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By Root 530 0

later coming out of another room in the back. I assumed at the time that that was the john and he had to use it, later realized that was ridiculous since it was almost certain that the only toilet anywhere around here was the ground. The rest of us stood around just inside the door of the house; it was a while before I realized that behind me, in the darkness, all the Rasta women were sitting in chairs or hammocks along the fence, silently watching as their children hopped around them and the men declaimed inside. The only woman I saw inside the house was one young brown-skinned girl about 20, sitting in a chair in a corner with a spliff in her hand upon which she occasionally took another hit; she was beautiful, as yet unbrutalized at least to the eye, but as she stared vacantly into space all the herb in the world could not have been cosmetic for the utter desolation that, in her silence, in her stillness, was radiated by her very youth and beauty.

Older Rastas from the neighborhood came wandering up to the house, some of them ragged, and I looked at them and then at Tom Hayes, who was wearing a pair of pants that probably cost $50, a Billy Preston T-shirt (I was in my Grand Funk) and a razor cut, and the irony turned to an absurdity so extreme it became a kind of obscenity. It was, at the very least, embarrassing, for me and for these people, and I seriously doubt if for all the talk of brotherhood of Rastafari there is anything beyond that embarrassment which they and I will ever be able to share. What I mean to say is I’ve been on lots of press junkets before, but this was the first one into Darkest Africa. What I meant to say is that a whole bunch of people were flown, all expenses paid, to Jamaica, so that we could look at these people, and go back and write stories which would help sell albums to white middle-class American kids who think it's romantic to be black and dirt-poor and hungry and illiterate and sick with things you can’t name because you’ve never been to a doctor and sit around all day smoking ganja and beating on bongo drums because you have no other options in life. I know, because I am one of those kids, caught in the contradiction—hell, man, my current favorite group is Burning Spear. But I wouldn’t want to organize a press party in that village they come from in those hills they sing about. And not because I don’t want to pollute the “purity” of their culture with Babylon, either—because there is something intrinsically insulting about it.

At length we were able to leave. Gonzo had been edgily hunching around the doorway of the house, prodding Wooly and Tom Hayes, who as an upright drinking Englishman was much more amenable, to “get the fuck back to the hotel before the bar closes, man!” We trooped out into the street, and some of the Rastas followed us. A curious thing happened then: they had smoked only herb inside, but as soon as we hit the lane where the cars were parked they started asking for cigarettes, which we of course gave them. As Gonzo put it later: “I felt like we should have had Hershey Bars to distribute.” They told us that in the middle of the band's performance (which was not in fact a Grounation at all but rather a religious concert for children—they would never let us come to the adults’ affair) the police and soldiers had driven up to the place, looked in the door, and then split. I told them that the same thing happened when a rock ‘n’ roll band tried to practice in my neighborhood, but somehow it didn’t ring quite the same. (Kingston police, I have been told, are not averse to such practices as walking into a house unannounced and for no reason in the middle of the night, interrupting a couple while they are fucking, pulling the man out of bed and hauling him in for interrogation and other sports that can be easily imagined.) I looked up and saw, at the top of a pole on the corner, two strips of black, battered metal, upon which had been crudely written in white paint instructions to go to certain addresses in the neighborhood for the mending of clothes, or to buy fish.