The Footsteps of a Spirit

A rusty placard at a bend in the road reads, "De la Vega Heights — Lots for Sale." It points toward a faded trail leading up into the hills. "This is the entrance to Pinnacle," the taxi driver says. I give him twenty dollars and walk toward the entrance. Behind me the Lada taxi lingers while the passengers' eyes follow me in silence. Not long before, as we were passing a house in the valley, the driver had knowingly commented, "Two pickney [children] from Pinnacle bury in this corner. And now dem build a house 'pon the grave." The lady squeezed in next to me scowls, "It full of duppy [spirits], this gully."

The road I'm walking on looks abandoned. The tar is gray and eaten up by plants at the edges, but it seems like it was built to last. Who built it? And where does it lead? There is nothing in sight for miles. ... I tread on. The road winds into a maze of hills, right, left, right again, and after a while I lose my sense of direction. Under the tropic sun everything is silent; dried creepers hang limp from the trees. Is this really Pinnacle, the "promised land" of the Rastafarians?

Pinnacle. Every book about the Rasta movement mentions Pinnacle, but no one seems to know where it is, or what happened there. Was the most fascinating twentieth-century religion born here, in this brilliant chaos of green jungle and rugged limestone? Did the planetwide phenomenon of red, green, and gold culture — reggae, dreadlocks, and an international champion of human rights — spring from this very spot?

As I turn around I notice a woman standing in the middle of the road looking at me. From this distance I can't see her face, but she is wearing the long dress and head wrap of a Rasta woman. After a few seconds she turns away and disappears to the left into the bush. I walk back to the spot. A footpath leading uphill is barely visible. Looking closer, I see that it must have been an old stone road, the kind that slaves built up to the old plantation "great houses," wide enough for wagon traffic. Now I see only a vague flatness under the growth of wild bush.

A loud shriek from a bird makes me jump and look around. Perched on a hill, right at my back, an empty-eyed ruin stares at me. Farther up, an elegant arch of red brick rises between two rocks; it seems to support the sky. All around grow gigantic aloe spikes as large as spears. I walk past them and suddenly an incredible view opens beneath me, with every shade and tone of blue shimmering in the distance as far as the eye can see. Far below, Spanish Town, the old capital of Jamaica, sprawls out like an industrial wasteland. Farther to the left are Kingston and its upland suburbs against the misty line of the Blue Mountains. Southward lie the indigo blue expanse of sugar estates, the Hellshire Hills, and the sea. The view is dizzying, and I keep walking up the old road. There is not much left of the great house that used to stand on the top of the hill; all that remains is a stone platform and a red brick cistern with green weeds rotting in an inch of black water.

As I prepare to turn back, the woman with the long green dress materializes from behind the cistern, carrying something in her hand. She is much older than I had originally thought. I'd been misled by her slender body and swift movements.

"You lookin' somethin'?"

"History ... I'm trying to learn about Leonard Howell."

"Counselor Howell!"

"Do you know anything about Counselor Howell?"

"Well ... not too much."

The woman squeezes her eyes shut in a silent laugh, then bends toward my ear. "He was a powerful man!" In her hand is an old red brick smoothed by age. She mutters, "He loved to walk barefoot. His feet have touched this stone." Opening up her old patched-up bag, she ceremoniously puts the brick inside, adding, "They say he is dead, but he is alive." She is still muttering, squinting in a smile. Then she looks straight into my eyes. "You believe he is alive?"

I am on the verge of answering a noncommittal "I understand," when I remember that Rastas do not like the word under-stand. They do not like to stand under anything, preferring to "over-stand," so I say instead, "I know he is alive. He brought me up here! Who else could have brought me to this place?"

She laughs and comes down the flight of steps. "So you want to learn about Counselor Howell. What do you want to know?"

"Anything."

"If you want to know, you have to come with me."

"Come where?" I think. "And who is she?" I follow her down the path, but suddenly, at a grove of flamboyants, she cuts left toward sheer cliffs that fall toward the Rio Cobre, far below. I try to keep up, but stumble and then lose sight of her. I want to call to her but don't know her name. A rock fall blocks my path. The sun is going down and her footprints vanish. I feel like I'm chasing a phantom or a spirit.

* * *

When Pinnacle, the first Rastafarian community, was burned to the ground in 1958, an estimated two thousand of its residents took refuge in Kingston. Ironically the Jamaican police had succeeded only in spreading the "Rasta Menace" they were trying to suppress. From then on, the preachers and disciples of this strange cult based their headquarters in the downtown ghettos of the capital, where they were feared and despised by the Jamaican establishment. The Rastas' poverty, their boldness of speech, and their wild looks were a contemptuous challenge to the colonial order. Jamaican educators and preachers realized that the Rastafarians could become a real threat to established religion in Jamaica. The rich and especially the middle class saw them as a rebel army crawling nearer to their uptown lawns. After eighteen years of peaceful relations within the boundaries of the Pinnacle community, thousands of Rastas had been thrown into western Kingston's hopeless maze of decrepit shanties. The terrible conditions in Trench Town and the other slums left them in a desperate struggle to survive.

And strangely enough, they were not the ones to start the war. On May 7, 1959, a dispute between a policeman and a city worker in Kingston's Coronation Market turned into a riotous brawl. The city worker had been sporting a beard, which was the distinctive sign of the Rasta in the days when...