The first time I left Jamaica, I was seventeen. I’d graduated from high school two years before, and while trying to get myself to college I’d been scouted as a model. And so I found myself at the Wilhelmina Models office in Miami, surrounded by South Beach’s finest glass windows with all my glass hopes, face to face with a famous one-named model who was now in her sixties. When her gaze halted at my dreadlocks, I shouldn’t have been surprised at what came next.
“Can you cut the dreads?” she asked, as she flipped through my portfolio, her soft accent blunting the impact of the words.
Back home in Kingston, hair stylists would leave my dreadlocks untouched, tied up in a ponytail with my good black ribbon, deciding that the problem of my hair was insolvable.
“Sorry,” I said. “My father won’t allow me.”
She glanced over at the agent who had brought me in.
“It’s her religion,” he explained. “Her father is Rastafarian. Very strict.”
The road between my father and me was woven in my hair, long spools of dreadlocks tethering me to him, across time, across space. Everywhere I went, I wore his mark, a sign to the bredren in his Rastafari circle that he had his house under control. Once, when I was feeling brave, I had asked my father why he chose Rastafari for himself, for us. “I and I don’t choose Rasta,” he told me, using the plural “I” because Jah’s spirit is always with a Rasta bredren. “I and I was born Rasta.” I turned his reply over in my mouth like a coin.
My father, Djani, had also been seventeen when he took his first trip out of Jamaica. He travelled to New York in the winter of 1979 to find his fortune. It was there, in the city’s public libraries, that my father first read the speeches of Haile Selassie and learned about the history of the Rastafari movement. In the early nineteen-thirties, the street preacher Leonard Percival Howell heeded what is known as the Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey’s call to “look to Africa for the crowning of a Black king,” who would herald Black liberation. Howell discovered Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, the only African nation never to be colonized, and declared that God had been reincarnated. Inspired by Haile Selassie’s reign, the movement hardened around a militant belief in Black independence, a dream that would be realized only by breaking the shackles of colonization.
As he read, my father became aware of the racist downpression of the Black man happening in America. He understood then what Rastas had been saying all along, that systemic injustice across the world flowed from one huge, interconnected, and malevolent source, the rotting heart of all iniquity: what the Rastafari call Babylon. Babylon was the government that had outlawed them, the police that had pummelled them, the church that had damned them to hellfire. Babylon was the sinister and violent forces born of western ideology, colonialism, and Christianity that led to the centuries-long enslavement and oppression of Black people. It was the threat of destruction that crept even now toward every Rasta family.
Just as a tree knows how to bear fruit, my father would say, he knew then what he needed to do. On a cold day in February, his eighteenth birthday, my father stood before a mirror in New York City and began twisting his Afro into dreadlocks, the sacred marker of Rastafari livity, a holy expression of righteousness and his belief in Jah. When he returned to Jamaica, his mother took one look at his hair and refused to let him into the house. It was shameful to have a Rasta son, she said. My father, with nowhere else to go, reluctantly cut his hair back down to an Afro.
Soon my father began spending time around a drum circle with Rasta elders in Montego Bay, sitting in on the spiritual and philosophical discussions that Rastas call reasoning. “Rasta is not a religion,” my father always said. “Rasta is a calling. A way of life.” There is no united doctrine, no holy book of Rastafari principles. There is only the wisdom passed down from elder Rasta bredren, the teachings of reggae songs from conscious Rasta musicians, and the radical Pan-Africanism of revolutionaries like Garvey and Malcolm X. My father felt called to a branch known as the Mansion of Nyabinghi, the strictest and most radical sect of Rastafari. Its unbending tenets taught him what to eat, how to live, and how to fortify his mind against Babylon’s “ism and schism”—colonialism, racism, capitalism, and all the other evil systems of western ideology that sought to destroy the Black man. “Fire bun Babylon!” the Rasta bredren chanted every night, and the words took root in him. He was ready to decimate any heathen who stood in his way.
Hanging on the mint-green living-room wall of our family’s house in Bogue Heights, a hillside community overlooking Montego Bay, was a portrait of Haile Selassie, gilded and sceptered at his coronation, his eyes as black as meteorites. It was flanked by a poster of Bob Marley and a photograph of my father, both onstage, both throwing their dreadlocks like live wires into the air.
Every morning of my childhood began the same way, with the dizzying smell of ganja slowly pulling me awake. My mother, Esther, who had first embraced the Rastafari way of life when she met my father at nineteen, was always up before dawn, communing with the crickets, busying herself with housework and yard work. Whenever she worked, she smoked marijuana. The scent of it clung to her long auburn dreadlocks. She carried a golden packet of rolling paper on her at all times, stamped with a drawing of the Lion of Judah waving the Ethiopian flag, the adopted symbol of the Rastafari. My brother, Lij, my sister, Ife, and I pawed and pulled at her, but she did not mind. If she was with us, she was ours.
My father was the lead singer in a reggae band called Djani and the Public Works. When I was seven, Lij five, and Ife three, he met some Japanese record-label executives at the hotel where the band performed nightly, and they agreed to fly the musicians to Tokyo to play reggae shows. They stayed for six months and recorded their first album. After he left, my mother cleared our back yard and planted some crops, which soon became towering stalks of sugarcane, a roving pumpkin patch, and vines and vines of gungo peas, all exploding outward in swaths of green. We had always kept to an Ital diet: no meat, no fish, no eggs, no dairy, no salt, no sugar, no black pepper, no MSG, no processed substances. Our bodies were Jah’s temple.
