Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  The 3,000 celebrants who squeezed into the hall were treated to a carnival of colour and pageantry, presided over by five church ministers. The 100-strong choir was at the couple’s disposal as well as the African Legion’s guard of honour. 500 guests from around the world were invited (Ashwood’s Panamanian friend, Allen Cumberbatch, though notified, was not on the list). Thereafter, the limited but open invitation to UNIA members came with but one request, for them to wear their buttons as proof of membership. Hundreds of curious onlookers, on the pavement outside Liberty Hall, strained with one eye to get a view of the proceedings, and, with the other eye, ogled at the mountain of wedding gifts valued at $3,500.23 The wedding allowed Garvey to indulge in his heightened feeling for the nuances and gravitas of public drama. He could change from morning suit to tunic and plumed helmet. More importantly, he could turn to the UNIA’s constitution and book of laws (that underscored the formal incorporation of the UNIA in July 1918) and, for one spectacular night, transform Liberty Hall into ‘the “Court Reception” at which the Potentate [Garvey] and his Consort [Ashwood] shall receive in presentation those distinguished ladies and gentlemen of the race and their … children whose character, morally and socially, stands above question in their respective communities’.24

  For an unashamedly romantic man, Marcus Garvey had a decidedly odd idea of the place of mystery, allure and indulgence in the immediate aftermath of a newly-wed’s life. On their two-week honeymoon to Canada, he had decided to invite along a small retinue of UNIA staff, including his personal secretary, Amy Jacques. The leisure of sightseeing would be punctuated by three mass meetings in Toronto and two in Montreal. Garvey had paused to be married but the honeymoon period would not extend to the actual honeymoon. Mrs Garvey had been forewarned and had had some little time to acclimatise to the expectation of work and pleasure in Canada. When they reached the border, however, it was Garvey who was caught off guard by an unwelcome surprise: a customs officer carried out a routine search of his wife’s luggage and found a concealed bottle of liquor. Garvey was teetotal – Amy had stashed away the bottle without him realising – and though he knew that his new wife liked a drink, his embarrassment at the border was acute. The disclosure for a middle-class woman was most unladylike; for the Consort of a potential Potentate it was even more unbecoming. Garvey was persuaded by the arguments of the Temperance Society that consumption of alcohol was morally reprehensible. Its transportation was, of course, another matter.25

  Edward D. Smith-Green, the secretary of the Black Star Line, had the good fortune of having been scouted by Garvey. He was, in the president’s estimation, ‘a clever, well-trained accountant from British Guiana, who could not be eclipsed for competency anywhere’. He’d been one of the founding members of the UNIA in Harlem but, doubting its longevity, had drifted away. When, in the middle of 1919, Garvey came to cast for talented individuals to help float the Black Star Line, he remembered the Guianese accountant. By then, Smith-Green was working in an ammunitions factory in Trenton, New Jersey – rather down on his luck with but three or four suits to his name. Garvey paid for his train fare and brought him back to Harlem. Within a few months, he had gone from counting and recounting his slender wages each week to handling hundreds, sometimes thousands of Black Star Line dollars coming into his office each day. Garvey noticed he’d also become something of a fashion plate, changing his suit each day; his changed demeanour – one of self-satisfaction – was expressed through the snap of his colourful bow-ties.

  In December 1919, Edward Smith-Green’s luck had turned. At the beginning of the month Smith-Green was shot in a bungled robbery by an unknown assailant. Though the injury was not serious, the shock had obviously had a deleterious effect on his pregnant wife. She died a few days later, and was given a public funeral in New York.26 It was not the best preparation for what was to come. Now he was to be the Black Star Line’s principal negotiator in agreeing terms to ship a large consignment of whisky out of the country. Between them Garvey and Green (without seeking advice from the captain) chartered the Yarmouth for a fee of $11,000. In the event, this would not even meet the transportation costs; but worse still, in their naivety, they neglected to write a limited-indemnity clause into the contract. If anything went wrong the Black Star Line’s liability would be unlimited.

