The Trench Town Culture Yard

By Elena Oumano

Dreaming Jamaica: gentle waves of an azure Caribbean kissing white sand beaches; warm, starlit evenings filled with the heady scent of night-blooming tropicals; lush forests of exotic fruits; mist-wreathed blue mountains. Anyone who has visited Jamaica knows the dream is real. Yet the island has another, less familiar face, one with a rough-hewn beauty and mystique all its own. You'll find it in the Trench Town Culture Yard, shrine to the musical and cultural world leadership of singer Bob Marley and to roots, rock, reggae as a carrier of knowledge.

On February 6, 1999 - what would have been the 54th anniversary of the late Reggae King's birth - England's Prince Charles and other dignitaries gathered at the Yard at Kingston's Lower First Street. Under a brilliant tropical sun, they inaugurated the official opening of the Trench Town Culture Yard, Jamaica's first inner-city heritage tourism project. In the 1960's and 70's, this humble government housing project for the inner city poor transformed into the epicenter of an overlapping series of musical and cultural epiphanies that changed not only Jamaica but also the world. Though Trench Town and neighboring urban areas have suffered since that first reggae flowering, the community is restoring its position as a tiny but potent pocket of spiritual richness and a testament to the indomitable Jamaican spirit.

You can't talk about reggae without mentioning Rastafari, and it was in this Yard where the music took as its message Rastafari's Garveyite point of view. Today, the Yard is known far and wide as a "Rasta" and reggae Mecca, a must-see attraction for millions of international music fans and believers. This is the place to pay homage to Marley and the other Wailers - Bunny Livingston and the late Peter Tosh - as well as to many more seminal figures of reggae music and culture. Joe Higgs, Toots Hibbert of Toots & The Maytals, The Wailing Souls, and countless others made music and "sighted up" Rastafari in the Yard's inner courtyard. And that philosophy spread throughout the world through the universal language of music, reminding everyone that we are one people, ruled by the power of "Jah love" and deserving of equal rights and justice.

The way to Trench Town is not marked by the breathtaking sea vistas and wild outcroppings of arching ferns, trees and brilliantly colored flowers that you see along the way to Jamaica's more established tourist destinations. Yet man-made beauty is everywhere: rose vines trained to trail over pock-marked concrete walls; red, green and gold lettered expressions of unity and portraits of community leaders decorating the facades of crumbling buildings.

As you approach the Yard in Trench Town, the red, green, and gold Rasta-reggae motif overpowers the concrete grey. Green and gold Jamaican flags wave from the tall poles and the gaily-colored fence that border the Yard's entrance. A banner strung across the poles announces "The Oneness of Trench Town Community" to remind all who enter, "United we stand divided we fall." A garden on the left, filled with local artist Stoneman's stunning found sculpture and assemblages, catches your eye. More art is housed in a room in the left-hand row. To the right, a row of rooms house the Casbah Restaurant and the bar. One of several trained tour guides from the community escorts you between those front rooms into the Yard's square-shaped inner courtyard. A small stage for live concerts now stands at one end. In a corner is the rusted-out carcass of the blue Volkswagen bus that carried the Wailers to performances around the island during the 60's. Three more rows of what were originally single room family dwellings describe the Yard's inner boundaries. One room now houses the Culture Yard's crafts workshop, where women of the community knit and crochet red, green, and gold tams, scarves, and other items; another, a museum of Wailers and reggae memorabilia; a third, the gift shop. Miss Brady's former home now contains a glass showcase protecting the battered acoustic guitar on which the teenaged Marley and his slightly older mentor, Vincent "Tata" Ford, wrote "No Woman No Cry," one of the world's most poignant love songs. It begins with the lines, "I remember when we used to sit/inna government yard in Trench Town." Tata and Marley were inspired when a sobbing Miss Puncie ran from the room to the right that she shared with her common-law husband, Piper Saunders, and their 8 children. It is the last song Bob ever played on that guitar.

