by Colin Grant
Marcus Garvey was now ‘faced with clippings of his obituary [and] pictures of himself with deep black borders,’ wrote Daisy Whyte, ‘[and] after the second day of this pile of shocking correspondence, he collapsed in his chair.’ Reading through the damning accounts, written by former friends and enemies, Garvey had suffered another massive stroke: he died two weeks later, on 10 June 1940.2
In those last weeks of his life, Garvey might also have been caught off guard by the surprisingly balanced coverage of papers such as the New York Times, the Daily Worker and the Chicago Defender. Back in the 1920s the Chicago Defender had led a pack of Negro papers in shrilly denouncing Garvey as a menace and disgrace to the black race. Now, on 22 June 1940, the Defender wrote, ‘Endowed with a dynamic personality, with unmatched oratorical gift, Garvey was easily the most colourful figure to have appeared in America since Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. From 1914 to 1921 he dominated the scene with … the powerful Universal Negro Improvement Association. Had Garvey succeeded in his undertakings, he would have been incontestably the greatest figure of the twentieth century. Having failed, he is considered a fool.’
A whiff of hypocrisy rose from its pages as it was the Defender’s London correspondent, George Padmore, who had initially spread the rumour of Garvey’s death. Amongst the small circle of exiled Caribbean intellectuals in 1930s London, the rising stars, George Padmore and C. L. R. James, had mounted a running campaign against the older man, heckling him at Speakers’ Corner and at political meetings, and seizing every opportunity to harass him and pour scorn upon his head. In the 1920s, J. Edgar Hoover had considered Marcus Garvey to be one of the most dangerous black men in America, but by the time of his death Garvey had retreated from the radicalism and militancy that the Bureau of Investigation boss had so feared. Garvey’s critics in London could not forgive his sharp turn to the right, nor his denunciation of Emperor Haile Selassie for fleeing Ethiopia during the Italian invasion of 1935.
If this tiny coterie of black intellectuals in London, including Garvey, had paused to reflect, they would have realised that they shared a commonality of purpose. Instead, they circled round each other in a narcissistic battle of minor differences. Theirs was a mirror of the many skirmishes Garvey had fought with other black leaders in Jamaica and Harlem throughout his unusual career.
C. L. R. James came publicly to regret his role in Marcus Garvey’s final demise, but it would take two decades before Garvey’s label as a fool was replaced officially with a badge of honour.3 In 1964, Edward Seaga (a future Prime Minister of Jamaica) arranged for Garvey’s remains to be returned for a state funeral and for the visionary, the man they called the Black Moses, to be honoured as Jamaica’s first national hero and one of the most radical and enigmatic figures in twentieth-century history.
1
BURY THE DEAD AND TAKE CARE
OF THE LIVING
And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and break in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire a still small voice.
