The devastation that befell Jamaica as Hurricane Melissa was the worst of the worst in the country's 63 year history and has dented and devastated a substantial amount of folks on our sandy spit at the end of the earth here, home to a warm, lovey, and thriving Jamaican community.
That thriving community is coming together on Sunday (08 November 25) at Hog Island in Orleans for One Love, the Cape Community Fundraiser happening from 1-9p. The suggested donation is $40 but they'll welcome whatever you can spare. It's a day long to-do, family friendly, kids welcome, so bringem out for hear two of the Cape's well-known DJs spin their thangs - Jagga & Emerson are onboard. It'll get louder and livelier as the sun takes a powder and the famed Dub Apocalypse circles through, nowhere-near on their way to the next gig to do their part. They'll give way to big fans of theirs, the Dirty Water Dance Band, who're digging at their roots, performing with the historic Mr Michael Gabriel and his steel drum.
Mean Chiquitas
It's likely that the Cape's relationship with Jamaica began in 1870 after the Wellfleetian sea captain Lorenzo Dow Baker pulled into Port Antonio for an oil change after he dropped a group of gold prospectors in Venezuela. An industrious chap, the Bound Brook Island native had been making money ferrying cargo out of New England to points south, so he poked around for something to bring back and sell (no empty trips!). He loaded a few hundred bunches of green bananas and headed north for home. Once the green turned yellow, he found the nearest port (Jersey City) and was able to unload all of his goodies to a single grocer. So, naturally, he spun the block and went back to pick up more than twice the bounty, this time unloading them in Boston a few days later.
When he was in Boston he met Andrew Preston and the two of them rallied investors and formed the Boston Fruit Company and began printing money. They eventually became Chiquita Brands International, the global giant. So yeah, straight outta Bound Brook, a crazy mfr named Renzo.
The relationship between the Outer Cape and Jamaica got more serious in the late 1980s and early 1990s when seasonal workers coming up from Jamaica on H-2B & J1 visas. In that group of Jamaicans who made their way to the Outer and Lower Cape was a young woman called Diana Bliss. Back before she became the matron of the Mean Burgers dynasty with her daughters Jony & Jodi (who welcomed their middle sister Jamey-Lee & step-brother Delon to the fray this summer), Diana was in Truro & Provincetown hustling to make her living at hotels, in gardens, and behind the counter at Cumberland Farms.
30 years later, she and her family have just, or are about to, shuttered their Ptown location for the season, are still running their Wellfleet location @ the Hog Island Beer Yard, and are preparing to open their newest adventure, Diana's in Chatham. Anyway you look at it, Miss Bliss is a success story. But the roots of success grow as far into the ground as they stretch to the sky and she's been massively impacted by what's gone on in the homeland over the last few weeks.
Her home in Westmoreland is miraculously still standing, and she’s opened it to neighbors who’ve lost everything. She sat wondering about her father, also in Westmoreland, because she hadn't heard from for about a week because everything was down. Her cousins, who had just lost their mom, had their mourning compounded when their home was destroyed weeks later. It's by strokes of great luck that her grandchild, Jamey-Lee's kiddo, lives in an apartment at higher elevation and was more or less untouched.
Diana, who's deciding on the right time to go home (when can she be the most helpful? can she get around? where will she spend her time?), is also very concerned with the aid being sent to the island. There are 14 parishes (like our 50 states), and she's confident that unless the aid that lands there is shepherded to the right place, the likelihood of it being misused is high. She's said that Mexico, the Cayman Islands, and Columbia have offered some help, for which everyone is grateful, but the distribution of that help is another matter.
The manager of Provincetown's Stop & Shop is putting together an aid package and will travel to the island to oversee the dissemination himself - his wife was born in Jamaican. Similarly the Squire, which is holding a fundraising event on 19 Nov, will do something similar to be sure the right hands receive the assistance. The community and open hearts are essential in the moment, but it's an emotional time of need, any number of things can come from pure altruism.
The destruction of so many churches and schools also impacts the ability for people to come together at a rally point, since everyone is spread thin and many have been reduced to fractions of their whole. It's truly heartbreaking. Our human scale is never on display quite the same way as when disaster like this arrives. If you're able, help and give what you can, but don't send empty aid. Ask questions and be sure what you give will find its way home. Luckily there are enough people prioritizing that to offer a guarantee.
It's the Drum & Bass
Less than two weeks after Melissa had decamped, Truro Vineyards reached out to their friend and collaborator, Dirty Water Dance Band's Josh Ayala, to get involved in the One Love relief fundraiser. As we'll see in the coming weeks, there are many benefits around, more will come together; there are only so many times and places to engage and this one was an easy yes.
Josh's family is local, he's in the Lobster Shanty's generational line, and he's been playing music all up and down the Cape in restaurants and bars for a better of his life. It's impossible to come across any successful hardworking restaurant who doesn't have a strong backbone of Jamaican folks making the engine run. We have this conversation at the Brickhouse in Eastham, owned and operated by established Jamaican restauranteurs who've owned places as far down as Hyannis.
He was always inspired by reggae and has fronted a couple reggae bands over the years. Bringing that groove, that drum & bass, to people, getting them to dance. When he put the Dirty Water Dance Band together, one of the founding members, who will often hop on stage with them, is the steel pan guru Mr Michael Gabriel. He will also be back with them this weekend as they put on a full Bob Marley tribute show.
This will be the first time Dirty Water is playing a show with Dub Apocalypse, drum & bass masters, offshoot of John Brown's Body. Also good friends of Truro Vineyards, Dub will be hauling themselves to Orleans from Boston only to pack it up and head right back 3 hours later.
The general tenor at the moment, out here by the rotary and beyond, is tinged with discord. The exhaustion of the season has barely worn off, any business concerned with making it into or through the shoulder season is shifting into their fall strategy, but there's also no way to ignore what's happened to Jamaica, and so few ways to truly effect help. A spiritual place and people, there's something in the air emanating from the decisions to take assistance seriously enough to carve deliberate path to its delivery.
That said genuine desire to raise the less fortunate up again seems to be finding a way generate something less visible and tangible and soaked through with love. That's a good part of what these benefits, at their best, are capable of. Not all rain storms leave us with rainbows, and rainbows don't dry the ground but they can make the aftermath a little prettier, and even wondrous to stand.
Say a prayer, visit Hog Island this on Sunday, have a beer, and dance. Help One Love make make a much needed rainbow.
