CHAPTER 1

Where Is My Mother?

R OGER STEFFENS: Cedella Malcolm Marley Booker, Bob Marley’s

mother, was eighteen at the time of his birth. Her white husband,
born in Clarendon, Jamaica, was named Norval Marley. He was
around sixty-four when Nesta Robert Marley was born on February 6,
1945, in a tiny rural village called Nine Mile, which had no electricity
or running water. Christopher Marley, a member of the white Marley
family, has spent years tracing Bob’s bloodline and has been sharing
his research with me as new discoveries come to light, debunking
many of the false claims that continue to this day, including the idea
that Norval was born in England and was an army officer.
CHRISTOPHER MARLEY: Bob’s father was Norval Sinclair Marley,
born to a British father and a “colored” mother. Norval was not a “sea
captain,” nor was he a “quartermaster” or “captain” or “officer in the
British Army.” He was a “ferro-cement engineer.” His British Army
discharge papers show that he worked in various “labour corps” in the
UK during the First World War and was discharged as a private. He did
not see active service on the battlefield. Norval Marley’s family was not
Syrian, as has been suggested. He was a restless, wandering man. He
traveled and worked all over the world at a time when travel was not the
simple thing it is today—to Cuba, the UK, Nigeria and South Africa. He
was supervising the subdivision of some rural land in Saint Ann
Parish for war veteran housing when he married eighteen-year- old
Cedella Malcolm, whom he had got pregnant. He provided little
2 S O M U C H T H I NGS T O SAY

financial support and seldom saw her and their son. He died of a heart
attack in 1955, stone broke and living off an eight-shilling-a-week army
pension (about US$1.20).
Norval was seriously unstable, to put it mildly. The rejection of Bob
by the Marley family was a rejection of Norval.
CEDELLA BOOKER: Norval was living in Nine Mile at the time, watch-
ing the lands that the government gave people—certain amount of
land to work on during the war. He was like an overseer.
ROGER STEFFENS: If there was any true direction in Bob’s earliest
years, it would come from his grandfather Omariah, who was known
locally as a myalman—a benevolent practitioner of healing arts—as
opposed to an obeahman, whose darker intentions cast fear into the
hearts of superstitious country folk. Omariah was reported to have
fathered as many as thirty children.
CEDELLA BOOKER: My father Omariah was a very spiritual person,
he’s like the Blackheart Man [a practitioner of traditional healing meth-
ods]. He’s a man like, when people sick he can help them and give them
medicine and things like that. He had his own medicine that him fix
and mix, and just cure people. Omariah taught Bob not to steal, to tell
the truth, to obey. He owned enough land, here there and everywhere.
Not no big great properties, but good parcels, like thirty acres, twenty
acres, ten acres, five acres all over the place. Bob moved donkeys, goats,
carry food from up in the field to the home. Then him ride the donkey
and pick up corn, cut corn bush to go feed the other animals. Them
have to do manual work. We have to go to spring to get water.
ROGER STEFFENS: Bob’s cousin Sledger, who was raised alongside
him in Nine Mile, recalls that Bob was a fearless rider of his favorite
donkey, Nimble, and could jump bareback over a five-foot wall with
ease, sometimes even doing it backward! He and Sledger loved music
and would listen especially on Sundays, when Omariah would plug his
radio into a generator and play it for the locals, tuning in to a Miami
station. Elvis Presley, Fats Domino and Ricky Nelson were early favor-
 W H E R E I S M Y MO T H E R ? 3

