Goings-on in the Tivoli Gardens: A Brief History of Seven Killings
Bob Marley had called a break during a band rehearsal at his house on the evening of 3 December 1976 when two cars pulled up and seven or more gunmen got out. One found his way to the kitchen, where Marley was eating a grapefruit, and opened fire. A bullet scraped his chest before hitting his upper arm, and four or five hit his manager, Don Taylor, who was standing between him and the doorway. The keyboard player’s girlfriend saw ‘a kid’ with his eyes squeezed shut emptying a pistol into the rehearsal area. The lead guitarist, an American session man on his first visit to Jamaica, took cover behind a flight case. The bass player and others – accounts vary as to how many – dived into a metal bathtub. Marley’s wife, Rita, was hit in the driveway while trying to get their children out and went down with a bullet fragment in her scalp. There were shouts: ‘Did you get him?’ ‘Yeah! I shot him!’ Then police arrived to investigate the gunfire and the attackers took off.
The manager had to be flown to Miami for surgery, but all the victims survived, and while each of the gunmen gets killed in A Brief History of Seven Killings, the novel restages the assault on Marley’s house with eight shooters, most of whom get given names: Josey Wales, Weeper, Bam-Bam, Demus, Heckle and Funky Chicken, plus ‘two man from Jungle, one fat, one skinny’. (‘Jungle’ is a nickname for one of the many social housing developments that sprang up in Kingston in the 1960s and 1970s.) The killings in the title of Marlon James’s novel – a novel that’s built around the attempt on Marley’s life much as Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid (1995) are built around the Kennedy assassination – turn out, after hundreds of pages, to be modelled on a massacre carried out years later in an American crack house, allegedly by Lester Coke, a Kingston gang boss who burned to death, in unexplained circumstances, in a high-security prison cell in 1992. His son and heir, Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, is the man the Jamaican army and police were looking for when they killed at least 73 civilians in a raid on the Tivoli Gardens estate in West Kingston in 2010. So there are more than enough killings to go around.
James begins his story with the build-up to Marley’s shooting and ends with the burning of Josey Wales, the character corresponding to Lester Coke, with a Dudus-like figure ready in the wings. (A sequel was projected early on, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it got slowed down by James’s work on a script for HBO, which bought the screen rights to the novel in April.) He has no trouble constructing a plausible narrative connecting the attack to many aspects of Jamaican history, and in outline his plot sticks closely, especially in its opening stages, to the facts and testimony and rumours gathered up by Timothy White, an American music journalist who periodically updated his 1983 biography of Marley, Catch a Fire, until his death in 2002. The characters are all freely imagined even when they’re filling the roles of real people, with the exception of Marley, who’s seen only through the eyes of a range of first-person narrators, and whose stage time is judiciously rationed. He’s referred to throughout as ‘the Singer’, though James doesn’t tie himself in knots for the sake of consistency: a character called Alex Pierce, a writer for Rolling Stone whose research seems to be a fantasticated version of White’s, urges himself at one point to ‘head back to Marley’s house’.
Marley isn’t left blank, exactly: we hear quite a lot about his under-the-table philanthropy, his physical beauty, his politico-religious worldview, and about the sniffiness with which he was viewed by the small, determinedly self-improving black middle class, which wasn’t at first thrilled by the outside world’s interest in some ‘damn nasty Rasta’, all ‘ganja smell and frowsy arm’, as an angry mother puts it. Other characters do impressions of foreign music-business types – ‘You reggae dudes are far out, man, got any gawn-ja?’ – or fulminate about Eric Clapton, who drunkenly shared his views on ‘wogs’ and ‘fucking Jamaicans’ with an audience in Birmingham in August 1976, two years after he had his first American number one with a cover of Marley’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’. (‘He think naigger boy never going read the Melody Maker.’) But animating a pre-mythic Marley, ‘outside of him being in every frat boy’s dorm room’, as James put it in an interview last year, isn’t the first order of business. ‘The people around him, the ones who come and go,’ Alex the journalist muses, ‘might actually provide a bigger picture than me asking him why he smokes ganja. Damn if I’m not fooling myself I’m Gay Talese again.’
