MOTHER BOOKER, Rasta Priestess
From Babylon to Zion
The Legend of Cedella Marley Booker
Them belly full, but we hungry
A hungry mob is an angry mob
A rain will fall but the dirt it tough
A pot a cook but the food nah nuff
You’re going to dance with Jah music, dance
We’re going to dance with jah music dance, oh-ooh
Bob Marley
“Of course, Bob is here, you know”
Once proclaimed as one of Jamaica’s most sovereign cultural icons, Mother Booker, a deep-voiced creative and unconventional singer of reggae and gospel and an empress in her own right, one is moved to ask, “Can history contend with good reason that Bob Marley’s mom was the source of his innate power?”
Over the twenty-seven years I’d known Mother Booker, we had discoursed at great length about the self-discipline and self-mastery of her son, even the exercise of the will to dominate.
I interviewed Mother Booker several times at her Miami home. On occasion, the sessions had become a gabfest. It wasn’t unusual that she smoked spliffs at night — especially following her son’s death, as if she were responsible for his spiritual welfare from his space in the beyond, just as she felt compelled to flip the switch on the storied past so she could be free to commune with nature in her idyllic village where Bob was born and buried (1945–1981).
I was set to visit her at her Caribbean home in Nine Mile, a farming community that sits in the lap of the verdant countryside of Saint Ann’s parish on Jamaica’s hilly northeast coast, closer to reality-based religion than you could find anywhere.
It was mere weeks before Mother Booker died (July 23, 1926 — April 8, 2008) that I had planned to visit her in Nine Mile.
Mother Booker made the suggestion, hinting that the Miami stories would be overshadowed by the pièce de résistance of her life with Bob in the hills.
That was the hook.
In my heart, I knew she meant well because she always leaned on her spiritual fate at her estate.
Early on, life was hard for her. Cedella was 8 years old and planting corn four grains to a hole in her father, Omeriah Malcolm’s field when the miracle of life struck her like a revelation.
“Like Jah,” I recall her saying as we sat in her backyard, redolent with fruit and herbs and vegetables. “If I didn’t plant that seed nothing would come of it. One grain. How it multiplies is a great blessing.”
The death of Alberta, her mother, during her 10th pregnancy, signaled the end of Cedella’s formal education at age 9.
When she was 16, Capt. Norval St. Clair Marley, a white Jamaican, 50-ish and a friend of her father’s, would molest her when field work was over, past sundown. In time, the captain would freak her out by predicting her pregnancy. Grain-sure.
And just like that Robert Nesta Marley was born. The captain chose his son’s first name because it meant “messenger.”
The captain didn’t hang around for long, though. Scant days after a shotgun wedding, Ol’ Marley sped to bustling Kingston. Cedella and Bob followed, but barely scraped through life in the city. Bob last saw his dad when he was 9. Cedella, who eventually divorced, continued to struggle to meet ends as a higgler of fruits and vegetables. Later she worked at a bar operated by her lover, Taddy Livingston, the father of Bob Marley’s musical collaborator, Bunny Livingston Wailer. But Taddy proved to be a bad chord in Cedella’s life.
I remember when we used to sit
In a government yard in Trench Town
And then Georgie would make a fire light
As it was log wood burning through the night
Then we would cook cornmeal porridge
Of which I’ll share with you
My feet is my only carriage
So I’ve got to push on through
But while I’m gone…
No woman, no cry
No woman, no cry
Oh, my little darling I say don’t shed no tears
No woman, no cry
Bob Marley
While rearing Bob in Trench Town’s government housing project — the famous government yard in No Woman No Cry, Marley’s anthem to his mother — Livingston made life so miserable for Cedella that, in 1963, she found refuge with a family in Wilmington, Delaware, and promised to get Bob a visa as soon as she got on her feet. That same year she married Eddy Booker, an American, with whom she bore two children. And by the time she returned to her homeland to pick up her oldest, “Bob was already a Rasta.”
“Nesta?” the Jamaican passport official mocked in disbelief when Marley was 18 and applying for a U.S. visa. “Is a girl name. What him middle name? Robert? Dere’s a good name for a man. Bob! Solid like a rock.”
But America didn’t change Marley. He worked for a few months as a janitor, then bought some musical instruments and split for Trench Town, where he would start up the group, Bob Marley and the Wailers.
