by Colin Grant
Negotiations for two more ships were well underway by the spring of 1920. $10,000 was placed as a down payment on the $35,000 steam paddle-ship, SS Shadyside. ‘Hot, isn’t it?’ teased an advert in the Negro World for the steam paddle-ship. New Yorkers need swelter no more intoned the Black Star Line. Its family excursions promised beautiful scenery, cool breezes and entertainment courtesy of the corporation’s brass band, once its latest acquisition started paddling down the Hudson. The fantasy fleet started to feel even more concrete by April, when Garvey was able to report what ‘to the ordinary optimist would seem a miracle’, that the board had also agreed to pay $60,000 for the SS Kanawha – a pleasure yacht which they hoped to convert to commercial use, and which would be launched in a few days.
By June the readers of the Negro World had become familiar with yet another looming landmark in the UNIA’s short history – the greatest convention held by the race that would span the whole of August. A convention fund was naturally launched under the heading, ‘How Much Will You Give to Help Redeem Africa and Thereby Your Own Race?’
BOI agent 800, James Wormley Jones, who’d been promoted to the publicity committee, was so alarmed by the welter of response, he advised his handlers to do all they could to ensure that Garvey was denied a permit for the convention. Sifting through letters, mostly coming from the South, the agent inadvertently highlighted the depth of the emotions Garvey had unleashed, especially among ‘the writers [who] speak of going back home to Africa’. One woman wrote to say she was ‘going to sell her cow and send money to the convention’; another woman travelled all the way up from Oklahoma, ‘seeking news about it so she could travel back and inform people’; a prominent Panamanian businessman ‘arrived [in town] carrying $50 in gold for the convention’. The nervous BOI man cited all three examples as indicating the effectiveness of Garvey’s dangerous propaganda in equating the Black Star Line with Africa.37
Marcus Garvey didn’t have to rely solely on his abilities of promotion. The fierce enthusiasm that his movement generated was increasingly being picked up by mainstream newspapers. The World magazine sent Herbert Seligman, one of its star correspondents, up to Harlem to capture the flavour of excitement emanating from Liberty Hall. Mr Garvey operated ‘at the juncture of mysticism and share-selling’, according to Seligman. ‘To walk into those offices is to enter a fantastic realm in which cash shares and the imminence of destiny strangely commingle.’ The growing cult of Garvey’s personality was impossible to miss: ‘At the centre of those dreams, spinning them like so many webs, writing, travelling across the city to Liberty Hall to exhort huge crowds, and centring himself in the uncertain complexities of the business ventures, is Marcus Garvey, West Indian Negro.’38 Seligman likened his hold over his followers to that of Billy Sunday, the great white evangelist. Hundreds of thousands (Garvey amongst them) flocked to Sunday’s travelling wooden tabernacle and been swayed by his sermons. And, just as during the Great War, the believers heeded Sunday’s invocations to buy war bonds to help defeat the enemy and restore democracy, then so too were Garveyites investing in a new and worthy crusade to restore the fortunes of the despised Negro. The trenchant and amusing insights of the World’s correspondent into the character of the UNIA president ultimately fell short of grasping Garvey’s true appeal. At this stage, at least, Garvey was not proposing a black Zion or a black Socialist utopia. He was making a straight pitch to the petit-bourgeois capitalist instincts of the majority of black folk, who had little to lose, to take a punt on a likely winner.
