Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  Shuffling uncomfortably between the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society and the Colonial Office, Garvey – like his father before him – took refuge in the safe, unjudgmental world of books. Earlier, Dusé Mohamed Ali had vouched for his employee’s honesty and integrity in his request for a reader’s pass to the British Museum. In support of his application, Garvey had cited a need to examine the works of the Liberian scholar, Edward Wilmot Blyden. The museum, whilst not fully granting his wish, offered the consolation of a month-long ticket. Nonetheless, his reverence for a house of knowledge would never be greater. Clutching his temporary pass, Garvey set up camp in the great domed library and tenderly turned the pages of black history texts and other wondrous manuscripts therein. He was an explorer on the threshold of a great discovery and would not be disappointed. It was during this period that he discovered the book that would prove the most influential on his life: Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington. ‘I read Up from Slavery,’ Garvey was later to write, ‘and then my doom – if I may so call it – of being a race leader dawned on me.’33 He prepared to leave London, boarding the SS Trent on 17 June 1914. The crew and passenger list records that he was only one of three third-class passengers. Over the next three weeks Garvey would have plenty of time and little distraction to reflect on which great expectations had been met in England and what might yet be met in Jamaica.

  In his two years abroad, in London and the other European capitals, Garvey’s thinking had undergone a profound shift. His passport identified him as journalist and student, but on the Continent he had been mistaken for an African prince. The cycle of fake African princes was yet to be played out in Europe and America, but Garvey had not set out to defraud anybody. The error gave testament to the fact that the black man was both visible and invisible. Through Caucasian eyes the Negro could not be confidently read: the peasant might just as well be a prince.

  In Europe, Garvey had made his way, haltingly, through a world that was foreign to him. In Jamaica he would be returning to familiar territory, but he would not be bound by its small-mindedness and the lowly expectations of the Negro; he had advanced into a ‘higher state of enlightenment’. As the SS Trent steamed across the Atlantic, he began to compose and order his thoughts, and sketch out arguments that would form the basis of essays and letters once he’d reestablished himself back home. The draft of the pamphlet ‘A Talk with Afro-West Indians’, which appealed to his compatriots to shake themselves from their slumber, had all the fire and urgency of the evangelist, worthy of Blyden, Du Bois, Booker T. Washington and all the other champions of the race that he had studied in London:

  Sons and daughters of Africa, I say to you arise, take on the toga of race pride, and throw off the brand of ignominy which has kept you back for so many centuries. Dash asunder the petty prejudices within your own fold; set at defiance the designation of ‘nigger’ uttered even by yourselves, and be a Negro in the light of the Pharaohs of Egypt, Simons of Cyrene, Hannibals of Carthage, L’Ouvertures and Dessalines of Hayti … Blydens of Liberia … and Douglasses and Du Boises of America, who have made, and are making history for the race, though depreciated and in many cases unwritten.34

  As yet, the name ‘Marcus Garvey’ did not figure on that list of black heroes. But he reflected, now, that perhaps it soon would. England had sharpened Garvey’s belief in his own destiny, and heightened his sense of racial awareness. As he was soon to write, Europe was a place where ‘the Negro is identified by his colour and his hair, so it is useless for any pompous man of colour to think because his skin is a little paler than that of his brother that he is not also a Negro. Once the African blood courses through the veins you belong to “the company of Negroes”.’ Garvey had come to a broad understanding of himself and reached an irrevocable conclusion: he had decided to hitch himself to the Negro race. The intent was clear and the details would soon be worked out.

  3

  IN THE COMPANY OF NEGROES

  In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and

  learning; but ’tis likely he is admired for slender

  accomplishment, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.

