The first time I left Jamaica, I was seventeen. I’d graduated from high school two years before, and while trying to get myself to college I’d been scouted as a model. And so I found myself at the Wilhelmina Models office in Miami, surrounded by South Beach’s finest glass windows with all my glass hopes, face to face with a famous onenamed model who was now in her sixties. When her gaze halted at my dreadlocks, I shouldn’t have been surprised at what came next.
“Can you cut the dreads?” she asked, as she flipped through my portfolio, her soft accent blunting the impact of the words.
Back home in Kingston, hair stylists would leave my dreadlocks untouched, tied up in a ponytail with my good black ribbon, deciding that the problem of my hair was insolvable.
“Sorry,” I said. “My father won’t allow me.”
She glanced over at the agent who had brought me in.
“It’s her religion,” he explained. “Her father is Rastafarian. Very strict.”
The road between my father and me was woven in my hair, long spools of dreadlocks tethering me to him, across time, across space. Everywhere I went, I wore his mark, a sign to the bredren in his Rastafari circle that he had his house under control. Once, when I was feeling brave, I had asked my father why he chose Rastafari for himself, for us. “I and I don’t choose Rasta,” he told me, using the plural “I” because Jah’s spirit is always with a Rasta bredren. “I and I was born Rasta.” I turned his reply over in my mouth like a coin.
This story is from the August 07, 2023 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the August 07, 2023 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Sea Change- Mountains, oddly, are the reason most of us have learned to think of the level of the sea as a stable point, a baseline, an unmoving benchmark against which one might reasonably measure the height of great peaks.
In 2019, a plaque was erected to commemorate the first glacier in Iceland to shrink so much that it could no longer be considered a glacier. Like the tsunami stones of the past, the plaque carried a message for the future, a warning to believe in changes that might at first seem implausible. It also carried a recognition of responsibility. “In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path,” the plaque reads. “This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”
My Life's Work- All I have in the world is a paternal aunt and a tank of fish that love me. And my work. I'm nobody.
Who am I? I’m nobody. I was cut from every team in high school. I didn’t go to an Ivy League college.
OUT OF THE PAST
At the beginning of “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973), Víctor Erice’s sublime first feature, a travelling projectionist arrives at a remote Castilian village, bearing a print of James Whale’s “Frankenstein.”
FUTURE IMPERFECT
“Hum,” Helen Phillips’s third novel, begins with a needle being drawn, steadily and irreversibly, across a woman named May’s face.
REMAINDERS
Why do bookstores still exist?
THE KAMALA SHOW
The evolution of Harris’ public persona.
THE NARAYANS
Mrs. Narayan was small, dark-skinned, oval-faced. She had a wonderful singsong voice.
A CULT IN THE FOREST
Everyone hopes for a miracle.
THE INFILTRATORS
Who’ leading the way in investigating far-right extremists: FBI. agents or leftist vigilantes?
ON CANCER AND DESIRE
Images from a complicated year.
