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NER: You’re affiliated with a Rastafarian group.

EB: Twelve Tribes is my official affiliation. It doesn’t mean that I don’t go anywhere else. I’m trying to help the Anglicans--not the Anglicans. I’m trying to help people re-develop this church up there.

NER: How did you become associated with the Twelve Tribes? What is it like?

EB: Well, I’m black, as you know, in every way that you can think of (although sometimes I tell my friends I’m partially black), and so I had to look. Especially when I came back to Jamaica where there was nothing black-conscious at the time. They couldn’t even pronounce the word: "b-l-a-c-k" was "blake." So I had to look for people who were saying the kinds of things that I understood and I found them in Rastafari. These people came closest to seeing the world the way I saw the world. An opportunity came for me to know more 1976 when I met the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Twelve Tribes was the group that Bob Marley was affiliated with before he became baptized into the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

NER: Can you talk a little bit about the role of Mrs. Brassington in Myal?

EB: Ahhm, Mrs. Brassington. I can answer Mrs. Brassington by saying some of my best friends are white. And some of my best friends have done a lot for talking things out with.

Because the world is not made up of black people alone. The world is made up of a whole lot of different people. And I am not saying that I am not out of many one people, but it is not time for "out of many one people." A lot of talking…as I tell Evelyn O’Callaghan, who is Irish, "A lot of talking between you and I will have to happen."

There was a time when Evelyn O’Callaghan and Victor Chang and I were in a group together, and I said, we have to talk. Because until they have written their thing and thought through their thing they still keep a piece of me which I don’t know, because I am related to them.

So, we have to accept that the other side has something to give us as well. Mrs. Brassington had. And Mrs. Brassington was even blacker than her husband. And she admitted certain things. So there’s always the possibility of the meeting. But the meeting has to be a real one in which we understand ourselves.

She understood herself; she knew that [black] people couldn’t possibly like her, that there has to be a different way in which to enter. And she knew that she believed what they believe. So she had to move with them on the grounds of what belief systems they shared. Not through power like her husband would have pushed--a business of superiority. It’s a business of understanding how the world is, understanding the nature of the spirit, understanding that we are, beneath this article [points to her skin] we have here that is causing so much trouble in the temporal world, something else.

And that we can get it together when we have found our spirit, when we have found our spirit, when we are able to jump out of the body but still look at the body, then that is when we can talk. So that is why she is there.

And I didn’t put her there. She just jumped in there.

NER: So tell me about what you do here, then.

EB: I do things in the village. Like we do the Emancipation celebration. People are beginning to understand, to be grateful for the information that we give. But I don’t want to thrust my black stance upon them.

For instance, we have white students coming up. People do a lot of talking with them, working through, talking through, both as white students and as Americans who supposed to be rich. People in Woodside are beginning to understand that not all Americans are rich, not all tourists are rich, and even that not all of them are sensible, and certainly, not all of them are moral, in the sense that they are accustomed to seeing themselves as immoral and other people as moral. Americans have demonstrated that very fully here. [Chuckles] So all of that learning has been going on.

But now, we are developing community tourism fully and I am interested in continuing with this place, this [gestures towards her own premises] blackspace, and so I have to pull myself away from them a little now because I wouldn’t want to affect their movement towards getting tourists of all types and colors.

So I’m moving away and moving to where I really wanted to go to, a school which will be for people who have experienced--historically--capture, transportation, auction block, enslavement, and Emancipation. And I would like to see us working through that and understanding ourselves. Understanding that it is a gift that we have been given and we are to define ourselves within this gift and then give ourselves to the world. And I do not think it can be done with white people looking over our shoulder, nor with Chinese looking over our shoulder, nor with Indians looking over our shoulder.

I think this is a black people’s thing. Indians have their thing, Chinese have their thing, black people generally in the Caribbean do not have their thing, have not worked through. You can understand then why certain people don’t want their children married to us, ’cause we not coming with anything. Likkle reggae. [Smiles, chuckles.] But we not coming with a thing.

NER: So, is blackspace a corporation, an organization…?

EB: No, nothing at all besides a notion.

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Crossing borders

'We have something to teach the world'

On writing

Blackspace

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