  David Hume, ‘Essay on National Characters’, 1758

  SAILING back to Jamaica in 1914, Garvey fell in with the other two third-class passengers, a Caribbean missionary returning from Basutoland and his Basuto wife.1 Marcus Garvey was shocked by the missionary’s description of life there. When he reflected on the missionary’s account of the ‘horrible and pitiable’ abuse of Africans, Garvey was so moved that he seems to have undergone an epiphany. ‘Where is the black man’s government?’ Garvey asked himself. ‘Where is his President, his country, his ambassador and his army … ? I could not find them.’ Capturing the feverish urgency of the time, Garvey later wrote that his brain was afire, that he had a vision of ‘a new world of black men, not peons, serfs, dogs and slaves, but a nation of sturdy men making their impress upon civilisation and causing a new light to dawn upon the human race.’2

  Each night, lying on his back in his tiny cabin, Garvey had the same dream. And by day, pacing up and down the empty decks as the ship steamed across the oceans, Garvey began to formulate a plan in his fertile imagination of a radical movement that would unite black people the world over.

  But Marcus Mosiah Garvey was little known in Jamaica – outside of a small circle of admirers to whom he’d communicated his European adventures. His sister might have been there at the docks to embrace him but it would be another six months before Indiana could save up enough money for her passage to Jamaica. So there was no welcoming committee for Garvey save for the vagabonds who kept a vigil for returning vessels, and the silver coins that might be tossed by Colón men in a flush of ostentatious largesse. As far as the disappointed beggars – whose outstretched palms Garvey could not cross – were concerned, there was little to mark him out from the horde of young hopefuls who had set out penniless from the pearl of the Antilles and returned in a similar state: empty but for zeal and great ambition.

  Within five days of landing in Kingston on 7 July, Garvey would take on the role of recruiting officer and set himself the unenviable task of enticing the sceptics to his banner. He formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities (Imperial) League (usually rendered UNIA).3 The gestation of this new confraternity appeared to be astonishingly short but Garvey’s account is, typically of him, a truncated version of events.

  The actual germ of the idea had been sown much earlier in London. The source of Garvey’s emergent Pan-Africanist thinking could be gleaned from the pages of Ethiopia Unbound – Studies in Race Emancipation by the Gold Coast lawyer, J. E. Casely Hayford. In the salvation of the race – the cause in which Marcus Garvey now cloaked himself – and in the path he mapped out for its execution, Garvey bore more than a passing resemblance to the fictional and heroic protagonist of Ethiopia Unbound. Published in 1911, the novel focused on an African student whose intellectual consciousness is awakened in London and who then returns to lead a political struggle in his native Gold Coast. Ethiopia Unbound may have provided the template for Garvey’s new character but the script would be drawn from his study of the seminal works of African and West Indian writers in the pages of the African Times and Orient Review: men like the coruscating and intense Liberian scholar, Edward Wilmot Blyden, who was internationally respected for his work on Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race.4 Blyden’s text was a modern and fractured book of notes, history, philosophy and other reflections on the reduced state of black people the world over. On the subject of religion, Blyden suggested that Islam, with its lack of colour distinction, was more attractive to black people than Christianity. Blyden, who’d migrated from the Virgin Islands to Liberia as a young man, was also an advocate of repatriation schemes which encouraged the return of blacks from the diaspora to Africa.

  In his relatively brief period in London, Garvey had shown an amazing capacity to absorb political tracts
, theories of social engineering, African history and Western Enlightenment. A prelude of his macroscopic vision was to be found in the detail of that first ambitious article for the Review in which Garvey had laid out, in part, his belief in a future of ‘unmolested liberty’ for the West Indies.

  The Universal Negro Improvement Association’s stated aim was ‘to establish a brotherhood among the black race, to promote a spirit of race pride, to reclaim the fallen and to assist in civilising the backward tribes of Africa’. Its motto, printed proudly on the letterhead, proclaimed, ‘One Aim. One God. One Destiny’. Garvey – acknowledging kinship with the Vatican – suggested that ‘like the great Church of Rome, Negroes the world over must practise one faith, that of confidence in themselves with One God! One Aim! One Destiny!’

