Free Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright by Hank Bordowitz Page B

discover that the hatred you feel emanating from many Jamaicans has far more to do with class and economic status than race, and that many of them would display a genuine warmth that had nothing to do with fawning with seething guts for bwana’s silver. So you might as well enjoy yourself, rubberneck, and try not to get killed. It ain’t no tropical paradise to the natives; seem to remember a guy singing a song about tables turning, begin to see what it means.
    Flying from Montego Bay to Kingston, impressions of California; green hillsides dotted with elegant swimming pool split-levels below, but the music reverberating in my head bespoke only Trenchtown and was at such variance with what I saw down there that I could only wonder how long till they tear this place apart, burning and looting non-metaphorically with no metaphysical ganja above-it-all possible. You wonder if you’ll be able to visit this country at all in a few years, and your wonder increases during your stay as you read in the daily papers how Manley is chumming up with Castro, supposedly all because of a cane thresher developed by the Cubans whose blueprints could revolutionize the sugarcane business in Jamaica (where it’s still cut by hand) and thereby perhaps save the economy. Meanwhile, the only people more violently anti-Communist than Cuban refugees are seemingly the people of Jamaica on all class levels; you wonder at times who they must hate more—the mindlessly patronizing American and Canadian tourists, or the Communists. In any case, there’s something in the air that you can breathe and taste like emotional cinders, and it isn’t love. When you get off the plane in Montego Bay and walk in to get your health card stamped, Disney World calypso natives in straw hats serenade you with backdrop of Holiday Inn sign, poster advertising the beaches of Negril (where all the white hippies go), arid latrine-green plaque warning in two languages that smoking, possession, or sale of ganja (“marijuana,” they add in parentheses for naïve hiplets) is a crime punishable by imprisonment. From the plane window, I look down and see a red lake, which I will later discover has been turned that hue and into a quicksand bog by bauxite mining on the part of the Alcoa corporation.
    The first sound I heard on arriving in the Kingston airport was the Muzak blasting a Jamaican imitation Otis Redding version of “Hey Jude,” which I thought was funny enough until I discovered that Jamaican AM radio almost never plays reggae. After a week of very little beyond Helen Reddy and Neil Diamond, I would be anxious to get the hell out of this place and back home just so I could hear some Toots and the Maytals.
    Kingston is very little more than a vast slum surrounding the ominous towers of babel in an enormous plastic palm Sheraton hotel, from which tourists seldom venture and around the swimming pool of which a great deal of Island Records’ business is conducted. This place has a Marcus Garvey Room (I peeked in the door; it looked like one of the rooms where I used to give speeches to Rotarian banquets in high school), but that is no reason why, upon arriving or anytime else, you should buy dope, “gold” bracelets or anything from the guys hanging around the parking lot. My colleague from Rolling Stone, arriving a virtual rube with no one to warn him, purchased a rather small quantity of not very good herb from one of these characters for the outrageous sum of $25. I have decided that it is a truth, if not a right, that in Kingston you are going to get burned, regardless of race, creed, or color, even if you never go out in the sun at all.
    Tuesday. Another writer, the man from Swank, comes to my room and turns me on to the legendary herb. It’s good, all right, but nowhere near the rep. It didn’t move my attention to unexpected places, inflate trivial ideas into fascinating discursions, or even get me deeper into the music like American dope. It did, however,