No Woman No Cry Read online

  As usual on tour, we had separate rooms, which at first I had enjoyed. But now, because Bob had the additional responsibility to give interviews and the like, the record company took control of his daily life—when he went to bed, the time he had to wake up, eat, and go. He was on a hectic, more pressured schedule now; when everybody else on the tour was able to rest a little later into the morning after a concert, he had to be up for a 7 A.M. or a 9 A.M. interview. If so-and-so was going to call you from another part of the world, you had to be up to catch their time, even though you had just fallen into bed.

  As the lifestyle changed, the women kept coming—the beauty queen or the Miss So and So. Every city we went to, he had to meet the Miss So and So for a photo shoot; it was a part of the promotional thing. “Hello Bob, Queen of the So and So is coming down to the hotel to take pictures with you.” And then I would find that she came to take pictures during the day but at night she’s there, in the bedroom, and trying to see him again the next night. That made a difference because of his health, which I could not stop my feelings about. I was still concerned about that. All this time the sickness was moving, according to what the doctors later said. The toe grew worse, aggravated by his wearing boots every night for performances. Sometimes we did two shows a night, and then there were the after-show parties. Next night same thing.

  I remember one night—I think it was in Paris—that he came back to the hotel with his toe all hurt up, draining, and then the next morning we had to call in the doctor. Along with the doctor came the picture on the front page of the newspaper, of Bob dancing with the beauty queen. I kept saying, “You really didn’t have to. After the concert you shouldn’t have gone out dancing with your sick toe, or if you’re going dancing, wear a slipper.” That’s when I realized that he wasn’t thinking of himself anymore, because self-preservation should come first. As for the one-night stands, the flings, I would say to him, “If you do this you can’t do that, because you’re weakening one aspect of yourself. And along with the weakness you lose your resistance. The more you can rest is the best for you.” And he’d say, “Oh, you’re getting jealous now …! Now you’re acting like a wife, huh?”

  We’d have arguments like that. And people even tried to turn him against me. But then I said to myself, tschoo, if I’m gonna be thought badly of, and treated so, then forget it. Because if you don’t take care of yourself, then you don’t love yourself, Bob, and if you don’t love yourself, you can’t love me. Because you have to love yourself, don’t let other people love you more than you love yourself. That’s a mistake. And though some are real fans who love you for your message, others are vampires sucking your blood, your energy, and they’re only saying they love you because you’re in the Daily News.

  Then I realized, oh, this is what happens when you finally lose control. I was losing whatever control I’d had, and just as I’d been warned early on, it came with success, with stardom, it came with “I’m too busy for you.” And the excuses: “There are things that I have to do, that I must do, to be somebody, to make money to send the kids to school. I have to work this way.” Though I knew Bob was on a mission, he had gotten sidetracked in so many different ways by all the “yes” people—whether he was right or wrong they said yes to him. Still, I said, “We’re losing the spiritual aspect of our dreams.”

  Then there came a time when the whole vibe started to change. This began to happen after Don Taylor had been fired from his job as Bob’s manager. Danny Sims, along with Alan Cole, was now managing the tour—Danny Sims, who took our demos over the years and sold them and claimed most of Bob’s publishing rights from the early days. And I’m there thinking, wow—what’s going on? After Bob had signed with Island, I didn’t participate in his financial or managerial decisions.

  Then everything began to unravel. At the end of September 1980, we arrived in New York to do a show with the Commodores at Madison Square Garden. The other members of the group were separated from Bob—we were put in the Gramercy Park Hotel downtown, and he was at the Essex House on Central Park South. We had never before been booked into different places like that. I heard later that some hustlers, dreads from Brooklyn who had attached themselves to the tour, had offered him something, though I don’t know whether or not he took it.