The small investors who thronged the offices of the UNIA on 135th Street were not so far removed from the punters who daily gave themselves over to the craze of ‘policy’ or ‘the numbers’ – the illegal, semi-underground lottery that had a firm hold over the population of the Negro Metropolis. Playing the numbers was, according to Claude McKay, ‘the most flourishing clandestine industry in Harlem’.39 Anyone could play. It required only nickels and dimes to score a fabulous ‘hit’. Placing a bet for less than the price of a packet of cigarettes might win a smoker the equivalent of a week’s wages. Over the ten years since the policy’s introduction (in 1910) the numbers racket had evolved into a smooth-running gambling system involving scores of operators who criss-crossed Harlem. The winning number was generated from the totals of foreign and domestic sales on the stock market, published daily in the Wall Street Journal (which, judging by the number of Harlemites scouring its pages, appeared to be as popular as the Negro World, New York Age and New York Amsterdam News). A punter might perhaps venture to the local candy or cigar store (fronts for ‘policy’), decide on a number (a date of birth, prison or psalm number) and buy a ticket from the runner who would run to the unofficial bankers (kings and queens) who would pay out to the lucky winner (and collect far more from the losers). Everyone seemed to be playing the numbers in Harlem: the watermelon man, the barber, the pastor and the Garveyite. The bankers, especially if they paid on time and in full, became local celebrities, benevolent ‘kings’ and ‘queens’. Marcus Garvey never played the numbers but the most revered banker, the ‘king of kings’ was the Virgin Islander, Casper Holstein, famed for his patronage of the arts, charities and other good causes, including the UNIA.
Holstein was one of a handful of black notables who helped in the 1920s to kick-start the Harlem Renaissance – an artistic flowering that saw such dazzling writers and performers as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Paul Robeson drawn to the Negro Metropolis. Holstein’s money was welcome; the man was not. He was never invited into the respectable parlours of the patrons of the talented tenth who either bank-rolled the Harlem Renaissance themselves or introduced the artistes to willing Negrophilic benefactors such as Charlotte Osgood Mason.
A fondness for artistic endeavour did not excuse the ‘policy’ kingpin’s degrading influence on Negro life: to the midwives of the Renaissance, Casper Holstein was ultimately an unsavoury gangster – more notorious than notable. Marcus Garvey was not so judgemental. Whilst Holstein’s pecuniary contributions might have caused some discomfort amongst the organisation’s inner circle – even though his dollars did not figure in the official UNIA accounts – he remained, as far as its president was concerned, a valued supporter of the movement. Garvey even invited him to write an occasional column for the Negro World in which he lambasted the USA over its stewardship of his native Virgin Islands. If, as Eric Walrond wrote, ‘amongst [the Virgin Islanders] Holstein was considered a messiah’, then it was mostly as a result of his largesse. Marcus Garvey spoke to the same demographic constituency. Both he and Holstein were of the street: there was a correlation between the rise of each – though comparatively Garvey’s trajectory was far more spectacular. Walrond may have been right about Holstein’s standing amongst the common people. But for every admirer of ‘Holstein the Messiah’, there were a hundred candidates who’d propose that in Marcus Garvey the Negro had finally found the true Moses after so many false and failed impersonators.
Amy Ashwood was coming to believe that the extraordinary dedication of Garvey and the degree of devotion he inspired was beginning to unbalance her new husband. ‘In the full glare of the limelight the Marcus Garvey I knew receded into the shadows,’ she later wrote in her memoir. ‘The public figure Garvey took his place.’ Neither man nor wife had much privacy. They continued to live amongst the debris of wedding gifts in Amy Ashwood’s cramped apartment. Her father had moved out and was almost straight away replaced by her brother, Claudius, along with a friend. Somehow the newly-weds still found space to provide a room for the maid of honour and Garvey’s personal secretary, Amy Jacques. Though crowded, the apartment was still big enough to accommodate them all, and in any case, the extra source of income would help with the expense of the rent. But Ashwood soon began to complain that her husband seemed to pay more attention to his secretary than his wife. Their intimacy was ‘open and manifest and almost brazenly flaunted’.40 When disputes arose in the household, wrote Ashwood, Garvey invariably sided
with his secretary. Her husband seemed to spend more and more time away from the apartment, and would often not return until two o’clock in the morning and sometimes not at all. Marcus Garvey had kept his bachelor’s furnished room, and in the early hours, when there was still no sign of him, Amy Ashwood would hail a taxi and rush over to it, only to discover he hadn’t slept there either. Frequently now, after many an embarrassing and frustrating hunt of all the rooming houses and boarding houses in Harlem, she still wouldn’t be able to find her husband.41
The first months of marriage had been a return to the tempestuous and fractious tenor of their New York reunion two years previously. Garvey’s grievances against his wife stemmed from her refusal to mould her behaviour in a manner befitting the wife of a leader of the masses. Ashwood saw no reason to curb her drinking: it was not to excess. Neither did she consider it inappropriate to spend time in the company of male friends. The UNIA leader was not amused by the irony of the contrast between his strong-armed control of an organisation, now estimated (by him) in the hundreds of thousands, and his inability to exert any reasonable influence over his wife.