‘The ones who come and go’, in James’s telling, include a young woman called Nina Burgess, who’s had a one night stand with Marley; Barry Diflorio, a CIA man; and Alex. The rest are gangsters, and the bigger picture they open up is a view from the ground of the working relationship between organised crime and Jamaican parliamentary politics. Marley’s shooting is a good device for getting at that, because no one seriously disputes that it was triggered by the 1976 election campaign, then the most violent in the country’s history, contested by two sons of the light-skinned post-independence elite: Michael Manley, the leader of the social democratic People’s National Party, and Edward Seaga, the leader of the conservative Jamaica Labour Party. The Jamaican system of ‘garrisons’ – social housing estates, usually built over bulldozed shantytowns, run by ‘dons’ on behalf of one or other of the parties – was up and running by the 1970s, with Tivoli Gardens, a pet project of Seaga’s and his electoral power base, as exhibit A. The novel reimagines it as ‘Copenhagen City’, perhaps to emphasise the contrast between the name’s promise of Scandinavian sleekness and the reality of votes delivered by armed enforcers.
Marley wasn’t faking it when he sang about his memories of a similarly downtrodden ‘government yard’, and didn’t need instruction on the dons’ multiple roles as providers of stuff the state wasn’t supplying, such as arbitration and policing of sorts, on top of their function as political goons and in workaday criminal enterprises. After he’d become a national celebrity in the 1960s, he sometimes played host to Claudie Massop, the JLP gang boss of Tivoli Gardens, whom he’d known as a child. Massop’s counterpart in the novel is called Papa-Lo. James casts him as an enforcer of the old school, still capable of murdering a schoolboy when necessary but sick at heart and out of his depth in an increasingly vicious electoral struggle. Papa-Lo’s younger ally, who calls himself Josey Wales after the Clint Eastwood character (Lester Coke himself operated as ‘Jim Brown’ in tribute to the only African-American star of The Dirty Dozen), is better adapted to the shifting state of affairs. Josey is made to seem dangerous not so much because he’s irretrievably damaged by previous rounds of slum clearance, gang warfare and police brutality – so is everyone around him – as because he’s attuned to goings-on in the wider world.
The opportunities Josey sees come from the external pressures that made the 1976 election, in the eyes of many participants, a Cold War proxy conflict. Manley’s PNP government, in power since 1972, had annoyed the bauxite companies, Washington and large swathes of local elite opinion with its leftish reforms and friendliness to Cuba. Manley blamed a rise in political shootouts and some of the country’s economic setbacks on a covert destabilisation campaign, and the Americans were widely understood – thanks partly to the writings of Philip Agee, a CIA whistleblower – to be shipping arms and money to Seaga’s JLP. Seaga’s supporters countered by putting it about that Castro was training the other side’s gunmen, and portrayed the sweeping police powers introduced by Manley’s government as a step towards a one-party state. Either way, no one was badly off for guns and grievances when Manley offered himself for re-election. ‘The world,’ Papa-Lo says, ‘now feeling like the seven seals breaking one after the other. Hataclaps’ – from ‘apocalypse’ – ‘in the air.’
Marley dropped a hint about his stance towards all this in one of the less cryptic lines on Rastaman Vibration, released eight months before the election: ‘Rasta don’t work for no CIA.’ Formal politics, he felt, belonged to Babylon, the modern materialist society, and he tried to keep his distance from it. But he was suspected, with some reason, of supporting the PNP. Both party leaders took an interest in the kinds of constituency Marley spoke for, and kept an ear to the ground when it came to popular culture. Seaga, early on in his career, had produced a few ska recordings in West Kingston, some of them featuring Marley’s mentor Joe Higgs. Manley, not to be outdone, had visited Ethiopia and returned with – in White’s words – ‘an elaborate miniature walking stick’, a gift from Haile Selassie, to show Rasta voters. Back in 1971 he had also pressed Marley into joining an explicitly PNP-oriented Carnival of Stars tour to warm up his first campaign. And in 1976 his people issued Marley with a pressing invitation to play a free concert in the name of national unity. It was to take place shortly before the election with an eye to overshadowing a JLP campaign event, and it’s what Marley was rehearsing for when, two days before the concert, the shooters arrived.