  After the show he’d stayed up all night, Bob told me later. I called him the next morning, which was a Sunday, to ask if he wanted to go to church, because ordinarily whenever we were in a city that had an Ethiopian Orthodox Church, we had been making sure to attend. Pascalene from Gabon answered. When she got on the phone I thought, wow, what’s she doing there so early? Then Bob picked up and said he didn’t want to go to church, which was unusual, and he didn’t sound like himself, so I said, “What happened, you didn’t sleep last night?”

  He said, “Not really.” Then he went on to say that he was fine, but that he couldn’t make it to church and he was going to send the limousine for me. Still, something in his voice sounded strange and distant.

  Minnie was with me, and I kept having the feeling that something wasn’t quite right, so I said to her, “You go up there and see what’s happening because I keep having this nagging feeling …” All along something just didn’t seem right.

  When Minnie got uptown and went into Bob’s room, she looked at him and—she told me this years later—she saw Death. To her, he looked like a ghost. Eventually they told us what had happened, that Bob collapsed while he was running in Central Park. He and Alan Cole had gone jogging to “energize” Bob, who in mid-run had suddenly felt his body freezing up on him. When he turned to tell Alan that something was wrong, he couldn’t move his head or speak, and fell down. Now they were waiting to see Danny Sims’s doctor, but Bob wanted us to go ahead to the next concert location, which was Pittsburgh, and he would see us there.

  Nobody had said anything to me about Bob falling, which I thought was so disrespectful and suspicious. But then I guess the lifestyle had so broadened, and so many people were riding on our earnings, that he wasn’t in control anymore over who knew what or when. Other people had taken over his life completely, and I didn’t know—maybe he didn’t even know—what he was eating or smoking. I still don’t know, though over the years I’ve heard a lot of stories about what had been going on without my knowledge.

  So I did go on to Pittsburgh, even though I knew something wasn’t right. During the night I dreamed that Bob was inside a fenced-in place that could have been a hospital, but it had bars and he didn’t have any hair on his head. He came to the fence to say something but we were separated by this grill thing, and I woke up thinking again that he didn’t look right to me, something had still not been explained. The next morning I called Marcia and Judy and told them about the dream, and then I decided to call New York and see what was happening. When I reached Bob’s number there, the phone was answered by a Jamaican journalist named Fitz, who was doing public relations for the tour. When I said, “Fitz, what’s happening there?” he said, “Man, it doesn’t look right …”

  I started to panic. “What do you mean it doesn’t look right, what the f - - - is happening to Bob? What happened to my husband?”

  Fitz said again, “Man, something is not right, and they need to talk to you.”

  At that point I started to curse. “Listen to me!” I said. “If you all stay up there and let anything happen to Bob, you will have to answer questions! Because something is f - - - ing wrong, and nobody’s telling me the truth!”

  I hung up the phone, and oh, I was upset. I began to feel panicky. A couple of hours later, Bob arrived and they said it was time for sound check, so I got on the bus where he was waiting, looking terribly pale. “Bob, what happened?” I said quietly. “Come on man, tell me the truth. You don’t look right. What’s happen? You didn’t sleep? What happened, what happened yesterday?”

  He took me aside in the bus, and said, “Well, Danny Sims took me to the doctor, and the doctor says I have cancer.”

  I felt as if my hea
rt had left my body. I said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “Something is wrong here, somebody’s trying to hurt you. Let’s go home.” Immediately I wanted to go. It was as if I’d gotten so scared that I wanted to stay away from everybody because I didn’t know who around was enemy or who was friend.

  I jumped off the bus and went to find Marcia and Judy, and told them the story. We were all furious. “Can you imagine this is what Bob is telling me and nobody called us?” Of course everybody was kind of suspicious, but Bob said they were going to do the concert that night anyway.

  But I said, “No you don’t!” I hunted up Danny Sims and said to him, “How dare you! What is this, a game? How could you do this?”

  And then I found Alan Cole. I said, “What exactly is happening? Tell me!” And then, finally, they said that the doctor told them that the malignancy in Bob’s toe had spread to his brain and that he was going to die anyway, so they might as well continue the tour till he dies.

