No Woman No Cry by Rita Marley Page B

look at this,” he went on. “Let me show you something.” And he pulled me to him, until we were facing each other quite close, almost close enough to kiss. We loved to kiss, kissing was one of our main functions! So I said to myself, uh-oh , he’s gettin’ ready to kiss me now and there I go … there I go … there I go …
    But this time he was drawing something in the palm of his hand, showing me a circle. “Listen, Rita,” he said. “You see this circle, this is like life, where we have to go around different places and meet different people. But inside this circle, this is where we are, you and me. And you see this line that go around it? Nobody can break that line to come into the circle with you and me, it’s protected. This is me, this is you, this is the children, all the important people are inside this ring. Anything happens outside it doesn’t have a proper meaning, and nothing can get inside. So don’t worry yourself, man, you’re safe, you’re my queen, my wife, my life.”
    From then on I felt all right, reassured and very special, because Bob was genuine in the ways he expressed himself. And it was also like him to know I needed that confidence and to give it to me. So I learned to ignore the follies that happened around me, to tell myself, oh, they don’t matter. That’s how I felt. And I felt, given Bob’s increasingly recognized genius, that I’d become more like a guardian—a friend, a partner—than in a possessive relationship, and that I had more responsibility than just that of a wife. This attitude would get me through the more difficult times that came later, when the “sister” thing had gone further than I’d ever expected. But I always had myself somewhere in mind, and when anyone came at me with “Bob says you’re his sister—is that true?” I’d come back with “Yes, I’m his sister. And I’d rather be a good sister than a miserable wife.”
    One interesting result of the association with JAD Records was Bob’s trip to Europe, which included a purely accidental meeting with my father. Danny Sims had taken Bob to Sweden to record the soundtrack for a movie, Want So Much to Believe (in which, as it turned out, none of Bob’s original songs were ever used). Bob hated cold weather, but he had moved to the cold basement of the house where Johnny Nash’s entourage was staying in order to get away from their lifestyle—the drugs, the whores, everything he disapproved of. He told me later that he thought he was going to die of the cold and had said to himself, if I’m gonna die, let me die in the basement—because they were eating pork upstairs, and cooking this and that, and oh … poor Bob. He was going through a hard time, having no friends there and no one to talk to. Someone made a tape of him in a bedroom there, singing solo with just his acoustic guitar. Especially on “Stir It Up,” I can hear all that loneliness in him: “Stir it up, little darlin’/stir it up/It’s been a long long time/since I’ve had you on my mind …”
    I suppose that’s why it seems like such a miracle that he and my father got together. I think they both thought so too (in later years Papa used to tell this story over and over). At the time, Papa was working as a taxi driver and playing music in Stockholm. One night a friend, knowing where Papa was from, said to him, “A young man came in from Jamaica man, a young man named Bob Marley. He’s somewhere in town with that American, Johnny Nash.”
    And Papa said, “What?! Bob Mah -ley? Bob Mah- ley ! But that name sound familiar! I think my daughter’s husband name Mahley! Let me see the guy, man!” So he got in touch with the person who was doing the cooking for Johnny Nash and said, “Let me meet this guy Mah -ley, man. Tell him Rita father