NO WOMAN NO CRY

It can’t be said that her relationship with Bob Marley was easy, but his wife of 15 years portrays it as intensely close and spiritual.

Rita Marley grew up in the rough Trench Town slums of Kingston, Jamaica. She was born to sing, and it wasn’t long before she conspired to bump into the Wailing Wailers as they walked to the recording studio down the road from her house. She formed the Soulettes to serve as the Wailers’ backup singers, and she formed a bond with Bob Marley close enough to lead to marriage. She joined Bob in the Rastafarian movement, which has some very specific prescriptions and proscriptions—although evidently, having numerous sexual relations outside marriage was not one of them, as Bob rarely spent the night with Rita. When she decided in 1971, after years of desperate poverty, that “the music thing was definitely not working” and she would have to go work in the US, leaving her children prompted sharp sadness. Meanwhile, Bob was busy back home getting two girlfriends pregnant. After Island Records took a chance on the “bad boys” against industry advice, they shot to fame, Bob played around even more, and the Marleys became as brother and sister. Rita’s role was to serve as protector: “I’d become more like a guardian. . . . I had more responsibility than just that of a wife,” she writes, admitting that the situation often pained her (“The boys born while I was in Delaware were not the last born outside our marriage, and I ended up taking care of many of them”). Marley doesn’t mince her words as she describes Trench Town, the trials of being penniless followed by the trials of being wealthy, and Bob’s probably preventable death.

Tart, self-assured, and lasting.