The apartment was a crucible of disaffection. Garvey, who now went for days without speaking to his wife, sought counsel from his secretary who, when pressed, told her boss that Ashwood had confided that she was still in written communication with Cumberbatch, her paramour from Panama. Amy Ashwood came to believe that her husband had a rigid understanding of the expectations of a wife; he had transplanted that conservative idea from Jamaica to America where the modern concept of marriage allowed for greater latitude: within reason a wife might lead a life that was not wholeheartedly dependent on her husband for fulfilment. The very qualities that had attracted Marcus Garvey to his wife seemed suddenly and peculiarly to repel him. In Miss Sarah Jack, Of Spanish Town, Jamaica, the English novelist Anthony Trollope painted a wry account of Jamaican social mores: ‘Flirting is an institution in the West Indies,’ mused Trollope, ‘practised by all young ladies, and laid aside by them when they marry.’ Ashwood’s crime, in her husband’s eyes, was that she continued to flirt, even if harmlessly. Garvey would later complain that Ashwood was ‘trying to return to the life [he] sought to reclaim her from’. His unease coincided with a certain wariness about the smart-suited ‘fashion plates’ that were increasingly coming into the organisation and securing the kind of well-paid position previously unimaginable to them. One of these fellows, Garvey later recalled, ‘had all the women around and [to] my surprise after a while, he also had under his influence my wife’.42
Garvey summoned his secretary and Henrietta Vinton Davis, ostensibly to ask for their guidance and advice about his wife’s behaviour. But essentially he had already come to an unflattering conclusion about her merits as a wife, and was edging towards a final, irreversible decision. Of that period, Jacques wrote that Garvey weighed in the balance the two poles of life with Ashwood which could either be ‘wrecked because of her conduct or embellished by her deportment’.43 Amy Ashwood had the kind of infectious personality that drew people towards her, but, as Garvey reflected, instead of doubt and suspicions being allayed, his spirit darkened – culminating in a late winter evening when he thought he’d caught his wife in compromising circumstances.
Garvey burst into the apartment and found her taking tea with a gentleman caller who was perched on the arm of the sofa. Amy Ashwood protested her innocence. As she remarked to Mariamne Samad decades later, ‘with china cup in one hand and a sandwich in the other, I can’t imagine what I was supposed to have been guilty of’.44 Nonetheless, the descent of their marriage accelerated thereafter. Garvey continued to rage over her drinking which, though consisting of a physician’s prescription for light wine and eggs, she failed to convince him was medicinal. Ashwood was pregnant – news that she prudently kept to herself. As Garvey had withdrawn his ‘husband’s favours’ in January, if the pregnancy went to full term and she delivered a child, it is most unlikely that Garvey would have proven to be the father. The anxiety over her semi-detached spouse was compounded by his lack of regard for her feelings of nervousness and nausea. The private Garvey had no time for domesticity. Rare occasions of intimacy soon boiled over into arguments that seemed to continue, in his absence, with her former maid of honour. When Amy Jacques had had her fill of quarrelling she moved out of the apartment; Garvey immediately packed up and did the same. Amy Ashwood did not stay brooding in the apartment; she searched for Amy Jacques and pleaded with her, eventually persuading her to move back in. That seemed to act as the catalyst to Garvey’s own return a few days later. Return did not lead to rehabilitation. After a brief respite, their rancour rose and fell repeatedly with the sun and moon, leading, inexorably, to a final reprise of abandonment. Later, Amy Ashwood was to suffer a miscarriage but Garvey’s stance towards her was not softened sufficiently for him to draw back from the decision to start proceedings for an annulment. Their marriage had lasted a little over three months. The UNIA president took both Amy Jacques and Henrietta Vinton Davis into his confidence before making his decision known in public. He was concerned about the negative publicity that would ensue and perhaps how Ashwood’s exclusion might impact on the smooth running of the UNIA. But, in the final analysis, Garvey considered his young bride a liability and she had to go. One of the key officers of the UNIA at this time was Reverend Weston and he recalled that when the