When he awoke, the man, by then joined by friends, gave the youngster ital food, a vegetarian cuisine eaten by Rastas, who believed that it was a sin to kill and eat animals. The man gave Blackwell water and a place to sleep. “In my confused, parched state, on the verge of passing out, I looked at the man before me and thought, ‘This might be the end.’”īut that was not the case. “Because I had never so much as laid eyes on a Rasta, they still existed in my head as bogeymen,” Blackwell writes. Blackwell was dehydrated and weak after days of walking the island’s remote coast when he saw “a tiny, lopsided wood hut held together with bits of string.” White youngsters in Jamaica were, at the time, told to avoid the Rastamen, and Blackwell was frightened, even in his desperation. A pivotal moment in his life occurred when, as a teenager, he was rescued by a dreadlocked Rastafari after running out of fuel during a boating jaunt. As Blackwell himself puts it, “There’s no two ways about it: I am a member of the lucky sperm club.”īlackwell grew up in Jamaica, alternately hobnobbing with the ruling class and exploring the island’s native culture. She was a close friend of Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels, and said to be the inspiration for several female characters in the Bond canon, including Pussy Galore and Honeychile Rider. It must be mentioned, parenthetically, that seafood lovers would do well to try their cocktail sauce, which is available domestically.īlackwell’s mother was a Jamaican heiress whose family had lived in Kingston for generations, making their fortunes in finance and agriculture. His father was a member of the Blackwell family, which had owned Crosse & Blackwell, a manufacturer of condiments, marmalades, and sauces since the early 19th century. Nevertheless, The Islander provides valuable insights into the inner workings of Island, a boutique label that hit the big time and was, for a while, unassailably cool.īlackwell is an intriguing individual with a distinguished lineage. Probably related to the British tendency toward understatement. It’s all rather superficial, the volume’s tone matter of fact to the point of occasionally becoming mundane. Book cover Still, with material like that to work with, Blackwell and co-author Paul Morley have not come up with a very exciting book.
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