1 Kings 19:11–12
ON 14 January 1907, the nineteen-year-old Marcus Mosiah Garvey anxiously picked his way through the corpses, rubble and fires that raged beyond control over 10 square miles of Jamaica’s capital, Kingston, in search of his mother and sister. Hours earlier, the Caribbean island had been hit by a massive earthquake. It was most severely felt along a line from Port Royal to Buff Bay with the epicentre below the sea, a few miles south of Kingston.1 Just after 3 p.m. it erupted with such ferocity that in a short time it had left a trail of more than 600 dead, thousands injured and much of the capital in ruins. The English journalist, Ralph Hall Caine, who had arrived on board the twin-screw steamer, Port Kingston, which had sailed into harbour just days before the quake, catalogued the pitiful sights and occasional lucky escapes. From the fallen wall of the railway station, Caine heard that a rail-worker ‘was thrown and impaled on the railings below, [but managed] to regain complete recovery notwithstanding his punctured lung’. Ralph Caine recorded the endless bodies, the bloated ‘human flotsam and jetsam (from which I must avert my eyes)’ drifting out to sea, and the desperate attempts at ‘putting out of the fires, the … lighters in the harbour receiving the dead bodies, the Parade Gardens in a mess, with families encamped there, and American blue-Jackets to the rescue’.2
A cloud of dust from the rubble eclipsed the sun; Kingston was cast in an eerie darkness. Much of the infrastructure and many of the businesses were destroyed: the great merchant houses which supplied the sugar plantations, dingy one-produce shops, government offices and factories were wiped out; flames jumped between buildings, and warehouses, packed to the rafters with sugar and rum, exploded. The biggest single loss of life came at the Machado Cigar Factory where up to 120 Cuban workers were killed when the building collapsed on them. No brick edifice was spared: almost all were wrecked including the printing plant and offices of the island’s principal newspaper, the Daily Gleaner; in the following weeks, newspapers around the world would reproduce the one iconic photograph that captured the calamity of the Kingston earthquake: the ghostly apparition of a young woman in starched white dress and straw boater stepping gingerly over the rubble in the heart of the commercial district on King Street. Fire had raged the length of the street and all the buildings including number 68, the site of P. A. Benjamin’s printers, where Garvey worked as a compositor, had disappeared.3
The power and devastation that nature could unleash was not unfamiliar to Marcus Garvey. Four years earlier he, his mother and sister had been trapped in the countryside of his birth, following a great hurricane that thrashed through the north coast at more than 200 miles an hour and destroyed all of their crops of bananas, pimento and coffee. Local people would so often resign themselves to their fate and the fact that ‘God is not in the wind’. But hurricanes were commonplace in the Caribbean, earthquakes were not. And the earthquake of 1907 was on a scale of unimaginable horror.
Kingston had been founded after a previous earth-shattering quake of 1692 that had destroyed Port Royal, described then as the most wicked place on earth: a playground for picaroons, pirates and prostitutes, and a haven for the notorious state-sponsored rogue, Captain Morgan. Popular folklore recorded how God’s wrath had been visited on this licentious den of iniquity when most of Port Royal and its fabulous riches were swallowed up by the sea. Such superstitions rose again from the fires of 1907. Church-going Jamaicans, more given to an Old Testament vision of the world, and yet to be touched by the compassion and tenderness of the New Testament, believed Negroes to be cursed. At 3.30p.m. on Monday 14 January, Christian fundamentalists were vindicated as the new seismologists: their much foretold chronicle of the ‘Last Days’ had finally arrived. The revivalist sect, the Bedwardists, shrieked the loudest, wrote the Gleaner. Minutes after the quake, ‘one could hear along the streets the cry of “Judgement!”’ Remorse gave way to penitence. The Anglican Church reported that over the next two days, 300 couples previously ‘married but not parsoned’ rushed to tie the knot. The novelist, Anthony Trollope, who had visited Kingston 50 years earlier, drew attention to the topography of the capital, noting that ‘the streets all run in parallels. There is a fine large square, plenty of public buildings, and almost a plethora of places of worship.’4 But now the streets were all buckled, rubble filled the squares and hardly any of the churches escaped unscathed: the 300 wedding ceremonies were conducted outdoors.
Reunited with his family, Garvey, along with most of the 46,000 surviving Kingstonians, spent months out in the open, grateful that the rains did not fall. Their desperate condition was not helped by the callous and brittle Governor Alexander Sweetenham, who was soon distracted by a perceived challenge to his authority which threatened to take precedence over the more pressing needs of feeding, clothing and sheltering a shocked population. The G
overnor summarily rejected a compassionate offer from a regiment of US Marines, whose battleships Missouri and Indiana, together with the gunboat Yankton, had steamed from Cuba just days after the earthquake struck. The Marines hadn’t paused to reflect: instinctively they had disembarked at great speed and fanned out over the city administering to the needy but also shooting at suspected looters. Affronted by the breach of diplomatic protocol – never mind the assault on British sovereignty – the Governor wrote tersely to the American admiral:
Dear Admiral Davis,
While I must fully and heartily appreciate your very generous offer of assistance, I feel that it is my duty to ask you to re-embark your working party, and all parties, which your kindness has prompted you to land …
It is no longer any question of humanity; all the dead died days ago; and the work of giving them burial is merely one of convenience.
