The Book of Jamaica

Chapter OneThis part of my story begins one evening early in January 1976 in Anchovy, Jamaica, a country village clinging to the hills of St. James Parish about twelve miles south and west of Montego Bay. At that time I was residing in Jamaica for a few months, ostensibly for the purpose of investigating the living conditions and habits of the Maroons, a remnant people who were the direct descendants of slaves who had escaped from their Spanish and then British masters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and who afterwards from their inaccessible mountain enclaves had successfully conducted a hundred year guerrilla war against the British. When I was not actively researching the daily lives of these people, I had sufficient leisure and interest to involve myself in the daily lives of the more typical Jamaicans who lived all around me, drinking and smoking ganja with them, playing dominoes, arguing politics, and so on. As a result I formed several close friendships with a number of my neighbors.My closest friendship, however, was with a man named Terron Musgrave who was neither a typical Jamaican nor one of my neighbors. He was a man in his mid-thirties, my own age, and a Maroon, and though during these months he spent fully half his time in Anchovy at my house, he lived in the Maroon village of Nyamkopong, forty miles and three hours' drive away.Terron was a short man, even diminutive, but extremely muscular, and though he gave the impression of having been packed into his body under great pressure and seemed always about to explode into furious, chaotic activity, when he moved he moved slowly and gracefully with thoughtful, deliberate precision. His skin was darkbrown, almost mocha-colored, and his face had been carved by genes and character into the face of a Nigerian king. Because he was a religious man and a member of the Rastafarian sect, he was bearded and wore his hair in long, mat