About the Author Mark Lee was born in Central Kingston, several blocks north of Southside and grew up in various sections of the city and its suburbs. As an infant he would have walked some of the streets of Southside as his mother or grandparents went shopping for market items for Sunday dinner. This was a more decent Southside, which had not yet been so named by its residents. His schoolmates included several of those who would shape reggae’s development: Augustus Pablo (Horace Swaby) of Java fame, Tyrone Downie, organist of the Wailers and Gussie Clarke, the producer and Lee’s cousin, Harold Butler. The association with Downie led to observing studio sessions including that for Trench Town Rock, with the Wailers. In 1973, he dropped out of the first year of college where he was pursuing Business Administration and joined the STAR as an understudy to the crime reporter. He later graduated in Mass Communication from the University of the West Indies. His journalistic career and stints with the adult literacy movement in Jamaica would lead to close contact with the island’s wealth, poverty and injustice. In the mid 1980s Lee’s career in the media took him to the Eastern Caribbean where he worked with Radio Antilles in Montserrat and the Caribbean News Agency in Barbados, where he now lives. His previous publications were, Life in the Caribbean Community (1992), a journalistic compilation for the Caribbean News Agency (the articles won him the Caribbean Broadcasting Union/Caribbean Publishers and Broadcasters Association All Media prize for Promoting the Spirit of Regional Integration, sponsored by the Caribbean Community) and Vacation Barbados (1993), a destination guide for the eastern Caribbean island for International Voyager Media. He has also edited Elements of Regional Integration: The Way Forward, for the Caribbean Policy Development Centre. His poetry has been published in the University of the West Indies’ Caribbean Quarterly, Fl