  The task was made doubly difficult by the unmovable deadline of 17 January and by the fact that the Yarmouth hadn’t yet returned from her maiden voyage when the deal was being struck. She would need extensive repairs before going out to sea again. The company’s naivety was further exposed when the final bill for repairs was presented: at $11,000 it was ten times the estimate. If Garvey didn’t pay, the Yarmouth wouldn’t sail, and if the Yarmouth didn’t sail it would be liable to substantial damages to the whisky company. Garvey paid. By the time the ship was ready to take on the cargo, there were only a few days remaining till the start of Prohibition. Garvey and his captain set to each other in violent, roiling arguments over the terms of the contract which Cockburn considered derisory. The Black Star Line would only receive $11,000 when the going rate on such a valued freight should have been closer to $100,000.27 Unknown to Garvey, his captain was also in negotiations with the client. It was one thing for the distillery to threaten a fledgling company like the Black Star Line with breach of contract; it was another to collect damages. If the whisky wasn’t out of the country before the Prohibition deadline it would be confiscated, and Cockburn was refusing to sail, claiming the ship wasn’t ready. The directors of the distillery were frantic and, in a secret deal, offered Cockburn a $2,000 incentive. He immediately ordered the crew to start loading the 20,000 cases of whisky, 500 cases of champagne and 350 barrels of wine. The Yarmouth just managed to clear port in time before the midnight deadline and set sail for Havana. Then 100 miles out to sea, off the coast of Cape May, she was caught in a storm. The valuable cargo had been loaded in such haste that it shifted in the hull, giving the vessel a heavy starboard list. Cockburn ordered the men to throw 500 cases of whisky overboard to steady the ship and prevent her from capsizing. (It was later rumoured that a number of tugboats had followed the Yarmouth, lain in wait for just such an eventuality and picked up the discarded bounty.)28

  Captain Cockburn still struggled to control the ship which rolled and yawed in the heavy weather, and eventually he radioed an urgent signal to the coastguard for help. The Black Star Line’s flagship suffered the indignity of being towed back to New York harbour for further repairs, and was laid to anchor off the Statue of Liberty.

  At the regular Liberty Hall meeting on 25 January, Garvey told the audience, with unintended irony, that the past week had been somewhat trying, that the plotters who hoped to crush the organisation had not relented. It had been ‘a week of brain against brain and the Black Star Line [has] survived’. The debacle was not over yet.

  On the afternoon of 3 February, Prohibition officers stormed the Yarmouth after being alerted that some cases of whisky were being taken off the boat and sold on to bootleggers in Brooklyn. British Military Intelligence reports, which were increasingly shared with their American counterparts, noted the brouhaha surrounding the misfortunes of the Yarmouth. Garvey and a team of Black Star Line officials immediately besieged the offices of the Prohibition Agency and ‘after much burning of long-distance wires and a conference in the US Attorney’s office’ managed to free the impounded cargo.29

  What should have been a straightforward business transaction turned into a minor comic opera (the last act was still to be performed) and illustrated the kind of difficulties that were to continue to plague the organisation’s inexperienced team. Garvey had not been able to send to Cardiff for a black officer to replace the Yarmouth’s recalcitrant chief officer but in Hugh Mulzac he found an African-American sailor whose commitment to his craft was matched by his enthusiasm for the UNIA. During Mulzac’s job interview, Garvey did most of the talking and took off ‘every few moments in a flash of oratory, his black eyes flashed and his
quick fingers drove home each point … wildly castigating white men for their cruelty and extolling the greatness of ancient African civilisations … “You are going to help man a vast fleet of speedy ships,” he said … Before I left I had purchased five shares.’

  Mulzac was piped aboard the Yarmouth and was soon perturbed by what he found. The boat was partly waterlogged. The passengers were in a pitiful condition. ‘They had to sleep in cold, wet, filthy rooms and were partly frozen. For a moment he wavered, for he ‘had just given up a decent position for the sake of race pride’. However, the new chief officer decided to make a fist of it and almost immediately ‘called for a gang of stevedores and made the crew snap to’.30