  The motto was open to interpretation: the actual title of the nascent organisation was not. The UNIA was a name that many refused to embrace. Those in opposition to Garvey’s organisation were the descendants of white planters and raped slave women, the light-skinned Jamaican elite. They constituted the vast majority of the decision-makers in Jamaican society, and who were most outraged by one word: Negro. No one, least of all the aspiring brown artisans, bank clerks and civil servants, would have willingly ticked such a box denoting their racial classification. Negro might sound scientific and denuded of negative connotations but in practice it was an insult. And light-skinned blacks recoiled at Garvey’s presumption to herd them together with their unfortunate darker brethren. As Vivian Durham, a contemporary of Garvey, later said, ‘It was a time when it was the ambition of every black man to be white’.5

  Over the 300 years of British rule, the population of Jamaica had evolved its own prejudicial stratification of class, with a twist: the subtle and sophisticated British system was compounded in the Caribbean by colour. So that, if you craved social mobility and were shrewd, you not only married out of your class, but out of your colour.

  By 1914, Edwardian Jamaicans had developed an almost clinically discerning eye for gradations of colour. Such was the premium placed on fairness of skin that there was manifestly an unspoken division in society even within the various sub-groups of brownness. So, a half-black child – the progeny of an ‘unadulterated’ black and a fully white parent – was described as a mulatto; a quarter black was a quadroon; an eighth an octoroon; and so on down the line until one might virtually ‘pass’ for white. It was a code that everyone adhered to, from the playground to the chambers of commerce, and was succinctly encapsulated in the folk song ‘There’s a Brown Girl in the Ring’:

  There’s a brown girl in the ring

  Tra la la la la

  For she loves sugar

  And I love plum

  Society was engineered for the greater benefit of the brown girl dancing merrily in the ring of black girls who held hands and formed a circle around her. She would invariably be offered the sweeter things of life – the sugar – whilst the mass of less fortunate Blacks would have to make do with the sour plum.

  Garvey identified the central plank of the problem he would face in Jamaica: ‘The prejudice in these countries is far different from that of America. Here we have to face the prejudice of the hypocritical white men who nevertheless are our friends as also to fight down the prejudice of our race in shade colour.’6

  But Jamaica’s wasn’t an entirely rigid caste system. There was still room for manoeuvre. Even if you were 100 per cent black, like Garvey, you could still slide up the social scale by dint of hard work and education. It was clear that a man of energy and intelligence need not be bound to the lower orders. Garvey was determined to make a name for himself, and he was acutely aware of the need to capitalise on the boon from his stay in England before it became too distant to merit comment. At least his old printing skills might be put to use and press releases profiling Mr Marcus Garvey ‘who left Jamaica last year for the purpose of taking a BA degree at the University of London’, were sent out to the island’s newspapers.

  An almost immediate and welcome return came courtesy of the society pages of the Gleaner which concurred with the youthful traveller in believing his homecoming worthy of record. The Gleaner printed a brief appraisal of his sojourn abroad, along with an impressive list of the notables he had met on his travels, including the former Governor of Jamaica, Sir Sydney Olivier, and Lord Balfour of Burleigh.

  Nevertheless, name-dropping aside, Garvey seemed bent on forfeiting the opportunity of joining the right set. ‘I had to decide,’ he later wrote, ‘whether to please my friends and be one of the “black-whites” of Jamaica, and be reasonably prosperous, or come out openly and defend and help improve and protect the integrity of the black millions and suffer.’7 This bold statement was nothing more than the ranting of a Janus-faced hypocrite, according to letter-writers to the Gleaner, who took him to task over the small matter of his previous saccharine article for the Tourist. On his return, Garvey had persuaded the Gleaner to reprint that article under the caption ‘What Freedom has done for the Natives of this Island’, leading one fellow black correspondent to suggest that he had momentarily parted from sanity. Yet another complained that Garvey gave the impression to ‘folks who don’t know anything about conditions in Jamaica, that the black man’s bread is buttered … [when] not only is his bread not buttered on any side, but he hasn’t any bread to be buttered’. With magnanimous aplomb, Garvey accepted that ‘all people engaged in particular ideals do not always “travel” the same way.’ He countered that his conscience was clear and that, as Jamaicans so often got a bad press abroad, he wasn’t going to provide further ammunition.

