Free Voyager: Travel Writings by Russell Banks Page B

Rastafarian dreadlocks, and their wispy blond mustaches and thin chin whiskers, they were still children. Their glazed, red-rimmed eyes and slow-motion gestures suggested more than occasional recreational use of cannabis.
    The half-dozen black taxi drivers in the terminal waited like pelicans on a pier for us to check our bags through the one-man customs dock and politely ignored the American boys. We understood why. The boys were painful to look at. They had covered their skinny, sunburnt arms and legs and hairless chests and bellies with brightly colored tattoos of lions, portraits of Haile Selassie, Jamaican flags, dreadlocked Rastaman heads, marijuana leaves, and mottoes like JAH LIVES and ONE LOVE . They’d turned their slender pink bodies permanently into reggae record jackets. We winced and, like the taxi drivers, averted our eyes.
    Throughout our brief stay on Nevis and long after, the image of the tattooed, dreadlocked American boys stayed with me. We took a room in one of the many small guesthouses for which the island is famous, snorkeled off Pinney’s Beach, strolled the six or eight narrow streets of Charlestown, and visited the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton and the church where Lord Nelson and Frances Nisbet’s 1787 marriage certificate is kept. We did what you can do on Nevis—but I was unable to stop grieving over the boys and their absurd Rastafarian fantasy. I wondered if the occasional adult who saw me and my pal Morelli when we made our runaway drive across the continent in 1956 had averted his eyes and felt as sad and sorry for us as Chase and I felt for those lost boys on Nevis. The mythology that turned me and Morelli into teenaged car thieves chased by a nationwide all-points bulletin was the same one fictionalized the next year by Jack Kerouac in On the Road —the male romance of the West and the open road and the promise of ecstatic freedom from the conformist, repressive, suburban 1950s. Not to mention our deep unacknowledged desire, like Kerouac’s, to escape from our respective dysfunctional families— dysfunctional, a social condition that in the 1950s had no name. Like Kerouac, my and Morelli’s sacramental drug had been alcohol, not cannabis—rotgut jug wine we convinced drunks off the street to buy for us that we guzzled until we were throwing-up sick behind the stolen Olds 88 parked beside open-all-night roadside diners in Kansas City and Denver and in our grim, bare YMCA rooms in Amarillo and Pasadena.
    I wondered what myths had plucked the boys on Nevis from their suburban homes in the late 1980s and led them to fry their brains on ganja and cultivate their white-boy dreadlocks and tattoo their bodies, before finally dropping them off here in Nevis. In those days, all over the Caribbean, especially on the English-speakingislands, one encountered the occasional white Rasta, but it was usually an American woman, not a man or teenaged boy, in her twenties or early thirties wearing an ankle-length Ghanaian kente cloth wraparound skirt, her straight hair wrought into a matted version of the leonine dreadlocks worn by the handsome black Rastaman walking a short, but discernible, few steps in front of her. One naturally tended to view the woman’s relation to the man’s apparent Pan-African mysticism with a bit of skepticism, since her racial, political, and cultural experience was not only radically different from his, but was profoundly antagonistic to it. Rastafarianism is rooted in the black oppressed victim’s experience of the history of slavery and colonialism, in the African diaspora and Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanism, in the abject hopelessness of Caribbean ghetto poverty, and in the prophetic power of the “sufferers in Babylon” evoked by the image of the late emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, the Lion of Judah in full military regalia astride a white horse, and the music of Bob Marley.
    It is hard to understand how this autochthonous, mainly Caribbean mix of black