  Hugh Mulzac recalled first-hand the degree to which Garvey’s ideas had infected black people beyond the USA with the Yarmouth’s arrival at Havana. Hundreds of sympathisers had camped out to greet them ‘showering us with flowers and fruit’. In the evening, President Menocal gave a banquet in their honour at his palace and promised his government’s support for future BSL ventures. The one unfortunate note was the Yarmouth’s bad timing. She had arrived in the middle of a longshoremen’s strike during which her cargo of liquor could not be unloaded. Because of her lack of protection from a demurrage clause, the unlimited liability meant the delay (a penalty of several thousands a day) ate into any profits the line hoped to make, swallowed them up entirely after a week and pushed on into a massive deficit after a month. Thirty-two days on from their arrival in port the crew was able to unload the cargo.31

  There was some consolation. Secretary Smith-Green had accompanied the Yarmouth and took with him two stock books of the Black Star Line which were completely sold out. Scores of Cuban businessmen had also pledged their cooperation and a substantial landowner had vowed to switch the shipping of his sugar from the all-powerful United Fruit Company to the Black Star Line – ‘if we could promise him seaworthy vessels and good service’. When Garvey addressed the audience of stock-holders at Liberty Hall and read out the secretary’s cable from Havana, though, the largest cheers came with the unexpected news of the crew’s royal welcome at the presidential palace. The UNIA leader chose not to itemise the daily financial losses that the expedition had thus far incurred. If he had been pressed to do so, he would have undoubtedly set that ‘regrettable deficit’ alongside the incalculable benefits of the presidential endorsement. A worldwide network of Negroes trading between themselves had been Garvey’s eternal dream, and Cuba heralded the first tentative signs of its real possibility.32 The response in Cuba emboldened him in the pursuit of other business ideas and ideals. Why settle for a millinery store when you could cut out the middle man and manufacture the hats yourself in your own millinery factory? That was the kind of thinking behind the Negro Factories League which Garvey incorporated in January 1920. He would need figures such as the redoubtable Hugh Mulzac to stand a chance in establishing such businesses. The call had already gone out for 10,000 intelligent young Negro men and women of ambition to take advantage of the leadership possibilities that were opening up. As Hugh Mulzac noted, the hopeful supplicants who queued round the block at 135th Street occasionally included sharks and charlatans but a significant number of promising candidates also came through, not always with the correct paper qualifications, but with energy and enthusiasm and transferable skills.

  The young J. Raymond Jones typified this group. He started work on the organisation’s unprofitable wet-wash laundry. Plying for trade with a leased horse and wagon on a single route, the laundry served only one apartment building, and had struggled to break into this competitive market. Jones’s innovation was simply to get rid of the horse and wagon, invest in a second-hand Model T truck and offer an incomparable service to the customer with the promise, ‘We Return Everything but the Dirt’. Further routes quickly developed. The popularity of hot-roasted sweet yams sold on the sidewalks sparked another idea: the UNIA was perfectly placed to secure deals between the small black farmers in Oklahoma and Tennessee and street vendors who catered to the Southern palate of the new migrants in New York. The UNIA also cultivated an interest in small traders, especially amongst Harlem’s Caribbean population, of whom it was often said that once they were 10 cents above a beggar they’d start a business.33

  Although Garvey soon appointed a firm of respected accountants to monitor the UNIA books, and Amy Jacques’s discipline and office efficiencies started to bite, the leadership continued to move monies between its businesses – with the Black Star Line taking the lion’s share. Raymond Jones recalled that early on the shipping corporation became a financial furnace that needed to be fed, no matter its diminishing returns. On one occasion he brokered the sale of two tank-car-loads of cane molasses direct to a firm on Wall Street for a tidy profit. With some pride, he rushed to Garvey’s office on an impulse to share the good news, ‘I suppose to impress the great man,’ and made the mistake of leaving the cheque with the president, ‘for later I had a devil of a time retrieving the money to pay the [vendor] in Georgia.’ There was no dishonest intention on Garvey’s behalf, Raymond Jones concluded, just a deficiency of business acumen and a belief that ‘all proceeds from the business ventures should go to the UNIA. When I suggested 20 per cent to the Association, in order to have money for expansion and a cash reserve, his answer was an emphatic, “No!”’34

  Despite his frustrations, Jones never reached the crossroads of disbelief. Faith sustained him in his efforts to make a contribution and to excel. In the presence of Garvey’s ‘powerful personality … nothing could compare to the primal feelings of pride in race and strength in unity and the hope for posterity’. Garvey must have sent forth his spirit along with the Yarmouth also. It was something of that feeling of fellowship and exaltation that excited the black populations of Costa Rica and Panama when they learnt that the flagship was headed their way.