In 1976, as the band was ascending the charts, Mother Booker’s husband Eddy died. Marley brought her and the two children to South Florida and plunked down $600,000 for the house — a dwelling that had been revealed to her years earlier in a vision — so she could be closer to him and Jamaica. Two years later, Booker, a Pentecostal, converted to the Rastafari faith, “because Bob said to me I was a Rasta since I was born.”
Mother Booker’s first overt move was to “lock” her hair. She switched to an ital diet and began fasting. Soon, she was smoking ganja as sacrament.
“It’s a healing herb. It makes me become more self-conscious,” she had said. “I never feel no way negative about it, because it’s how you think. If you think evil, it’ll present itself. But when you think in a godly, spiritual way — like when … I take a draw from my spliff and I would sit here in my garden all by myself, I’m among nature and feel so close to God.”
Notwithstanding the herb’s healing effect on the soul, Booker said she also discovered that it had saved her failing eyesight. Glaucoma had set in years before her Rasta conversion.
“Did it help!” she said with a deep sigh. “My doctor wasn’t surprised.”
Lounging in a white chair in the shade of her mango tree, she resonates African royalty. Can it be the powder-blue African garment set off by a golden Ethiopian cross? The Rastafarian dreadlocks, crowned in grey as if celebrating longevity? She being the matriarch of a worldwide movement?
There’s something else about this Jamaican woman. You sense her mysticism when the “dreads” and the stockinged legs peeking from under the long dress suddenly spring to life.
Mother Booker, the aspiration of reggae’s eternal flame, brightens.
“Bob’s here, you know. He’s sitting in with us.”
The revelation raises Bob Marley’s ghost and, of course, your pores. “Bob’s alive,” she says. “You can’t touch him. But he’s always around the house.”
Men and people will fight ya down
When ya see Jah light
Let me tell you if you’re not wrong
Well, everything is all right
So we gonna walk
Through the roads of creation
We the generation
Tread through great tribulation
In this exodus
Good god almighty
Movement of Jah people
Exodus
The movement of Jah people
Bob Marley and the Wailers
Mother Booker alternates between a molasses-thick Jamaican dialect and an accent she gathered from nearly 40 years as a U.S. resident, more than half of them spent in Miami, during which she has assembled her own international fame as a singer and author. The relationship between the mother and her deceased son continually unfolds as she shows a visitor around her five-bedroom home.
She pours out memories of Bob and her youngest son, Anthony, 19, who met a violent death in 1980, when he paraded a mall with a shotgun and was shot by police; and she speaks with affection about another son, musician Richard Marley Booker, who shared the home with her; and daughter, Claudette Pearl Livingston, then a recovering cocaine addict and resurrected singer.
Back then, the main resident of the home, and her heart, was Jah, the Rastafari deity and the force behind her missions and concerts abroad, particularly in Europe, Africa and Mexico.
Along the way she had enthralled musicians like Lenny Kravitz, who persuaded her to join his band one night in London; and French rockers, whom she couldn’t resist for an impromptu session on Bob’s haunting Redemption Song at the 10th anniversary concert for him in Paris. There’s actor Woody Harrelson, who, in 1977, sang a duet with her at a concert in Miami.
Most of the time, “Mom had a simple routine at home,” Richard said. “She got up early, read her Bible, played the piano, joined friends at the gym (well through her 60s and 70s), got her acupuncture and massage, fixed lunch, worked on her dolls, then cooked ital. Oooh, she was great in the kitchen. Later, she settled in by watching documentaries on [the] Discovery [Channel] and news. She loved news. All news.
“And if you’re lucky, she’ll tell you stories. She’s one of the best storytellers around. It’s on a level with her dolls.”
Fifty or so 24-inch dolls, in a sewing room near the pool at the back of the house, authenticate Booker’s touch with ceramic clay. Many of them are miniature Bob Marleys. All carry the trademark grin. More dolls standing around like ranks of sailors on deck. When they outgrew their quarters, she sold them to make room for more.
“She’s gone back to the mother country [for her art],” Livingston says. “They’re characters from her past, country people. And she’s given them their full experiences.”
Booker called them blessed dolls. No doubt because a photo of the late Ethiopian leader Haile Selassie I brought power to the room. She shared the same birth date as Selassie, a k a Ras (Prince) Tafari (Emperor of Ethiopia), who inspired the Pan-African social movement of Rastafarians in the early 1930s in Jamaica.