  I was outraged. I said, “No!” And then it seemed as if I needed additional backup, so I ran to the phone and called Bob’s mother and told her to please help me out, to please call and intervene. I called Diane Jobson, Chris Blackwell, and Bob’s business lawyer, David Steinberg, and told them the same thing. I even called Dr. Bacon in Miami, who said he’d been expecting this and could have prevented it, that things needn’t have been this way. I was devastated. Then I ran back to Danny and Alan and screamed, “We can’t go on with this, it’s crazy! You’ve got to stop this show now! Now! Stop Stop Stop Stop Stop!!”

  Bob checked into Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where they gave him radiation treatments that resulted in hair loss around his forehead and temples. Cindy Breakspeare came to New York, where she and I shared time caring for him with the kids and Aunty. But word leaked out that he was there, and it got on the radio and in the New York papers, so he left New York for a hospital in Miami, in search of some kind of positive word about treatment or cure. But everyone told him that he had only months to live, that the cancer had advanced into his liver, lungs, and brain and was still spreading. He came back to Sloan-Kettering, where they gave him chemotherapy, and his locks started to fall out, in lumps. He said, “This is dangerous, can it grow back?” And they said, “Oh yes, yadda yadda …” He began losing weight rapidly, and it seemed as if he was slowly turning into a different person. The morning of November 4, 1980, he called for a baptism. I’d been telling him to be baptized ever since His Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie sent Abba to Jamaica, because I’d had all our children (not only my own) baptized in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. When he asked me to call Abba that morning, he was crying. We were all crying. Bob was baptized with a new name, Berhane Selassie, meaning “light of the trinity.”

  A short time after this, Dr. Carlton Fraser, a Jamaican physician who was a Twelve Tribes member, suggested that Bob try Dr. Josef Issels, a German doctor with a specialty in the treatment of advanced cancer. I had gone to Jamaica to check on the children and Aunty and to prepare them for the seriousness of the situation. By the time I was able to leave them, Bob had been taken to a hospital in Germany by Dr. Fraser and Alan Cole. When I called and asked for him, I was told he was having his tonsils taken out. When I asked who—besides me as next of kin—had given permission for that to be done, I was told that the permission had been given by Mr. Alan Cole. My first response was “Why did he do that?” Because I thought that once they touched Bob’s tonsils, he’d lose his voice and wouldn’t be able to sing again, and that’s what they wanted to do.

  I got to Germany the day after they removed his tonsils without my knowledge or my approval and found that this was part of Dr. Issels’s treatment, that chronically inflamed tonsils and decayed teeth had to be removed if they were getting in the way of the body’s natural immune system. Nevertheless I felt—and this was my belief—that operating on Bob’s throat was what the Devil wanted to do in the first place, stop his voice from saying what it was saying. I was more suspicious of the whole thing now.

  Then I went to see him along with his mother, who had arrived the same day, and he was able to show his happiness on seeing our faces. He was also able to whisper that he’d had a dream about the two of us the night before, and at this he laughed and said, “Now the both of you come.” He had dreamed that both of us were drowning and he didn’t know which one to save. “Now tell me, Rita,” he said, “if you both was drowning, who should I save first, my mother or you?”

  Well, I had to laugh and she had to laugh, and I said, “You know you have to save both of us.” And then all three of us just began to laugh at the idea, which reassured him that really we would never leave him. I will never forget that morning, because from then on I understood that everything was just going to go downhill.

  That same night, when I went back to the hospital, I could see he was very worried. He took my hand and said, “Why you stayed away so long in Jamaica?” Because, even though so many other things were happening, he still looked to me for a certain strength. For him I remained a pillar. When I wasn’t around, he felt as if people could do anything they wanted with him, but if Rita was there, she wouldn’t allow certain things. She will make an argument of certain things. I was always like that, despite all the women and every other aspect of it. He told me he had told Cindy not to come back to see him again. She had met with Pascalene and knew Bob had been seeing her (it was in the newspaper), and by then Cindy was getting ready to marry someone else and would get married about three months later. So she took herself out of the picture. And soon Pascalene was sent away, too. I guess it didn’t feel right anymore, having these women around; I was not comfortable and maybe they weren’t either.