  That seemed to silence the snipers for now; they would mount more serious challenges in the year ahead. At present though, his detractors were no more irritating than the island’s overfamiliar mosquitoes that you learnt to swat away as you got on with your life, or in Garvey’s case, with laying down the foundations of his fledgling organisation. On 20 July 1914, just two weeks after his return to Jamaica, he had convened the first-ever meeting of the UNIA and elected officers who, in turn, appointed him the president and travelling commissioner.

  The organisation’s modest funds meant that the operational headquarters of the UNIA was confined to 12 Orange Street, Kingston – a central location which, to those unfamiliar with the topography of the capital, might suggest a confident beginning and some success. On closer inspection, however, it turned out to be Garvey’s cramped hotel room, complete with a small bed jammed into the corner.

  From the start the UNIA made clear that it was not a political organisation but a charitable club built around the nucleus of a literary, music-appreciation and debating society, to which all were welcome. Such debating societies had mushroomed in the capital, partly in compensation for the island’s limited formal educational system. The educationally aspiring had a plethora of groups to choose from: Spaldings Literary and Social Society, the Queen Street Baptist Literary and Debating Society, and a host of other genteel associations competed for members; James Hills’s Literary and Improvement Society, with its extensive library, was perhaps the most alluring. It was over tea and johnny cakes at the Queen Street Baptist Literary and Debating Society at the start of August 1914 that Garvey met a formidable seventeen-year-old girl (ten years his junior) who had recently graduated from Westwood High School for Girls. Even at so young an age, Amy Ashwood’s elegance and regal bearing were remarked upon. She had a haunting and mischievous face.

  Decades later, in her unpublished manuscript, Portrait of a Liberator, Amy Ashwood wrote glowingly of an unexpected encounter with a member of the audience at the end of the debate. Garvey had followed her out into the wine-dark night to the tram shelter where she stood waiting for the streetcar to take her home. They struck up an immediate friendship and ‘the very next day at eight in the morning he [Garvey] was knocking on the door of my home’.8

  The honourable leader of the UNIA invited Amy to a committee meeting at Orange Street. But as he strode forward into the
office, she held back at the door, alarmed at the signs of domesticity. Under cross-examination, Garvey admitted that, given the convenience of its central location, he ‘sometimes rested there’. It was evidently an unsatisfactory answer. Amy Ashwood promptly informed him that it was not appropriate for a young unaccompanied lady to be calling at the home of a gentleman, and she ‘would not be able to return there to attend any meeting and … mother was very dubious about the whole affair’.9 Alternative premises needed to be found.

  If Garvey, like Ashwood’s mother, had doubts about including a member of such tender age, then Amy’s subsequent offer a week later – of a large rented house in new Kingston divided in two so that one half would serve as UNIA offices – settled the matter. The organisation’s fortunes would improve substantially with the admission of Amy Ashwood.

  Amy was extraordinarily mature for her years. Her precocious brilliance dazzled all those who came within her sphere. Her personality seems to have been an appealing concoction of high intellectual seriousness and convivial mischief: a formula that drew people to her and, by extension, to the nascent movement.

  The rental of the new HQ at 30 Orange Street had been secured on her father, Michael Ashwood’s, credit. He thought highly enough of Amy to have made her treasurer of the family fortunes in his absence. A baker by trade, Michael Ashwood had stayed on in Panama City, having migrated there with the family at the height of the canal’s construction, and set up a restaurant and food-catering service. The nostalgia of his fellow Caribbean émigrés – or at least their palates – was sated by Michael’s cuisine of rotis, ackee and salt-fish, and jerk chicken; business had boomed, so much so that the decision was made, after a few years, for his wife and daughter to return to Jamaica, where Amy was enrolled as a boarder at the pioneering Westwood High School – ‘a school for the training of native girls along with others regardless of class or colour’.10