Hear the children cryin’
But I know they cry not in vain
Now the times are changin’
Love has come to bloom again
Smelling the air when spring comes by raindrops
Reminds us of youthful days
But now it’s not rain that water the cane crops
But the sweat from man’s brow
The substance from our spine
We gotta keep on living, living on borrowed time
Hallelujah time!
Yes, you can hear the children singing, Hallelujah time!
As they go singing by and by, Hallelujah time!
Oh, “hallelujah” singing in the morning
Hallelujah time! let them sing, don’t let them cry
Bob Marley
Mother Booker’s sipping rain-forest tea now. In her yard she searches the distance through the trees, hands cupping her knees, to touch base with some of the visions she’s had. She can’t put a finger on why they come in her dreams, why she’s so blessed, except “maybe it’s Jah’s work.”
There’s one about a snobbish neighbor in the mainly white community. The neighbor knelt before her and Booker said to her, “Some things that people do, I don’t know why. Greed, jealousy, or what. But I love you today as the first day I met you.”
Bob’s biblical interpretation? Your enemy is your footstool.
“Well, I was sitting in the bedroom after Bob’s death and the woman came to the house and we invited her upstairs and, would you believe, the entire vision came to pass?”
Dr. Anthony Maingot, a professor of sociology, ascribes such vivid experiences to fasting. For example, St Theresa in the Catholicc Church had visions. And the Rasta doctrine today is like most religions that have dietary restrictions, including fasting.”
When she wasn’t in the garden or with her dolls, Mother Booker spent much of her spare time traveling and laying tracks for spiritual albums.
In 1996 Nairobi, Kenya, a family of five, including a newborn, had traveled three days without food or money to seek Mother Booker’s blessings.
“She was sick,” a friend said, “yet she got out of bed and received the group. She wasn’t aware of the family’s misfortune because they had regaled her with skits and songs about the persecution of Rastas in the country.”
Booker took them in for the night.
Even in its darkest hour, Rwanda, too, had heard the word. So Booker planned a performance at a stadium in Kingall, a city that still had the odor of tribal massacre.
With apprehension souring her musicians, Booker reached into her medicine bag for her famous son’s mantra — Everything’s gonna be all right.
“We were in a place of great pain,” a member of her group recalled, “and she imparted a sense of peace.”
Three years earlier In Gabon, in May 1993, nineteen African presidents were hosting many of America’s black elite, leaving some to wonder why Booker was invited.
The answer lay in the prayers — in the presence of Coretta Scott King and Rev Jesse Jackson — that Booker delivered in respect to a death in the Gabon president’s family.
“They brought a simple woman to their country,” said a tour member, “and elevated her.”
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds
Have no fear for atomic energy
’Cause none of them can stop the time
How long shall they kill our prophets
While we stand aside and look? Ooh
Some say it’s just a part of it
We’ve got to fulfill the Book
Won’t you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
’Cause all I ever have
Redemption songs
Bob Marley and the Wailers
At her Pinecrest, Miami, home, Mother Booker brings up the last months of Bob’s illness in 1980, when she flew to a German hamlet to be at his side. It was there she sought a miracle cure for the cancer that had spread to the brain from a toe. When the situation turned dire in Germany, the Booker family flew Marley home.
At a hospital in Miami Beach, Booker shared his last moments. She poured him homemade carrot juice and read his favorite Psalms: One and Two. He took her hand, squeezed it, and flipped the respirator off his nose as a defining gesture. Then, in a flashbulb nanosecond, Bob Marley departed this life.
Through the trees behind her home, a glint of sunlight catches the Ethiopian cross around her neck and the black marbles in her eyes.
So Mother Booker, now that life’s better, what would you have done differently? What would you change?
A small bird cuts through the moment.
“Change? I don’t have anything I will change, because I have been changed. I can’t go back. This is the best.”
Well, Bob’s around the house, you know.
Hear the children cryin’
But I know they cry not in vain
Now the times are changin’
Love has come to bloom again
Smelling the air when spring comes by raindrops
Reminds us of youthful days
But now it’s not rain that water the cane crops
But the sweat from man’s brow
The substance from our spine
We gotta keep on living, living on borrowed time
Hallelujah time!
Yes, you can hear the children singing, Hallelujah time!
As they go singing by and by, Hallelujah time!
Oh, “hallelujah” singing in the morning
Hallelujah time! let them sing, don’t let them cry
Over rocks and mountains
The sheep are scattered all around
Over hills and valleys
They’re everywhere to be found
But though we bear our burdens now
All afflictions got to end somehow
From swinging…
BOB MARLEY