  From then on, I went back and forth between Germany and Jamaica, bringing some of the things he liked best, things that were healthy like yam and dashine, because Dr. Issels’s treatment included the kinds of food that Rastas also thought it proper to be eating. I didn’t like other aspects of the treatment—for example, every morning we had to take Bob to Issels’s clinic to take pints of blood out, and put blood back in, and I wasn’t sure whether Bob was getting back his own blood. Nevertheless, Dr. Issels kept Bob alive more than six months longer than the other doctors had predicted, though he had made no promises other than to try his best. It wasn’t until the spring of 1981 that he said he had done all he could, and Bob asked to be flown home. I had gone back to Jamaica when this happened, and he called me to say he wanted to be closer to the children and to his mother and me, that I shouldn’t come to Germany, but instead should bring all the children to Miami, where he was going to fly. So he was on the verge but he was determined, and built up that resistance that took him back to Miami, which allowed him to see the kids, and give them instructions, and to tell them that he would always be with them. At one point he called Ziggy and Steve into the room where only the family was allowed. To Steve he said, “Money can’t buy life,” and to Ziggy, “On your way up, please take me up; and on your way down, don’t let me down.” And they both said, “Yes, Daddy.”

  Early on the morning of May 11, from the hospital in Miami, he called Diane Jobson and said to her, “You know, Diane, what will happen if, you know, something happens to me? If I should pass away, as the doctors say, what will happen?” And when she said, “Nothing,” he said, “No man, give me a likkle law.” He was saying to her, give me the legal aspect of this matter. I swear he said it to her, even in the whisper that was all he could manage. Recently I asked her if she remembered what Bob had said. Because “give me a little law” meant he needed some assurance, since earlier he’d said, “I don’t want to write this thing they call will.” That morning Diane said, “No, man, your wife and children will be the main beneficiaries, and I’m sure Rita will take care of your mother.”

  But if she had just said to him “Let me write something and you sign,” as his legal adviser at the time, it would have saved millions of dollars. Instead of our having to give away what we didn’t ha
ve, because when Bob passed away he was not a millionaire, although that’s what people think. Of course he knew he had done his work, and what was left to be done was for us to do.

  That last day, a little before noon, I had gone to get him some carrot juice and when I returned his eyes were closed and the doctor said, “It’s over.” I started screaming, “Don’t give it up to the Devil, Bob! Give it up to Jah, don’t give Satan any power to mingle with your spirit! Don’t give up, Bob, don’t stop, go straight to your father in Zion high!” I took off the red, black, and green band around my waist and tied it around his head, and kept shouting biblical injunctions until I heard the doctor say, “We better keep her quiet,” and the next thing I knew they had given me an injection that put me to sleep. When I woke up Bob was not in the room, and I realized what had happened.

  By late afternoon I was still pretty upset, until Steve said to me, “Mommy, you remember what Daddy says, ‘No woman no cry.’ Daddy says don’t cry, no woman no cry. So come, let’s go to Jamaica.” So Steve and I got on a plane, the last plane leaving Miami at six. And I came straight from the airport to the house on the hill, the house I had taken a chance on before we left on that last tour.

  chapter thirteen

  WHO CAN BE AGAINST US

  BOB’S PASSING WAS a downfall for me. He was my strength, my man, my first heart.

  I had never experienced a death in the family since becoming an adult; it was as if part of me went, emotionally and spiritually, even physically—because just the fact that he wasn’t there felt strange, to wake up the next day and not be able to look at him. For me, death is not the end of life; I believe the spirit continues and believe in reincarnation in a positive way. But I understood for the first time that sensation of something missing when you lose a person’s physical presence.