Early on school mornings, under the watchful eye of the holy trinity, my mother combed my black thundercloud of hair, often with me tearfully begging her to stop. Once, the children at my grandmother’s Seventh-day Adventist church had asked me why I didn’t have dreadlocks like my parents; I remembered the certainty in my grandma’s voice when she said that we would be able to choose how to wear our hair.
Even though the combing was painful, I still wouldn’t have chosen dreadlocks. When my mother was finished, I swung my glistening plaits, fitted with blue clips to match my school uniform, back and forth, back and forth, pink with delight. I felt it was all worth it then. My mother made it look easy, corralling three children by herself to school every morning while my father was away.
Babylon came for us eventually, even in our kingdom of god-sent green. One Sunday during our Christmas break, my mother dragged a comb across my head and gasped. Two large fistfuls of hair were stuck in its teeth, yanked loose like weak weeds from dirt. I screamed.
“Oh, Jah. Oh, Jah. Oh, Jah,” she said, holding me as I cried, blocking my hand from trying to touch my scalp, where I now had a bald spot. Ife was fine, but Lij’s hair was also falling out in clumps. My father distrusted Babylon’s doctors. My mother did, too—until she had children.
We had been infected with barber disease, the doctor told us, a kind of ringworm spread first by barbers’ tools, then by children touching heads at school. Babylon’s disease. Mom closed her eyes as she listened. The doctor prescribed a thick antifungal cream and a chemical shampoo.
A week later, despite the treatment, there was scant improvement. My mother gathered up all the combs in the house and flung them into a trash bag, along with the medicine. Hair for the Rastafari signified strength. My father called his hair a crown, his locks a mane, his beard a precept. What grew from our heads was supposed to be most holy. My mother took our blighted scalps as a moral failure, ashamed that we had fallen to Babylon’s ruin so soon after my father had gone.
For the rest of the break, she tended to our heads with a homemade tincture. After a few days, my hair started growing back. “Praise Jah,” Mom said, as she began the process of twisting all our hair into dreadlocks. Day after day, we sat, snug between her legs, as she lathered our heads in aloe-vera gel and warm olive oil.
Within a few weeks, my hair had stiffened and matted into sprouts of thick antennae, bursting from my head. There was no turning back now. From that point on, combing and brushing our hair was forbidden, on a growing list of NO.
When my siblings and I returned to our primary school after the break, the students gawked at us as if we were a trio of aliens disembarking from a spaceship. They crowded around, trying to sniff or pull at our locks. If they could have dissected us alive, I think they would have.
Not long after, a sixth grader began shadowing me. She crept up close while singing in my ear, “Lice is killing the Rasta, lice is killing the Rasta,” a widespread taunt in the nineties, which co-opted the tune of a popular reggae song.
My cheeks stung in humiliation. For the first time, I felt ashamed to be myself. At lunchtime, I told my brother about the girl, her needling insult. My brother shook his head and kissed his teeth the way grownups did.
“Saf, don’t pay her no mind. All ah dem a duppy,” he said. “And we are the duppy conquerors.” He was trying to sound like a big man, talking like our father.
I tried to imagine what my father would say. He always told me to be polite but right. “I man and your mother didn’t birth no weakheart,” he said. “Always stand up for what you know is right. You overstand?” Even from afar, his mind moved mine like a backgammon piece.
I decided to go to the teachers’ lounge and tell my third-grade teacher about the girl’s teasing. Tapping me gently on the shoulder, she told me that with my good grades I should pay such things no mind.
As I walked away, still pensive, I heard her and some of the other teachers talking.
“But it’s a shame, innuh,” a new teacher’s voice chimed in. “I really thought the parents were going to give them the choice.”
We were under our favorite mango tree by the front gate when a car rolled up one day in early May. Suddenly, my father appeared like the sun, beeping the horn and flashing his perfect teeth at the sight of us. We jumped on him, and cried; the fireworks of feelings had nowhere else to go. He brought in a parade of bags and boxes from Japan, a brand-new electric Fender guitar slung across his back. He was buoyant. All afternoon, he kept touching his fingers to our dreadlocks. We could tell he was pleased.
Inside the house, he unzipped his suitcases and showered us with mounds of stuffed toys, exquisite notebooks, new clothes and shoes, and a Nintendo Game Boy with Japanese cartridges. For Mom, he brought fancy lotions, a robe, and packets of something called miso. We cheered at every new gift. My father was our Santa, if Rasta believed in Babylon’s fables.
Dad was home with us that entire summer. Every day, he was a more carefree version of himself. He taught us to play cricket, told us the same ten jokes of his childhood, and dazzled us with his tree-climbing skills. His recording contract was for two years, but the record label could obtain only six-month visas for the band at a time. Once school began, he went back to Japan to finish the album. We didn’t have a phone, so we visited the shop of his closest bredren, Ika Tafara, to call him every weekend.
By the time we walked into Ika’s shop for the Kwanzaa celebration that December, I felt like I belonged. About thirty Rasta bredren and their families had come from all over Mobay to gather and give thanks. We recited Marcus Garvey’s words like scripture. I played the conga drum and sang of Black upliftment with other Rasta children. There were about twenty of us there, peeking from behind our mothers’ hems. And though he was across the sea, my father felt present, the sound of his voice ringing out through the store’s speakers.