by Christopher Tayler, LRB | Read more:Bob Marley had called a break during a band rehearsal at his house on the evening of 3 December 1976 when two cars pulled up and seven or more gunmen got out. One found his way to the kitchen, where Marley was eating a grapefruit, and opened fire. A bullet scraped his chest before hitting his upper arm, and four or five hit his manager, Don Taylor, who was standing between him and the doorway. The keyboard player’s girlfriend saw ‘a kid’ with his eyes squeezed shut emptying a pistol into the rehearsal area. The lead guitarist, an American session man on his first visit to Jamaica, took cover behind a flight case. The bass player and others – accounts vary as to how many – dived into a metal bathtub. Marley’s wife, Rita, was hit in the driveway while trying to get their children out and went down with a bullet fragment in her scalp. There were shouts: ‘Did you get him?’ ‘Yeah! I shot him!’ Then police arrived to investigate the gunfire and the attackers took off.
The manager had to be flown to Miami for surgery, but all the victims survived, and while each of the gunmen gets killed in A Brief History of Seven Killings, the novel restages the assault on Marley’s house with eight shooters, most of whom get given names: Josey Wales, Weeper, Bam-Bam, Demus, Heckle and Funky Chicken, plus ‘two man from Jungle, one fat, one skinny’. (‘Jungle’ is a nickname for one of the many social housing developments that sprang up in Kingston in the 1960s and 1970s.) The killings in the title of Marlon James’s novel – a novel that’s built around the attempt on Marley’s life much as Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid (1995) are built around the Kennedy assassination – turn out, after hundreds of pages, to be modelled on a massacre carried out years later in an American crack house, allegedly by Lester Coke, a Kingston gang boss who burned to death, in unexplained circumstances, in a high-security prison cell in 1992. His son and heir, Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, is the man the Jamaican army and police were looking for when they killed at least 73 civilians in a raid on the Tivoli Gardens estate in West Kingston in 2010. So there are more than enough killings to go around.James begins his story with the build-up to Marley’s shooting and ends with the burning of Josey Wales, the character corresponding to Lester Coke, with a Dudus-like figure ready in the wings. (A sequel was projected early on, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it got slowed down by James’s work on a script for HBO, which bought the screen rights to the novel in April.) He has no trouble constructing a plausible narrative connecting the attack to many aspects of Jamaican history, and in outline his plot sticks closely, especially in its opening stages, to the facts and testimony and rumours gathered up by Timothy White, an American music journalist who periodically updated his 1983 biography of Marley, Catch a Fire, until his death in 2002. The characters are all freely imagined even when they’re filling the roles of real people, with the exception of Marley, who’s seen only through the eyes of a range of first-person narrators, and whose stage time is judiciously rationed. He’s referred to throughout as ‘the Singer’, though James doesn’t tie himself in knots for the sake of consistency: a character called Alex Pierce, a writer for Rolling Stone whose research seems to be a fantasticated version of White’s, urges himself at one point to ‘head back to Marley’s house’.
Marley isn’t left blank, exactly: we hear quite a lot about his under-the-table philanthropy, his physical beauty, his politico-religious worldview, and about the sniffiness with which he was viewed by the small, determinedly self-improving black middle class, which wasn’t at first thrilled by the outside world’s interest in some ‘damn nasty Rasta’, all ‘ganja smell and frowsy arm’, as an angry mother puts it. Other characters do impressions of foreign music-business types – ‘You reggae dudes are far out, man, got any gawn-ja?’ – or fulminate about Eric Clapton, who drunkenly shared his views on ‘wogs’ and ‘fucking Jamaicans’ with an audience in Birmingham in August 1976, two years after he had his first American number one with a cover of Marley’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’. (‘He think naigger boy never going read the Melody Maker.’) But animating a pre-mythic Marley, ‘outside of him being in every frat boy’s dorm room’, as James put it in an interview last year, isn’t the first order of business. ‘The people around him, the ones who come and go,’ Alex the journalist muses, ‘might actually provide a bigger picture than me asking him why he smokes ganja. Damn if I’m not fooling myself I’m Gay Talese again.’
