Following heart break and a brief attempt at running a tiny grocery shop in Alva. Cedella had decided to take her father’s advice and get over her failed relationship with the Captain and focus on building a life for herself and her son.
Nesta’s first experience of ‘town life’ came by way of a brief stay with, according to Bob Marley's father Captain Marley in his 1949 letter, one of his nephews’ who was a Kingston business man.
He and his family he proposed would be able to care and provide for the child better than his country mother possibly could.
It was not an easy decision for the young mother to make.She made the difficult choice of sending away her only child at the time to take advantage of what she thought was would be an elevated standard of living.
According to Timothy White in Catch a Fire, a book on Marley’s life,he equates ‘Ciddy’s’gesture with the Creole culture of Jamaica where a geographic move out of the country to an urban area or foreign equals upward social mobility.
The young Marley was very distraught but went anyway.
While he was away Cedella received few and later no letters saying of the child’s well being from his intended guardians in Kingston.
This initial migration did not last long and ended up with Cedella returning to Kingston for her child Bob.
Who turned out to have been essentially abandoned once again by his unfeeling father and left in the care of one Mrs. Grey.
The second time around when both mother and child would migrate to Kingston’s inner city, would prove more pleasant for Bob Marley more so than his mother.
A sense of adventure, pure ambition and sheer boredom of country life had propelled Cedella, now a young woman to make the move to Kingston.
Her final address after moving around for a short while became one of Kingston’s well known inner city areas, Trench Town.
