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Soon after this, “Babylon” came to permanently replace the word for “police” in Jamaican patois. I was never taught one word of this in school; the massacre has been all but erased from Jamaican history, with very few among us aware of these atrocities, but the term for police being “Babylon” remains.
One evening, she called us over to her as she rested. With a calm smile she looked over and told us we were going to have another brother or sister.
They’d walked barefoot on a thousand streets then walked into Ika’s shop with horned and mangled feet as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. When I asked my mother about this, she told me that some Rastas believed shoes were the invention of Babylon and that Rastafari should walk natural upon Jah’s earth.
asked her how come they had ridden in a car to get here, she chuckled. Years later, when I got up the nerve to ask my father why he wore leather but did not eat meat, he scolded me for impertinence.
The Mansion of Nyabinghi is the oldest, and the one from which all the other sects were born. Nyabinghi is militantly Pan-Africanist, believing in Haile Selassie as the reincarnation of God on earth, in Black unification, liberation, and repatriation to Ethiopia.
The Twelve Tribes of Israel is the most liberal Rastafari sect, welcoming wayward uptown Jamaican youth and white foreigners as members; they eat meat and believe in Jesus Christ.
The Bobo Shanti, the newest sect of the three, live closed off from society as a self-sufficient group, adhering to Jewish Mosaic Laws from the Old Testament, including observing Sabbath, ...
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Her words were hushed as she asked about extramarital relations and polygamy in Rastafari, which was a common practice among Rasta bredren, no matter the sect.
Samuel made her sleep in a different room when she menstruated and forbade her from entering the kitchen or cooking during her monthly cycle because she was “unclean.”
Just then, the frayed whisper of a ghost breath caught me. Like a flash of a white wing, a pale figure of a woman, vaguely familiar, fluttered in the curtains against the wall. A thought, hovering just beyond my reach, slowly sucking the air out of the room. I shuddered, then shook the specter away, turning to bolt as quickly as I could
back into the festivities. It would be a long time before the thought ambled perilously from the bushes of my mind again. But the next time it did, I would have no choice but to heed it.
