by Colin Grant
The apprenticeship at Alfred Burrowes had been a good investment; Garvey thrived but his mother could give no shape to her life in the city. At the beginning of 1908, Sarah Richards turned her face to the wall, withered and, with characteristically little fuss, died suffering cerebral apoplexy on 18 March at the age of fifty-six – not far off the life expectancy of a Jamaican at the turn of the twentieth century. Garvey eulogised his mother as a ‘sober and conscientious Christian, too soft and good for the time in which she lived … always willing to return a smile for a blow, and ever ready to bestow charity upon her enemy’.23 Sarah was survived by her estranged husband and two children who’d made it into adulthood, Indiana and Marcus.
Brother and sister dug in in Kingston. Indiana went to work as a live-in maid for the family of the Kingston city engineer George Fortunatus Judah, who, though a prominent member of the 2,000-strong Jewish community, was closely associated with the Catholic Church.24 Over the next few years Garvey, also, would forge strong links with the Roman Catholic diocese of Jamaica, and would convert to Catholicism. Now, with his sister financially secure, he concentrated on his own ambitions. Pretty soon Marcus Garvey was boasting of his promotion at P. A. Benjamin’s to the ‘excellent position as manager of a large printing establishment’.25 Yet, in this climate of every man for himself, where he confessed, ‘I had not much difficulty in finding and holding a place for myself, for I was aggressive,’ Garvey found that his loyalties wavered between self-advancement and communal justice. It was perhaps a mark of his social and political sensibilities that, even as he progressed up the lower rungs of management, he retained his trade-union membership. Towards the end of 1908, the card-carrying foreman of the Kingston Typographical Union found himself in an impossible position.
Print workers’ demands for better wages and working conditions were ignored by managers throughout the capital. When the workers went out on an island-wide strike on 28 November 1908, Garvey defied expectations by not only joining the strike but also taking a leading role amongst the strikers. The year before, he’d been elected vice-president of the compositors’ branch of the union; but few young men, at the age of twenty, would have demonstrated the maturity needed to organise and motivate the masses. The strike force found support amongst the American affiliation of the International Typographical Union and, for several weeks, the men weathered the hardship of no wages. In the interim, their resolve was severely tested by two undermining pieces of news: firstly, that Jamaica’s newspaper proprietors had ordered new linotype machines from New York, thus reducing the number of workers required for printing plants; and, secondly, that the union’s treasurer had absconded with the strike fund. When the strike was eventually broken and the workers returned, Garvey, along with the executive members of the union, was sacked by the management. Found guilty of the Jamaican adage, ‘you can’t sidown pon cow, so cus cow kin’ (you shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you), and subsequently branded a troublemaker, Garvey was unable to find any other work in the private sector.
Garvey knew of the vindictive nature of Jamaican employers, yet he walked out on a point of principle, and aligned himself with the working class. When he later wrote about that period, he seems to have surprised even himself; good opportunities for someone from Garvey’s background were extremely limited and ‘it was not easy to pass on to office and position’. It was a measure of his single-minded determination to succeed, that he held up for public admiration his achievement at P. A. Benjamin’s of ‘having under my control several men old enough to be my grandfathers’. The decision to come out with the men had been taken on instinct rather than sober reflection. Later attempts to explain that bold action were reduced to the frank and un-analytical, ‘I got mixed up with public life.’ Garvey found that he was shocked by what he saw: ‘the politics of my country … disgusted me.’26
For all of Garvey’s talk of being aggressive, Amy Ashwood recalled that though he ‘possessed an overwhelming quota of physical courage’, Garvey was also an extremely sensitive young man who was no stranger to tears.27 Moving from a rural area to the capital, he could not fail to notice how the differences between the classes were accentuated. Garvey was not misty-eyed about the romanticism of simple country life: St Ann’s Bay and Port Maria were both marked by social stratification that was partly obscured by the egress offered by the green hills, the wilderness and expanse of the countryside; but in the oppressed cauldron of Kingston, the vulgarity of wealth butted up against the perfect squalor of Smith Village. Garvey was steeped in the reeking, pestilent poverty of a neglected people, apparently immune to yellow fever and untreated sewage, whose surroundings offered little dignity and certainly no grace. ‘I started to take an interest in the politics of my country,’ Garvey recalled, ‘and then I saw the injustice done to my race because it was black, and I became dissatisfied on that account.’28
Up until then, he’d been well on the road to a respected and respectable career. Looked at coldly, he’d made an egregious and reprehensible mistake. But in Kingston, Garvey was developing a fierce hatred of the iniquities of Jamaican society – even as he craved respectability. At the age of twenty, he had taken a huge gamble with his career and his livelihood and lost. Jamaica wasn’t the kind of society that allowed for second chances. Marcus Garvey counted himself extremely fortunate, therefore, when he eventually found temporary employment at the government printers.