‘The ones who come and go’, in James’s telling, include a young woman called Nina Burgess, who’s had a one night stand with Marley; Barry Diflorio, a CIA man; and Alex. The rest are gangsters, and the bigger picture they open up is a view from the ground of the working relationship between organised crime and Jamaican parliamentary politics. Marley’s shooting is a good device for getting at that, because no one seriously disputes that it was triggered by the 1976 election campaign, then the most violent in the country’s history, contested by two sons of the light-skinned post-independence elite: Michael Manley, the leader of the social democratic People’s National Party, and Edward Seaga, the leader of the conservative Jamaica Labour Party. The Jamaican system of ‘garrisons’ – social housing estates, usually built over bulldozed shantytowns, run by ‘dons’ on behalf of one or other of the parties – was up and running by the 1970s, with Tivoli Gardens, a pet project of Seaga’s and his electoral power base, as exhibit A. The novel reimagines it as ‘Copenhagen City’, perhaps to emphasise the contrast between the name’s promise of Scandinavian sleekness and the reality of votes delivered by armed enforcers.
Marley wasn’t faking it when he sang about his memories of a similarly downtrodden ‘government yard’, and didn’t need instruction on the dons’ multiple roles as providers of stuff the state wasn’t supplying, such as arbitration and policing of sorts, on top of their function as political goons and in workaday criminal enterprises. After he’d become a national celebrity in the 1960s, he sometimes played host to Claudie Massop, the JLP gang boss of Tivoli Gardens, whom he’d known as a child. Massop’s counterpart in the novel is called Papa-Lo. James casts him as an enforcer of the old school, still capable of murdering a schoolboy when necessary but sick at heart and out of his depth in an increasingly vicious electoral struggle. Papa-Lo’s younger ally, who calls himself Josey Wales after the Clint Eastwood character (Lester Coke himself operated as ‘Jim Brown’ in tribute to the only African-American star of The Dirty Dozen), is better adapted to the shifting state of affairs. Josey is made to seem dangerous not so much because he’s irretrievably damaged by previous rounds of slum clearance, gang warfare and police brutality – so is everyone around him – as because he’s attuned to goings-on in the wider world.
The opportunities Josey sees come from the external pressures that made the 1976 election, in the eyes of many participants, a Cold War proxy conflict. Manley’s PNP government, in power since 1972, had annoyed the bauxite companies, Washington and large swathes of local elite opinion with its leftish reforms and friendliness to Cuba. Manley blamed a rise in political shootouts and some of the country’s economic setbacks on a covert destabilisation campaign, and the Americans were widely understood – thanks partly to the writings of Philip Agee, a CIA whistleblower – to be shipping arms and money to Seaga’s JLP. Seaga’s supporters countered by putting it about that Castro was training the other side’s gunmen, and portrayed the sweeping police powers introduced by Manley’s government as a step towards a one-party state. Either way, no one was badly off for guns and grievances when Manley offered himself for re-election. ‘The world,’ Papa-Lo says, ‘now feeling like the seven seals breaking one after the other. Hataclaps’ – from ‘apocalypse’ – ‘in the air.’
Marley dropped a hint about his stance towards all this in one of the less cryptic lines on Rastaman Vibration, released eight months before the election: ‘Rasta don’t work for no CIA.’ Formal politics, he felt, belonged to Babylon, the modern materialist society, and he tried to keep his distance from it. But he was suspected, with some reason, of supporting the PNP. Both party leaders took an interest in the kinds of constituency Marley spoke for, and kept an ear to the ground when it came to popular culture. Seaga, early on in his career, had produced a few ska recordings in West Kingston, some of them featuring Marley’s mentor Joe Higgs. Manley, not to be outdone, had visited Ethiopia and returned with – in White’s words – ‘an elaborate miniature walking stick’, a gift from Haile Selassie, to show Rasta voters. Back in 1971 he had also pressed Marley into joining an explicitly PNP-oriented Carnival of Stars tour to warm up his first campaign. And in 1976 his people issued Marley with a pressing invitation to play a free concert in the name of national unity. It was to take place shortly before the election with an eye to overshadowing a JLP campaign event, and it’s what Marley was rehearsing for when, two days before the concert, the shooters arrived.
Image: Jonathan Player/Shutterstock via Rolling Stone
[ed. Netflix apparently has a new "docuseries" out about the 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley - Who Shot the Sheriff? (the subject of Marlon James' Booker Prize winning fictional novel A Brief History of Seven Killings... one of the most violent novels I've read since Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or Bolano's 2066). A tough read.]