Bob Marley’s mother, Cedella Booker, atop Mount Wilson above

Los Angeles on Mother’s Day, May 1988.
4 S O M U C H T H I NGS T O SAY

ites of the boys. Bob’s nascent musical instruction came directly from
Cedella’s dad.
CEDELLA BOOKER: My father played organ, guitar, a little violin. Every-
one in the family played music. My cousin Marcenine, he make a little
banjo guitar and they put the string on it. That would be Bob’s first
instrument. And when he got bigger he would start holding guitar.
Sometimes he hum along with me on songs like “Precious Lord Take
My Hand.”
ROGER STEFFENS: At the age of three, Bob began to evince intuitive
powers of surprising accuracy.
CEDELLA BOOKER: I remember when a woman we called Aunt Zen
used to love to play with Bob as a little boy. So she came to the shop
where I worked and he start to read her hand and tell her some things.
And she said, “Everything that the child tell me is right.”
Another man, Solomon Black, a district constable, he came to the
shop and stopped by and as a little boy, Bob take his hand and start to
look at it, start to tell him some things. And whatever he told him, the
man say, “You might be taking it for a joke, but everything the child
tell me is right.”
Bob knew he wasn’t going to be here for long, so he have to do what
he have to do. I have this friend, Ibis Pitts. He was Bob’s first friend
that he made in Delaware in 1966. Ibis said that one day he and his
friend Dion Wilson went over to the park where I used to live and Bob
climbed into a tree and that Bob said, “When I am thirty-six I am going
to die.” This was in 1969.
ROGER STEFFENS: Cedella Booker, affectionately known as Mother B,
has visited my Reggae Archives several times over the years. Many of
our conversations went unrecorded, although I made notes of each one
afterward. In one she recalled Norval showing up at Nine Mile when
Bob was five, asking that she allow Bob to come with him to Kingston
so he could educate him and give him a shot at a better life. Cedella
agreed, but when Norval and Bob arrived in Kingston—one of the only
 W H E R E I S M Y MO T H E R ? 5

times they were together—instead of taking him home and enrolling

him in school, Norval sent him to live with an elderly woman friend of
his named Miss Gray. During the next couple of years Bob was essen-
tially an abandoned child on the streets of Kingston. Cedella would
write Norval and ask when she could visit, but he discouraged her every
attempt and told her the boy was in a boarding school in St. Thomas.
Eventually someone from Nine Mile recognized Bob on a Kingston
street and told Cedella where he was and she came and got him.
CEDELLA BOOKER: Bob was about five when he went to Kingston,
not quite two years when he came back, and Mrs. Simpson asked him
to read her hand and he said, “No I’m not reading no more hand, I’m
singing now.”
ROGER STEFFENS: Neville O’Reilly Livingston, later to be known as
Bunny Wailer, cofounded the Wailers. He first met Bob when they
were both youngsters.
BUNNY WAILER: I was about nine [in 1957] when my father took me
up to live in Nine Mile, where I first met Bob. We moved, migrated. My
father bought some land there, about twenty-five acres, built a house,
built a shop. We stayed there about nine, ten months. I didn’t live
there too long though. The place was too cold. Very cold area. I wasn’t
prepared for that kind of cold. I used to get cramps in my stomach, so
they had to ship me back to the city. And then, a short time after that,
Bob came to the city to live with his mother.
ROGER STEFFENS: As a youngster, Bob would explore the area around
Nine Mile, and sometimes went places he was forbidden to go. During
one of these excursions he cut open his right foot after stepping on a
broken glass bottle. He was afraid to show the wound to his mother
for fear of being punished. But it became infected and he was in great
pain for months. Eventually his cousin Nathan made a plaster of warm
orange pulp and a yellow powder called iodoform, and within a couple
of weeks the wound completely healed. This was the first of numerous
wounds to the foot in which his fatal cancer would eventually take hold.
6 S O M U C H T H I NGS T O SAY

Bunny Wailer in Aspen, Colorado, September 1994.

BUNNY WAILER: Bob was a wild child. He was like the ugly duckling.
He had to find his own little brush to pick, and his own little cornmeal.
Nobody wanted him around their corn, so he get what’s left. He just
had to survive. His most serious endeavor was just to eat and drink.
There were many nights of cold ground for his bed and rock stone for
his pillow. Countless nights. Bob was not a child who get anything that
he sought. He didn’t get what any other child got.
ROGER STEFFENS: Bob’s earliest years were filled with neglect and
 W H E R E I S M Y MO T H E R ? 7

rejection by both races. Whites thought of him as a black child; blacks,

critical of mixed-race children, taunted him as “the little yellow boy.”
Even his revered great-grandmother, known as Ya Ya, referred to him
as “the German boy.” Racism was rampant in those days, and the
light-skinned leaders of the country were deeply influenced by four
hundred years of British colonial rule. For Bob, his color seemed to be
an impediment wherever he turned, causing him to turn inward, a soli-
tary soul relying on his own inner strengths. Even more significantly,
the rejection by his father weighed heavily on him throughout his life.
His early sojourn in the city of Kingston, where he went weeks with-
out a proper meal, steeled him for his return there when his mother
left Nine Mile to join Bunny’s father in 1957. Kingston would force the
young Marley outward into a world of crowded slums and stimulat-
ing companions, in a nation on the brink of overthrowing the yoke of
imperialism.