I should be glad to accept delivery of the safe, which the alleged thieves were in possession of from the jeweller’s shop. The American Consular Agent has no knowledge of it; the shop is close to a sentry post, and the officer in charge of post professes ignorance of the incident; but there is a large safe on the premises, which has been opened by the fire, and also by some other.
I believe Police surveillance of no city adequate to protect private property. I may remind your Excellency that not long ago it was discovered that thieves had lodged and pillaged the town house of a New York millionaire during absence of the owner for the summer. But this fact would not have justified a British Admiral in landing an armed party to assist the New York Police.
I have the honour to be, with profound gratitude and highest respect.
Your obedient servant, Alexander Sweetenham, Governor.5
Later Sweetenham would be recalled to London in disgrace and the British would come to the island’s aid with the pledge of a massive loan to reconstruct the city. HMS Indefatigable was dispatched from Trinidad with provisions and clothing. Help also came from a French cruiser that hurried from Martinique, and the Mansion House relief fund was started. In the meantime, claimants battled with dry-eyed insurers who directed them to the small print of their home-insurance policies: fires were covered, earthquakes were not. The price of everything, already extravagant, would become even more so.
Jamaica was not a cohesive society. Its population of just under a million was cleaved along lines of race and colour. More than 800,000 black citizens were the descendants of enslaved Africans; about 5,000 white people constituted the ruling elite, buffered by 15,000 brown folk of mixed race. The Browns might take tea with the Whites, but certainly not with the Blacks. As the early historian of Jamaica, Edward Long, noted at the end of the eighteenth century, ‘the rich are the natural enemies of the poor’, and if that state of affairs hadn’t much changed a century later, there were optimists who reflected Edward Long’s great hope: ‘Yet if both parties could compose themselves, the faeces would remain peaceably at the bottom, and all other parties range themselves in different strata, according to their quality, the most refined floating always at the top.’6
The great problem was that a culture of social service had not yet evolved in Jamaica. The majority of people were too concerned with survival to think along selfless lines and those idle rich who could afford to, remained idle. When, a little while later, the young lawyer (and future Prime Minister) Norman Manley was approached by the directors of the charitable agency, Jamaica Welfare Ltd, and asked to volunteer his service, he looked bemused and answered, ‘in my sweet young life, I never once heard mention of the word “service” [in that context]’.7 In such a climate, the population of Kingston looked to friends and family outside the capital for support. But for the young Garvey there would have been little sense in sending a message to his birthplace, St Ann’s Bay, for aid from his father. Garvey senior – Malchus – was a cantankerous and bookish loner. From birth he’d been apprenticed to a former slave-owner, his own father and grandfather having been born into slavery. The parish records only showed a break in this pattern following the slaves’ emancipation in 1834. The British implemented a four-year period of transition, as much to process the claims for compensation from the slave-holders, as to allow the formerly enslaved to acclimatise to the peculiarities of being ‘fully freed’. The formerly enslaved were expected to work without pay for their former slave-owners for 40 hours a week; payment for extra work was to be negotiated. This period was quaintly called ‘The Apprenticeship System’. As well as adults, a child whose parents died within the four years of transition or whose parents gave approval (as it appears did Malchus Garvey’s) could also be apprenticed to their former master.8