Britain ruled Jamaica as a Crown colony. It was a strange hybrid system in which half of the members of the local legislative council (including the Governor) were executive appointments and the other half elected officials – collectively this group presided over an assembly commonly cursed as ‘the house of 40 thieves’.29 Critics argued that in replacing the quick-tempered Governor Sweetenham with the acerbic Sir Sydney Haldane Olivier after the earthquake in 1907, the British had swapped like for like. The compass that had guided Olivier’s Fabian principles in England seemed to have gone awry somewhere between the Colonial Office and King’s House, as it often did when civilised men went out to the colonies. Olivier was perhaps not as brittle as his predecessor but he could be equally autocratic. Local antipathy towards the new Governor was not universal. The island’s burgeoning poet, Claude McKay, was so pleased with the encouragement of the poetry-loving chief executive that he dedicated his first book of poems to him. Sydney Olivier had shown his appreciation by donating books to the Literary and Improvement Society of which McKay was secretary. But, arguably, Olivier’s acts of individual kindness were not matched by his overall approach to the workforce.
In his book White Capital and Coloured Labour, Olivier gave a bleak prognosis for sugar production on the island, given the inefficiency of the emancipated African who was ‘no longer exercised by fear of the Driver and the whip’. In so doing, he upheld the common belief that ‘the strenuousness of the inhabitant of the temperate zone must not be looked for’.30 His appointment further fuelled discontent amongst the masses who occasionally roused themselves to demonstrations in the heat of the night. By now Garvey was growing weary of the unfocused rage and meaningless verbal skirmishes that served as Saturday evening’s entertainment down at the Victoria Pier. There he was amongst the reformist pamphleteers who sought vainly to politicise jeering, rum-soaked ragamuffins. Ultimately it was little more than schoolboy grandstanding and a trifle undignified. Garvey had outgrown it. In a period of accelerated political education, the young man aligned himself with the National Club, where in a ‘tumultuous meeting’ he was elected first assistant secretary on 20 April 1910, along with the equally youthful Wilfred Domingo, an apprentice tailor who became the second assistant secretary. Domingo and Garvey were both natives of St Ann’s Bay (though as Domingo was the child of a much more prosperous family the two had never met). Another member of the National Club recalled being impressed by Garvey, especially by the intense young man’s continuing self-education: ‘He carried a pocket dictionary with him and said he studied three or four words da
ily, and in his room, he would write a paragraph or two using these words.’31 By night he learnt and by day he put into practice, as Garvey lent his expertise in the printing and publication of the group’s fortnightly journal, Our Own.
The club, Jamaica’s first nationalist political organisation, sought to challenge the abuses of the Crown government and campaigned actively for the removal of Governor Olivier and an end to the ‘coolie’ immigration (the influx of indentured Indian labour brought in to replace blacks who, after their emancipation, refused to work on plantations). In some quarters this rise in immigration bore significant responsibility for the commensurate rise in native unemployment. The objectives of the National Club rested on the shoulders of Solomon Alexander Cox who had gained a seat on the Legislative Council. Cox complained that the ‘coolies were brought in to help the planters [and] … large companies such as the United Fruit Company who … consisted for the most part of Americans who would simply place the Jamaican to a pile and set them on fire if they had a chance to do so.’32 Cox’s was a lone voice amongst a council more given to the concerns of planters than labourers, and his tenure was short-lived. He was unseated – much to the relief of the authorities – through deft machiavellian manoeuvring. The Jamaica Times noted the outrage of one Marcus Garvey, a junior member of the National Club, who had collaborated with Wilfred Domingo in publishing The Struggling Mass, a ‘sedulous pamphlet in which he upholds the policy of Mr Cox and deals severely with the Press which he declares is now an enemy of the people’. Although not so remarkable, it did signal perhaps the first island-wide public recognition of the young man from St Ann’s Bay. Garvey did not rush to correct the flattering misperception that he was the sole author and not, more accurately, the co-publisher along with Wilfred Domingo.