Bob and Tata wrote "No Woman" in the tiny "kitchen" in the back row, where Ford prepared food for the Yard's youth. At night, he and Bob practiced on that guitar, using a tattered music instruction book they read under the weak light of a "tining" lamp, a homemade contraption that's little more than a rag wick soaked in kerosene. When the "tining" light gave out, they took turns sleeping on the kitchen's narrow cot. But if a young girl named Rita Anderson (who later became Mrs. Marley) was visiting, Tata ceded his resting place to the courting couple.

The Yard was originally part of a housing scheme erected by the British in the 30's and 40's, before Jamaica's 1962 Independence. When Cedella Booker and her small, wiry son, christened Nesta Robert Marley, received word that they were moving to Trench Town in the late 50's, it was as if they'd won the lottery, so prized were these communal urban projects by Jamaica's less privileged.

With most rooms opening up onto the courtyard, the first sight of the morning was your neighbor. And with each room home to as many as 14 family members, much of the Yard's life took place in the courtyard, where everyone shared cooking, bathing, and washing facilities. Neighbors became family and took care of each other as such.

On washdays, when the courtyard was crisscrossed with lines of drying laundry, Miss Lou might burst into a church hymn; Miss B would join in, then Miss Monica, until the entire Yard swelled with song. On weekends, Mr. "Big Hand" carried his turntable and boxes of vinyl records down to Lower First Street, rigged up his public address boxes, then plugged into a light pole. Everyone came to Lower First Street to dance and party because the Yard was known far and wide as a music yard.

Until 1970, you could gaze from the back of the Yard straight through from "First Street to Seventh Street," as Bob sings in "Trench Town Rock." After the success of his 1973 "Catch A Fire" Island Records debut, Bob moved "uptown" to a plantation house at 56 Hope Road, now the site of the Bob Marley Museum. But Marley never abandoned Trench Town. Whenever he returned to Jamaica from a tour abroad, his first stop was always the Yard, where he could sit in the courtyard and reason with his longtime breddren. During one of his last visits before his 1981 passing, Marley told these men - most of whom still live in Trench Town - to prepare themselves. One day, the world would come to them, to witness where the legend began.

"This is `Rich Town,'" says Piper Saunders today, "rich in music and people. Feel that cool breeze blowing? That's his presence."

A concrete wall that went up during the political turmoil of the 70's now blocks the view from the back of the Culture Yard. Thanks to the dogged efforts of the community to restore the Yard, other buildings, and construct a schools, study center, and a medical clinic, Trench Town's family feeling is returning, and that wall has transformed into a symbol of renewed unity and hope. It bears the inscription of a verse from Marley's "Tribute To Trench Town" and local artist Lloydie's powerful mural paintings of Bob, Peter, Bunny, and the late Raphael "Med Gong" Smith.

Together with his brother Michael Smith, Chair of the Trench Town Development Association, Med Gong was a driving force behind the Yard and this community's recovery. Other Jamaicans have also contributed. They include Jamaica's Governor General, Howard Cooke; the Jamaican Product Development Company [TPDco], the Jamaica Tourist Board [JTB]; Sister Grace Yapp of the Franciscan Ministries; architect Christopher Stone; Gloria Palomino; and the three young Australian owners of Rockhouse Hotel in Negril, on Jamaica's western shores.

"Whenever someone comes here, they feel the spirit from back then," says Smith. "You can't get that spirit anywhere else. You know right away that this is `it,' where it all comes from. People actually get on their hands and knees and crawl into the courtyard. Some don't even need to hear about Bob Marley. They just want to spend five minutes in the kitchen where Bob and Tata wrote music, played guitar, and slept."

For Smith and the community, the work is about even more than restoring a cultural dream. The pride and happiness written on the shining faces of Trench Town's children is their greatest reward.

As you finish touring Marley's home and reggae's birthplace, those children are returning from school, dressed neatly in tan uniforms and carrying school satchels. The sound of their play fills the air, blending with the steady, rhythmic cross-currents of the Nyabingi [Rastafarian] drummers who gather in the Yard's front garden every day, under the spreading shade of a stately tree. This simple concrete and wood communal housing project has become a kind of holy place, an internationally-recognized monument to the power of people united as a force for positive change.