  Sixty years later, Simon Clarke still remembered the occasion when, together with his older brother, he was given a packed lunch and ‘set off on foot for Christ Church by-the-sea … and waited from nine in the morning till nine at night without catching a glimpse of the ship on its way through the Panama Canal’. Over the coming months that extraordinary desire to celebrate the simple existence of the Black Star Line was replicated throughout the Negro world. The idea of a black-run shipping line and its visionary leader had captured the collective black imagination.35

  The Yarmouth eventually reached Colón, and Hugh Mulzac (a precise man not given to exaggeration) was amazed by the ‘thousands of Panamanians who swarmed over the docks with baskets of fruit, vegetables and other gifts’. Exaltation mingled with relief. Thousands of Caribbean labourers had been driven to desperation by conditions in the zone, following the downscaling of their work and rights since the opening of the canal. They were enormously anxious to leave. To them, the Yarmouth had become a rescue ship. It had appeared on the horizon when they had all but given up hope. The crew improvised and made up accommodation for 500 of the lucky ones whom they agreed to carry as far as Cuba.

  Stopping off, on Garvey’s orders, at Bocas del Toro in Costa Rica, the crew were greeted by similarly ecstatic crowds, the peasants coming down from the hills on donkeys and makeshift carts. ‘When we threw our heaving lines ashore,’ Mulzac confided to his diary, ‘the peasants seized the hawsers as they came out of the water and literally breasted us alongside the dock.’ Whilst he could not fail but to be flattered by all the praise and adoration of the celebrants, Hugh Mulzac worried that the ship was in danger of becoming a trophy, and the crew part of an elaborate exhibit. It was a view reinforced by the fact that there was no cargo to pick up in Costa Rica.

  Every time the Yarmouth weighed anchor and set a course for home, a message would be relayed ordering another detour and change of destination. Garvey seemed determined that as many UNIA celebrants and prospective UNIA members as possible should get to see her. There was a piece of unexpected good fortune in Kingston, Jamaica. The Yarmouth picked up a bonus shipment of 700 to
ns of coconuts, and Captain Cockburn was relieved that the vessel was being returned to more conventional use. By now, she’d been away for several months and when the ship received yet another change to the itinerary, ordering her to Boston, Cockburn objected. It made no sense because he ‘would be passing New York to go to Boston’. Garvey would not demur. ‘Do the best you can,’ he pleaded, ‘because those people there want to see the ship, and the arrangements are made for your coming.’ Cockburn did as he was told. When the Yarmouth finally returned to New York and a hero’s welcome, ‘the coconuts, of course, were rotten’.

  At times, Garvey sounded like an overadoring parent and the Yarmouth his first-born but, in the absence of more orders for cargo to be picked up and delivered, he was anxious to capitalise on her propaganda value. Given the magnitude of the task to rouse the people from their slumber, it was not only tempting but absolutely vital to exploit the Yarmouth for all her worth. ‘Prior to the establishment of the UNIA, it was difficult to get black people to raise capital for entrepreneurial pursuits,’ wrote Raymond Jones. ‘Somewhere between slavery and the twentieth century the system of capital formation, called esusu, characteristic of West African societies and always extant in West Indian societies, something was lost among Negroes in the United States.’36

  Garvey’s ability to loosen their purse strings should not be underestimated. However, he was enormously helped by his good timing. The post-war downturn in the economy was followed in 1919 and 1920 by an economic boom. President Warren Harding was soon to come to power on a ticket promising a return to normality. Harding unashamedly embraced the spirit of the age, of easy credit and get-rich-quick business deals. It was a time of extravagance, of reckless speculation on the stock market that led to a sharp boom and a share-buying craze amongst the population. Shares and commodities were passing hands at a furious rate. Black people were just as infected by the speculation fever and Garvey offered them a timely outlet. He preached a new gospel of success which tied an individual’s financial and spiritual improvement to the elevation of the race: a Garveyite could get rich buying stocks and shares in the Black Star Line, and feel good about it.