Free No Woman No Cry by Rita Marley

a little authority, and he had an attitude, you might say. “Do you think it is right,” he asked me when he came home from one of his parish assignments, “after all the money Aunty and I spent on you, that you end up like this? What are you getting out of it? You think because you’re married you’re big? You’re still under our protection, and you have no right to be a Rasta! That’s being worthless!”
    I said to him, “You have no right to be a policeman, you’re a Babylon!”
    And he boxed me! Slapped my face— pow ! I cried and thought, I’m still being treated like a child. What the hell is this, where’s my life? But I was determined, despite all these objections.
    When Bob heard about my brother having hit me, he cried too—even more than I had. He felt humiliated that this had happened to his wife, and there was nothing he could do because we were living in their house. He felt he was no longer just “Robbie”—Aunty still called him “the boy”—but a married man with responsibilities. So he said, “You know what we should do? Come, let’s go to my home.”
    He meant his birthplace in the countryside at Nine Miles, St. Ann. The idea appealed to me, since I’d never been there and it could be something new. But despite being married and nearly twenty-two years old, I was still so young and inexperienced that I said, “Oh, first I have to ask Aunty!”
    But I also didn’t feel Bob was capable or prepared enough to take up responsibility for me, wholly and solely, 100 percent.
    Nevertheless, we decided to go. I was already pregnant with Cedella, and Aunty said, “You’re crazy, you’re gonna go down there and tu’n wu’thless, you’re gonna be a country woman, what is he gonna give you? You’re gonna do farming? You’re gonna plant yams and cabbage?”
    And Bob’s mother wrote that St. Ann would be the end of us, that he should come back to Delaware and be a gentleman—the type who wears neckties and works nine to five and commutes was what she wanted. You’re going back to the careless life, she said, the life that doesn’t show money-making. You and Rita have no ambition!
    Like many other parents the world over, Jamaican parents wanted you to make money, but only the way they’d intended. Otherwise they were upset with you. How dare you be what you want to be! But Bob had his directions and I believed they were right for him and so I encouraged him to follow them. I felt I would always be by his side. Later on I was given a lot of scorn, and many accusations came my way for urging him to remain conscious of his calling and his religion and his power. But then I said, “If going to St. Ann is what he wants, I’m gonna do it. Whatever my husband wants me to do.”

chapter four
TO LOVE SOMEBODY
    E VEN BEFORE WE decided to go to St. Ann, we’d been talking about the changes in Aunty, who had started to act a little suspicious—or maybe just condescending—in response to everything we did. Bob felt that she was getting a bit of a sore eye with us being around so long and not able to get out of her place. I think what offended her most was our refusal to eat from her pot, because she cooked pork whenever she felt like, which of course was her right. I understood that, and usually cooked our food separately, but I guess it didn’t make any difference. Bob and I had discussed the situation for many, many nights, as he was getting very unhappy and had begun to spend most of his time across the street, rather than staying in Aunty’s yard and hearing himself constantly referred to as “the boy” or included with his friends as “dem boys.”
    Our plan was to go to Nine Miles and live in the house his father had given his mother, which was then standing empty. If we spent some time there and saved a little money, we