This phase of Garvey’s life was characterised by a stringent regime of self-improvement; he enrolled for elocution lessons, with the aim of recasting his thick country accent into the kind of neutral Standard English spoken in music-appreciation and debating societies. On the face of it Garvey’s choice of occasional tutor was an odd one. Robert J. Love was celebrated as a natural orator of great ability, capable of an effortless swaying of the emotions of those lucky enough to hear him. But even if he’d been so inclined, Love’s ability to offer elocution lessons would have been impaired by a recent stroke. It didn’t stop the young pretender, with heroic potential, seeking out the man many in Jamaica thought of as an oracle. For Robert J. Love did not confine himself to the rendition of clean seductive sounds and aural perfection. As well as being a doctor and preacher, Love was a proud ‘decidedly black’ radical journalist and aggressive campaigner for social reform. From the public platform he used his tongue as a tomahawk, provocatively advocating, for example, the erection of a memorial to the black Baptist preacher, William Gordon, executed for his part in the Morant Bay uprising forty years earlier, in 1865. Such sentiments alarmed the authorities and prompted sombre warnings from agitated editorial writers who chastised Love and prophesied that his careless talk would lead to a resurrection of racial animosities on the island; a claim largely overstated as Love lacked any mass movement or the engine of a political party to push his ideas through.
In young men like Garvey and Domingo, though, Robert Love found disciples radicalised and racialised by the sermons in his weekly journal, the Jamaica Advocate. The paper not only spelt out the glaring inequities in Caribbean society but was an early champion of the Pan-African idealism that would soon infect its most avid reader. Although evidence of the correspondence between the two men is patchy, it is clear that Garvey revered the great man and considered him a mentor.33
The young elocutionist’s next move was to put his new-found private voice on public display. The road test was his entry into a number of public-speaking competitions, culminating in a grand finale where recitations of leading authors would be given by various parishes of the island. The Gleaner of 20 August 1910 announced that the Garden Parish of St Ann would be fittingly represented by ‘the energetic elocutionist, Mr M. Moziah Garvey’. Midway through Chatham’s speech on the American War of Independence a wag in the audience threw out a witty remark about Garvey’s sometimes squeaky voice and the rows of Collegiate Hall resounded with laughter. Not surprisingly, St Ann’s favoured son did not figure amongst the winners. By his own estimation, though, Marcus Garvey should have ended the night in first place. So seriously did he take this setback in the competition that a month later, in the first foray into a lifetime of litigation, he sued the heckler who had put him off his stride.34
Garvey’s voice may have wobbled on the platform but it struck a surer note in print. A natural exuberance and self-conscious zeal fired the pages of Garvey’s Watchman, his first weekly journal that rolled off the printing presses in early 1910. There was much to admire in newspaper columns that crackled and fizzed with the certainty of youth. Garvey had announced his ambition from the outset with the title Garvey’s Watchman, for though the paper might have seemed like an exercise in vanity, it actually bore earnest homage to The Watchman published by George William Gordon. In 1865 the authorities claimed this militant journal had incited the violent rioters of Morant Bay. Their murderous call of ‘Colour for colour and blood for blood!’ resulted in the death of a dozen white men and was followed by swift and brutal British retribution with 400 rebels executed and more than a thousand flogged.35
Garvey’s Watchman claimed a circulation of 3,000, but given that the population of the city did not exceed 50,000 (the majority of whom were only semi-literate) and the fact of Garvey’s limited funds for promotion, that figure is unlikely. The hard-working publisher struggled from the outset to sustain his weekly paper. By the middle of 1909, recession in Jamaica was beginning to cut deep, and with their bellies knocking on their backbones, fewer citizens were prepared to take a punt on the expense of a journal. Garvey was forced to suspend publication after the third issue. Unsold copies of Garvey’s Watchman went the way of the pamphlets at Victoria Pier the previous year, distributed like confetti on the water. Garvey’s Watchman was the bold experiment of a twenty-two-year-old man. In its short life, the paper had briefly mounted a campaign over the lack of relief for the poor, and the tendency to cast the unemployed as agents of their own misfortune as ‘Quashees’ who continued to doze under the shade of palm trees, spitting out pumpkin seeds. The indifference of the authorities to the population’s hardships was a common complaint and a theme later take up by Claude McKay when he wrote bitterly:
Gov’mint seem no hea’ de cry
Dat de price o’ food is high,
Not a single wud is said
’Bouten taxes to be paid;
Same old taxes ebery year,
Though dere’s hunger in the air.36
Though figures suggested an increase in the island’s workforce, this was largely the result of splitting the work of existing jobs. More than one in ten workers were now in domestic service, but the swell in their numbers did not come from a greater middle-class demand for cooks, cleaners, gardeners and handymen but rather answered the urgent need to create employment for a surplus rural population. ‘Every house and shop is filled with black servants,’ J. Bigelow observed when visiting the island in 1850, and the situation had not changed much sixty years later when even modest homes had ‘four to five domestic servants … and the amplest provision is always made to prevent the possibility of the ruling race being compelled to do anything themselves which can be done by servants’.37
During the days of plenty Jamaica’s plantocracy had reaped fantastic rewards from the hundreds of sugar-cane plantations (at its most profitable the pearl of the Antilles was the jewel of the British Empire), but by 1910 sugar production had been scaled down in favour of bananas; and though there was a boom in the planting and harvesting of bananas (more than 10 million bunches were exported annually), their production was not as labour intensive and required fewer workers; competition from cheaper ‘coolie’ migrants forced
an already mobile working population to consider looking for jobs beyond the island. In 1910, Colonial Office records charted a great exodus of 13,109 Jamaicans; more than 10,000 of these economic migrants headed for Central America.
In the middle of 1910, Marcus Garvey cleared out his savings and approached steamship agents for a ticket to Costa Rica. He was one of hundreds of hopefuls who gathered at the wharves each week, united in a singular belief that the bananas cultivated by the mighty United Fruit Company in Central America were ‘green gold’. Such was the demand amongst Jamaicans for work that the United Fruit recruiters, accompanied by doctors, could afford to be exacting in their choice. As well as harvesting bananas, the Jamaican labourer would need muscles of rope to clear the forests in the never-ending drive for new land. There was no policy of crop rotation, and bananas would be grown until the land was exhausted; planters then moved on to the next fecund and fertile patch made ready by an army of gasping and sweating machete-laden labourers. Marcus Garvey would be spared the indignities and more unpleasant aspects of plantation life; another uncle, Henry Richards, had secured him a job on one of the larger plantations in the Limón division, in the privileged position of timekeeper.
Contract labourers had ventured to Costa Rica since the 1870s, first to build the railway lines through an unforgiving landscape of tropical rainforests (the daily rains typically measured over 2 metres in the course of a year). Men worked all day in the mud up to their knees. Landslides were terrifying and routine; work was always hazardous and sometimes fatal. On 22 August 1886, the New York Tribune reported a spate of accidental burials, of makeshift graves of black workers buried under piles of rubble: ‘It was the same every day – bury, bury, bury, running two, three and four trains a day with dead Jamaican niggers all the time.’ Labourers ran the risk of personal injury and death whilst investors baulked at the cost of the railway-line projects and the depressing prospect of no financial returns. To dissuade entrepreneurs such as Minor Keith from abandoning their half-built railway lines, the government in San José had offered generous land concessions. Hundreds of thousands of acres were transferred, and as the laying of the track progressed, Keith organised for banana trees to be planted all along the route of the line to feed his workers. When the various railway lines neared completion and the passengers for whom they were conceived failed to materialise, Keith and his associates began to adapt their carriages and rolling stock, and gradually converted their use to the transportation of freight, primarily bananas. The so far luckless entrepreneur had unwittingly stumbled on a produce whose harvest would soon transform his company into one of the richest in the world: green bananas were gold.