‘If it meant I had to sell all the drugs in America, then that’s exactly what I was going to do.’

Family ties are the ties that bind, but when unraveled, they can be the threads that nearly hang us to death. In fact, sometimes our most vehement enemies emerge from the same sources from which we yearn to receive so much love—our families.

Ky-Mani Marley knows this firsthand. As he says, ‘Family politics can be a straight bitch.’ Although born the tenth child of Bob Marley, Ky-Mani grew up estranged from his internationally renown family—without the power, wealth, and influence they enjoyed. Ky-Mani says, ‘ … when I would visit my siblings, it was like night and day.’ He goes on, ‘I’d be coming back home [from Kingston] from two weeks of helpers, cooks, gardeners, and a lawn man to bathing and cooking outside in our front yard [in Falmouth, Jamaica].’

Never fully included in the Marley Family, things only worsened after his father’s untimely death. Ky-Mani was completely locked out of his iconic father’s shelter. He was forced to survive the impoverished and predator-infested streets of one of Miami’s most violent ghettoes, determined to stay alive any way he could. ‘This is not the life I would have had to live if he were here—my dad,’ Ky-Mani says.

This compelling narrative chronicles young Ky-Mani’s gritty ascent out of the bullet-riddled life of street conflict and crack selling. An internationally known recording and performing artist, Ky-Mani shares his own story of personal redemption through his music, writing about his experiences, his struggles, and what he has survived to make it to the world stages he now commands as a Grammy-nominated musical artist and philanthropist.

THE STORY THE MARLEY FAMILY APPARENTLY DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW
This memoir is the book the Marley Family tried to stop. By legal standards, they committed tortious interference as an attempt to stop it from going into print and to censor the author from telling his story. You now have in your hand that story in its uncensored form.

‘The harder the battle, the sweet of Jah victory.’ — Bob Marley