Vincent "Aivengo" Martin ( Eng. Vincent "Ivanhoe" Martin ; 1924 - 1948 ), known as Rhyging - a Jamaican criminal who became a national hero and personified the image of the ore battle [1] [2] . He became notorious in 1948 after escaping from prison and organizing several robberies, murders and attempted murders before he was shot dead by police. In the following decades, his life was actively mythologized by Jamaican pop culture, culminating in the 1972 cult film The Harder They Come ( The Thorny Path ), in which Martina played Jimmy Cliff .
| Vincent Martin | |
|---|---|
| English Vincent "Ivanhoe" Martin | |
| Birth name | Vincent Martin |
| Nickname | Rhyging, Ivanhoe |
| Date of Birth | 1924 |
| Place of Birth | Linstead, St. Catherine's Parish, Jamaica |
| Citizenship |  Jamaica |
| Date of death | September 9, 1948 |
| Place of death | shallow lime kay, jamaica |
| Cause of death | Gunshot wounds |
| Affiliation | Ore fights |
| Crime | |
| Crime | beatings, robberies, killings |
| Period of commission | 1938 - 1948 |
| Region of Commission | Jamaica |
| Status | dead |
His nickname comes from the term rhyging (also spelled rhygin ) [3] - in Jamaican patois means "raging". The word is used by the Jamaicans as a synonym for the adjectives "wild", "hot", "bad" [4] .
Life
Early career
Vincent Martin was born in Linstead, St. Catherine County , Jamaica , and already in his youth, after moving to Kingston , set foot on the road to commit violent crimes. Skinny, nondescript, with a effeminate voice [5] , he compensated for these weaknesses by creating a reputation as an extremely cruel criminal. Martin was first arrested at age 14 for a fight and sentenced to flogging [6] . Further arrests for beating and theft led him to six months in prison. Upon his release, Martin joined a criminal gang and acquired a number of pseudonyms, including Aivengo, Allan Ladd, and Captain Midnight [5] . In 1946, he was arrested for robbery and expressively defended himself in court, which caused public sympathy, irritated fading and unpretentious statements by the prosecutor and judge [7] . A year later, Martin was released from prison, but very soon committed another robbery, for which he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. On April 30, 1948, Martin escaped from prison. In the next few months, Martin escaped the police, and during the six-week “criminal spree” committed a series of violent crimes in eastern Kingston. Sensational reports on Martin's crimes were published in the Daily Gleaner newspaper, which popularized him under the nickname "Rhyging" in the image of "Jamaican Robin Hood " [7] .
Criminal Spree
Martin’s scandalous series of crimes began when the police tried to arrest him in August 1948 . Upon hearing from an informant that he would be at the Carib Hotel, several police officers were waiting for him there. Martin was in the room with the woman when the police broke in. He grabbed a gun and shot one officer, Detective Lewis, the other two were injured - policeman Earl and retired sergeant Gallimore [5] . The murder of Lewis forced Kingston Mayor Alexander Bustamante to begin a real hunt for Martin. Bustamante himself carried the coffin at the Lewis funeral [5] .
The next day, Martin killed a woman named Lucille Tibby Young, girlfriend of Eric Goldson, whom he considered a scammer. [7] He burst into her apartment and demanded that she bring Goldson to him. When a woman said she did not know where Goldson was, Martin shot her in the chest. He then shot two other women who were in the room at that time, Estella Brown and Iris Bailey, injuring them. Immediately after that, the police announced a reward of £ 200 for Martin’s information, dead or alive [7] . Martin responded by writing an open letter to Sergeant Scott, one of the detectives searching for him. In a letter that was published in the Jamaica Times , he wrote:
I have an arsenal of 29 types of weapons, and I am pleased that I am creating the history of a criminal element in Jamaica. Do not expect me to commit suicide, it would only ruin my great history. But I hope Detective Scott educates his people even better. I am going to show the police what she lacks and what I can do [5] .
A few days later, Martin killed Jonathan Thomas, his former accomplice. Thomas was walking down the street with his wife when Martin came out to meet and shot him. He then tried to kill Selvin Maxwell, but Maxwell managed to wrest the gun from Martin's hands. Martin escaped by stealing Maxwell’s car [5] . He also participated in robberies, possibly to finance the planned escape from Jamaica [3] . Martin was suspected of robbing the White Horses Hotel, during which a security guard was connected, and a store near Russo Road [6] .
"Criminal Spree" made Martin famous. Martin provoked the police and played in public, posing for a photo with a gun and sending these photos to newspapers. In a letter to the Daily Gleaner, he described events at the Carib Hotel:
I decided to make a jerk. I ran to the door with a gun in my hand. I didn’t even have time to put on clothes. I looked outside. I heard the sound of another shot. I saw guys who wanted to make this evening the last of my life, but I was against it. At that time I had only five rounds ... I rushed out into the street. I was wounded in the right shoulder ... [5]
Police circulated Martin's description saying he was 5 feet 3 inches tall, tall, but usually wore high-heeled shoes to appear taller. He also lacked several front teeth in the upper jaw, but sometimes he wore false teeth. Martin, as a rule, wore black glasses and had the habit of looking around every few steps and spitting every few words during the conversation [7] .
