Photo by Michael Thomas
Sitting in front of Crown Candy Kitchen, a man with dreadlocks dangling beneath a straw hat stuffs cotton into an old pair of pantyhose. It’s just after 10 a.m., and the streets are still. The only sound is the bounce of reggae Muzak from an old Discman piped through a distorted Peavey amplifier. The 102-year-old confectionery is still closed; the 59-year-old Jamaica Ray is open for business.
While Ray’s steel drums wait silently for the line of lunchgoers, the artist toils over one of his other passions. Once the nylon hosiery is stretched and stuffed to the size of a small throw pillow, he ties off the bottom with fishing line. He adds a black wig and a plastic red rose. This will be the head of his latest creation, a Latina mannequin, part of a Cinco de Mayo display for the Mexican restaurant down the street. Ray hates the word “mannequin”—but can’t think of a better descriptor. “You see the mannequins at Walmart or Kmart, they have no character,” he says. “They all standing straight. They all perfect. I ain’t never seen no old mannequin, no mannequin with a belly or a beard or glasses.”
Photo by Michael Thomas
Ray’s life-size sculptures are made of nylon, cotton, and PVC pipe. There’s little Tony the Newspaper Boy, hawking the latest edition across the street, and bespectacled Dee Gregory the Activist, pleading with passersby with a sign that reads “We Must Stop Killing Each Other.” Beside Ray’s bench stands Bob Big Boy, a mustachioed chef whose belly is an entire pillowcase full of fluff, and the goateed painter dubbed merely Sexy Guy because of the twinkle captured in his plastic eye, which Ray swears makes women do a double-take.
They are composites of characters Ray has encountered over a transient lifetime. He was born here and grew up near Riverview Boulevard before moving at age 8 to Westmoreland, Jamaica, with his mother. In the Caribbean, he picked up his accent, religion, and music. He learned to play and make steel drums from barrels. He returned to the U.S. in 1979, lived in California and Florida, got married and had four children along the way. Like him, his wife was an artist, but art couldn’t support a family. “People always liked my art, but you can’t pay no bills with people just liking it,” he says. “Hungry kids need money every week.” He fed them with regular paychecks from factories, machine shops, restaurants, and landscaping companies. Once the children were old enough to feed themselves, Ray’s marriage fell apart. “Sometimes love grows,” he says. “Sometimes love goes.”
Sometimes love brings you home. About three years ago, Ray moved back to Missouri to help care for his father, who had cancer. He moved in with his sister on Herbert Street in Old North, and he took to the neighborhood with his steel drums and mannequins. He was playing a block up 14th Street, in front of an artists’ studio, when Crown Candy co-owner Andy Karandzieff suggested that the musician might make more tips entertaining the throngs waiting outside his historic green storefront.
The business and the street artist have quickly become inseparable, so much so that the Karandzieffs have now given Ray a key to the vacant building attached to Crown, where he’s set up his studio. There he stores his drums and the materials he uses to make his mannequins. In a back corner is a pile of discarded DirecTV satellite dishes that Ray has started to paint over in scenes of African wildlife, Jamaican iconography, a joint-burning, dreadlocked cartoon mouse named Mickey Marley…anything that pops into his mind. They’ve become good sellers—a third arm of his burgeoning art empire.
Music has always been the centerpiece. And as noon approaches, Ray puts up his as-yet-unnamed Latina dancer and steps to the drums beneath the green-and-white–striped awning. He pulls $6 from his shirt pocket and tucks the bills beneath a brick in the tip drum on the sidewalk. He’d like to make enough for a gallery of his own, or at least a car, but today the immediate goal is offsetting the daily expenses: $2 for two AA Discman batteries, $1 for three lemons with which to clean his vocal cords, and $4 for a lunch of grapes.
Ray pulls out a CD, wipes it on his black slacks, pops it into the Discman, and starts bobbing to the accompaniment. He grabs two small mallets and starts into UB40’s “Red Red Wine,” singing along to the melody he bangs out on the high-pitched steel.
But it’s a slow day. Ray fears that tonight’s Cardinal game is drawing people downtown. “Even Jamaica Ray can’t compete with baseball,” he says. Two young boys exiting Crown Candy come over and dance along with Ray. Their mother digs into her purse and leaves a dollar bill and some coins clanging off the tip drum. Ray’s smile is missing a front tooth. “Thank you, mon,” he says.