separation occurred, it was a huge blow to the entire movement. Ashwood had been a fantastic galvanising force within the UNIA, so the breach was not just a marital separation: ‘People loved, loved Amy Ashwood. They were entranced by her manner and personality, and her departure was the first great split in the movement.’45 Garvey’s rejection of his wife would not be reversed. Thereafter he refrained from communicating with her, save for instructions to his lawyers. He first requested an annulment, claiming that Ashwood had used ‘fraud and concealment’ to induce him to marry her and that she was guilty of adultery. Though no ‘correspondent’ was named at this stage, Garvey furnished the court with evidence of Ashwood’s previous sexual indiscretions. Ashwood herself provided him with the ammunition. In a tearful letter, pleading for their marriage to be saved she had written:
‘I would have given up long ago, but you gave me hope and caused me to live, when I nearly fell in the estimation of the whole world. I have not forgotten Marcus, but you said to me then, and these were your exact words: “Amy, I will marry you if the baby is not even mine.”’
Amy Ashwood launched a counter-claim that she was blameless and that her husband had abandoned her, leaving her destitute and without means even to provide shelter for herself. Amy Ashwood asked the court to award her $75 per week alimony but Garvey told the bench that he only earned $25 per week; that he worked sixteen hours a day and was on the road practically all the time raising funds. He paid $96 per month for his rent, was saddled with debts of several thousand dollars to the Harlem Furniture Company and $700 to the Bloomingdale company for the purchase of a grand piano. It was galling that whilst he lived frugally on cheese and crackers, Amy Ashwood ‘attended upon the theatres two or three times per week, and goes in expensive style as though she had the income of a millionaire’. The court eventually settled on alimony of $12 per week but whilst Garvey might have considered that he’d won a moral victory, his desire for a divorce had not been granted – for now. Court proceedings between the two would rumble on for another two years before Garvey, having satisfied legal requirements by establishing a temporary residence in Missouri, secured a contentious divorce in Jackson County (later legally challenged by Ashwood) in the summer of 1922. Amy Ashwood would always maintain (right up to her death in 1969) that she was still married to Marcus Garvey.
The young, now separated, wife blamed her maid of honour, Amy Jacques, in part for the gulf between her and her husband. Though there was no hint of impropriety between the UNIA leader and his personal secretary, Garvey’s subsequent dealings introduced an element of doubt, at least in the mind of his spurned
wife; Amy Ashwood believed she had been manoeuvred out of the way to make room for Amy Jacques.
As spring blossomed in Harlem, Garvey was determined to order his personal life to blend even more seamlessly with the needs of the organisation. To that end, he summoned Henrietta Vinton Davis and Amy Jacques once again to discuss an unusual proposition. Garvey had moved into another apartment on 129th Street and now invited both women to share the accommodation with him. Such an arrangement would run counter to the current social conventions – not quite rising to the red-heat that might tip it into a scandal, but tepid enough to set tongues loose. Garvey was prepared to take the risk. Embarking on this next important phase of the organisation’s development, he made a clear-eyed calculation of the need for the loyalty, comradeship and proximity of Jacques and Davis in his life. The women accepted. As well as holding important positions that were integral to the operations of the UNIA, Jacques and Davis were content to keep house for their leader. Neither appeared to agonise over the decision. Jacques gave the disarmingly simple explanation that by walking home together, they ‘would be better protected at nights coming from meetings’.
By the middle of June, not only had Garvey banished his wife, he had also rid himself of any residue of sentimental thoughts of his father. Garvey Senior died on 9 April 1920. The old man had spent the last few years of his life in a poor people’s almshouse in St Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. The son’s resentment of his father still ran high in his veins. He would meet the minimum requirement and pay for his father’s funeral but he stubbornly refused to foot the bill (when a summons was taken out on him) from the almshouse because ‘his father had done nothing for him’.46