A class apart from the peasant farmers in the area, Malchus Moziah was a stonemason and rum-shop scholar who’d occasionally pronounce from the pulpit of his encyclopedic mind. Garvey senior drew a very important distinction between himself, an artisan, and his neighbours who were primarily labourers. His son, Marcus, was born at 32 Market Street. Typical of the area, it was, recalled an early boyhood friend, Isaac Rose, a functional and unprepossessing wooden ‘old board-up house’. But Garvey’s father was an ambitious man who bought land up on Winders Hill. He turned his trade to good use and, with great satisfaction, built a ‘Spanish wall’ house for his family on the outskirts of town in the St Ann’s district – commonly referred to as the ‘Garden Parish’ because of its outstanding natural beauty. The property on the hill backed onto the Cloisters, once the home of the Anglican Rector, George Wilson Bridges, one of Jamaica’s most ardent and vocal opponents of the emancipation of the enslaved; during Garvey’s time the Cloisters had been purchased by the Wesleyan Methodist Church. Garvey senior was a master mason whose service, though not always affordable to local people, was much in demand.9
Garvey’s mother, Sarah Richards, a sincere and gentle woman, was the daughter of peasant farmers. Relatively late in life, at the age of forty-two, she had married Malchus Garvey. Their son, by then a toddler, had been born two years previously on 17 August 1887. Though the marriage certificate registered Malchus as a bachelor, Sarah was purported to have been his third partner; the previous two women, Caroline Trail and Charlotte Lawrence, had borne him six children between them. When Malchus Garvey moved on to Sarah Richards he fathered four more children with her: Trueman, Indiana, Rosana and finally Marcus. Trueman and Rosana both died in infancy.
Though wealtheir than his peasant neighbours, Garvey senior still required his wife to work. As well as growing crops on a small plot, Sarah worked as a domestic servant, cooking for their neighbours, the family of the Wesleyan minister, Reverend Arthur F. Lightbourn. Marcus Garvey grew up playing with the children of Reverend Lightbourn. His best friend at this stage was Isaac Rose, whose family lived and worked on the Seville sugar estate, known locally as ‘Nigger House’. Isaac Rose recalled that, in contrast to the Garveys’ substantial and robust ‘Spanish wall’ house, his own family lived in a property ‘made out of thatch, wattle and daub, paved inside with marl’. Isaac Rose’s father fed the sugar mill with cane, crushing them and extracting the liquor which then flowed through bamboo troughs to the boiler; his mother worked in the refinery boiling down the sugar in large vats. Husband and wife saved and prospered. They were able to move out of their humble dwelling to become neighbours of the Garveys at Winders Hill, once Marcus’s father had built a house for them. Though the Roses were not the class of company whom Mr Garvey would want to keep, no impediment was placed in the way of his son befriending whomsoever he chose.10
A generation up from slavery, Mr Garvey, as he insisted on being referred to by everyone, including his wife, was an extravagantly proud, self-educated man who had amassed an impressive collection of precious books. In later life Marcus Garvey would recall how he’d steal into his father’s library and luxuriate in the knowledge contained therein. Outside of the library and local school, Marcus displayed only an intermittent reverence towards the other traditional seats of learning. The local church and Su
nday school came with an extra hazard, as Garvey senior was an occasional layman – though, by his son’s account, whenever in attendance, Mr Garvey was most likely to be found asleep in the gallery. Isaac Rose recalled a bruising encounter with Marcus when Rose and the other local boys rolled up some paper, fashioned a makeshift cigarette for the sleeping Mr Garvey, placed it between his lips, lit it and ran. The ringleader was caught by the furious and protective junior Garvey and thrown down the stairs of the church.
When his father wasn’t the chosen victim, Marcus was not averse to joining in the pranks and high jinks of the gang. Sunday school seems to have served primarily as a venue for the local boys to try to impress the girls, and for Garvey to hone his mimetic skills. Amy Ashwood, whose life was to become intensely linked with Garvey’s, wrote that ‘Marcus was barely seven years old when he began to play the role of priest, guiding his flock composed of his village playmates … preparing his own “divine service”, his own hymns and prayers and [would] close the meeting with a rousing sermon’.11