Death
Martin was hiding with some friends for a while near his home in St. Catherine County, but police were informed of his whereabouts. He managed to escape on the banks of Lime Cay, near the ruins of Port Royal , but the police quickly found out again. On September 9, 1948, police raided Martin’s shelter. Martin and his accomplices fired back for an hour, but was killed when he tried to escape. He died at the age of 24 from gunshot wounds on Lyme Cay Beach. On his body, 5 injuries were counted in the head and several more throughout his body. Perhaps he was hiding in Lyme Cay, waiting for the boat to escape to Cuba. [8] Police also suspected that Martin was hoping to board a boat and escape from an island or somewhere on its southwestern coast [9] .
Martin's body entered the city morgue and was buried in an anonymous grave. A large number of people came to look at the body of the notorious criminal, including Eric Goldson. In order to avoid gathering the crowd at the funeral, police said that Martin’s body was transported to Spanish Town . As a result, Martin’s body was delivered to the May Penn Cemetery, where he was hastily buried without ceremony [9] .
Posthumous Glory
Immediately after Martin's death, Gleaner began to print stories about his life. One of them was entitled “The Story of a Killer”, and the other “Who was this man with a reward on his head”:
Who was Rhyging? This man with a reward for his head, who was misrepresented as an enemy of society ... Vincent Martin is his real name. In the jargon of his comrades, his name was Rhyging. Rhyging means a person who is always on top ... [6] [1]
Martin became a national hero for the poor inhabitants of the Jamaican slums of the 1940s, acquiring the image of an anti-hero like John Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde [1] . According to Kevin Aylmer, he became an “icon of the Jamaican working class,” due to his image as a hero of the Hollywood Westerns, his masculine charm and attractive ability to suddenly appear and run away from the chase [1] . Shortly after Martin's death, two Jamaican comedians Bim and Bam staged a drama called Rhygin's Ghost. Prince Buster wrote a song about Martin entitled Rhygin in 1965 . He also became the hero of the poem Dead Man ( 1966 ) by the Jamaican writer Louise Bennett-Coverly.
Martin's life inspired director Perry Hansell in 1972 to make the film The Harder They Come ( The Thorny Path ), in which Martin played Jimmy Cliff [10] . In the film, Rhyging is portrayed as a reggae singer and songwriter, who was deceived of the rights to his songs, because of which he turns to the drug trade and becomes famous thanks to his crimes [11] . According to Cliff, “Rhygin was on the side of the people. He was a kind of Robin Hood ... ” [12] . [13]
In 1980, Michael Telwell’s novel appeared in The Harder They Come , based on the plot of the film, also idealizing Martin’s image and portraying him as an innocent victim of the scammers he encountered, first arrived in Kingston [13] . The film was later adapted into a musical [14] and was first staged in 2006 at the Royal Stratford Theater (London) [15] [16] .
Rhyging continues to play an important role in Jamaican culture in the form of duppy - a ghost that scares naughty children.
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 Ska: An Oral History . - McFarland, September 27, 2010. - P. 69–. - ISBN 978-0-7864-6040-3 .
- ↑ Greil Marcus. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century . - Harvard University Press, 1 September 1990. - P. 263–. - ISBN 978-0-674-53581-7 .
- ↑ 1 2 Kevin Aylmer. Towering Babble and Glimpses of Zion. // Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader, Temple University Press, 1 January 1998, p. 285.
- ↑ Timothy White. Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley . - Macmillan, 2 May 2006. - P. 102–. - ISBN 978-0-8050-8086-5 .
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Walker, Karyl, “The story of Rhygin: The Two-Gun Killer”, Jamaica Observer , October 21, 2007.
- ↑ 1 2 3 C. Roy Reynolds, “Through the 20th century with the Gleaner History of a killer” Archived December 2, 2013. , The Jamaica Gleaner .
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 5 Grant, Colin, I and I: The Natural Mystics - Marley, Tosh and Wailer , Random House, 2012, p. 94.
- ↑ Christopher Farley, Before the Legend , HarperCollins, 2009, p. 87.
- ↑ 1 2 C. Roy Reynolds, “Rhyging terror ends in May Pen Cemetery” Archived on August 3, 2013. , The Jamaica Gleaner .
- ↑ “How we made: songwriter and actor Jimmy Cliff and actor Carl Bradshaw on The Harder They Come” , interviews by Dave Simpson, The Guardian , August 20, 2012.
- ↑ Perry Henzell, 70, Filmmaker of 'The Harder They Come,' Dies , The New York Times (December 5, 2006). Date of treatment April 14, 2011.
- ↑ Lloyd Bradley, Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King , Penguin UK, 2001, unpaginated.
- ↑ Daryl Cumber Dance, Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook , Greenwood Publishing Group, 1986, p. 460.
- ↑ Henzell, Justine, “Reggae Revolution: Perry Henzell Created Jamaica's First Feature Film against All the Odds”, New Statesman , Volume: 137, March 10, 2008, p. 41.
- ↑ Johnson, Richard (2012), “Keeper of the flame: Justine Henzell protecting her father's legacy, ” Jamaica Observer , November 11, 2012.
- ↑ "Rolan Bell On ... His Reggae Education" (link not available) , What's On Stage, July 7, 2008.