Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  Such views were unlikely to endear Garvey to the youngish Trinidadians, George Padmore and C. L. R. James. There was something ‘magic’ about George Padmore, believed his admirers; he’d relentlessly railed against colonialism and had little time for the petitbourgeois sensibilities of Marcus Garvey. He’d been the Communists’ ‘point man’ for the Caribbean but had resigned from the Communist Party in 1933. In his attack on Garvey, George Padmore formed a curious double act with his boyhood friend C. L. R. James, a Marxist intellectual who was just about to publish a book that would make him famous, a history of the slave revolution in St Domingue (Haiti), The Black Jacobins. James and Padmore were especially angered by Garvey’s response to the labour disputes in the Caribbean; throughout 1937, the two men stalked him on Sunday mornings at Speakers’ Corner, and ambushed him with inspired heckling whenever he rose to speak.22

  On his return to London, Garvey rented a home for his family at 53 Talgarth Road, just a few streets away from his office. It was a tall building with four floors. Amy and the children were assigned to the rooms at the top. Garvey also moved in his secretary, who took a room next to his wife; Garvey occupied the second floor with his bedroom and library. For much of the time, Jacques complained that her husband was often distracted and took refuge in his library. 1938 was not a happy year for the Garvey family. Their anxiety mostly centred on the health of the eldest boy, Junior, who, after recovering from measles, contracted rheumatic fever, requiring months of medical care. It was a constant strain to keep the fire going in Junior’s bedroom, and Jacques spent most of her time shuttling up and down the stairs, between the kitchen in the basement and the top floor, providing him with food and hot water. ‘[Garvey] came upstairs almost daily,’ his wife later wrote. ‘From the doorway he would ask how he [Junior] was, or come to the bedside and talk to him for a few minutes; but he was always too busy to stay any time.’ The parents squabbled over the best course of treatment for their son until Garvey reluctantly relented and acceded to the wishes of his wife and the specialists that Junior be hospitalised.

  In the summer of 1938, shortly after Junior had been discharged, Garvey made plans for another trip to Canada, for the annual conference in Toronto. Jacques, who had weathered a year of discomfort and anxiety, seemed to accept the news with her usual stoicism. She was only really concerned about the paltry sum of money that the departing head of the house deemed sufficient: ‘Just before he was to leave, he handed me four sheets of type-written instructions, and told me I was again in charge of the office. Two pounds ten shillings ($10) was for house money and personal needs of the family … balancing the budget was taxing, to say the least of it.’23

  A few weeks after Garvey’s departure, his son’s condition worsened. The rheumatism had affected the joints in his knees. One leg had been taken out of plaster and put in a hip-length woollen sock. The leg had become drawn and needed to be straightened again and replastered. But more than anything, the doctors advised he needed sunshine. The choice was either violet-ray treatment at an orthopaedic home in the south of England or the natural sunshine of the Caribbean. Jacques wrote that in the doctor’s office she was asked, ‘Where is the objector?’ Garvey was in Toronto and so the burden rested with his wife as to whether their son would be ‘allowed to grow up as a cripple’. Amy Jacques’s emotionally charged memory reflects her agony over the decision that she knew instinctively that she was going to take. ‘I sold a diamond ring, booked our passages, and cabled an SOS to my aunt for the balance. I told no one of my plans before sailing.’ Jacques did not send a telegram to her husband. Instead, she left instructions with his secretary, Daisy Whyte. Her jewellery was to be put in a safe, together with the balance of any remaining money and two letters, ‘one containing a statement on the office transactions, the other marked personal, explaining the urgency of Junior’s case’. Daisy Whyte fretted. She was very upset, wrote Jacques, and her biggest concern was: ‘How am I going to tell Mr Garvey?’24

  At the beginning of September, Jacques and sons sailed from the Royal Albert Docks on board the SS Casanare. She would have been aware that she was returning to a country riven with strife. Like Trinidad, Jamaica had exploded in a violent labour dispute. Rioting first broke out amongst plantation workers on the Frome Estate of the West Indies Sugar Company on 29 April. Other workers soon joined the demonstrations, and within a few weeks the whole island seethed with rebellion, with the former UNIA Legionnaire, Sergeant William Grant, at the head of the protests. Grant and the union leader Alexander Bustamante were arrested. By the time Jacques docked in Kingston, British troops had been sent to put down the rebellion and a semblance of peace and order had returned to the island. Her husband was also rumoured to be on board the Casanare and despite the fact that newspapers published the passenger list, hundreds of cheering labourers and Garvey supporters had descended on the harbour to catch a glimpse of their hero. The rumours continued weeks after Jacques’s return. The Gleaner spoke of unknown sources claiming that Garvey was steaming towards Jamaica on one of the CNS liners ‘for the purpose of gathering first-hand data on the labour situation here’.25

  Garvey was actually steaming back to London to discover, when he opened the front door of his home on Talgarth Road, that his family had left him. He was furious but his anger towards his wife was couched in silence. On 8 December, he wrote to his five-year-old son, Julius:

  My dear Chubbie:

  You will find enclosed the sum of One Pound (£1) as a Christmas Gift. You will also receive/two/suits of clothes and a set of books.

  I am surprised not to have found you at home when I returned from Canada, but I know as children you have nothing to do with what happened … If you can get your Grandmother to write to me for you, I shall be glad to keep in touch with you. Anything that you may want [,] write to me and I shall send it for you …

  I shall not be returning to Jamaica and … in case anything happens to me I want you to know that I have opened a Post Office Account at the West Kensington, North End Road W.14, Post Office in your name. On information of anything happening you must then communicate immediately to the Post Office …

  As stated, get your Grannie to write to me for you. Sincerely yours,

  Dad

  Garvey communicated with his sons in this way over the next year, sending pocket money and gifts. His sons wrote back, updating him on their progress at school and, at their mother’s prompting, requesting money for food, school, the movies, books and other essentials. On 11 January Junior asked for an ice-cream bucket and a new bed ‘as Chubbie throws his foot all over my bad leg at night’.26

  Regular correspondence followed and packages with gifts, such as fountain pens and essentials such as a pair of crutches for Junior. Through the boys’ letters and occasional communication with his secretary, Amy Jacques chided her husband over the inconsistency of the payments and for his assumption that she would be cared for by her middle-class relatives.

  On 25 September 1939 Garvey wrote to both of his sons:

  Dear Junior & Chubbie:

  The war has started and things are up-side-down. Hope you are well. I had not sent any money for three weeks. You will find enclosed $12.00 for two weeks money. I will send you balance next week. I received your letter about school. I will send the money next week. Keep good and learn you[r] lessons O.K. I sent fo[ur] books and pen by Reggie also Chubbie’s bag.

  Your Dad

  Marcus Garvey cut a lonely figure in London, pining for his children and fuming over his wife who had abandoned him. He was more isolated than ever before. The war made it doubly difficult for him to keep in touch with the remaining UNIA divisions. But the dribble of funds being sent into the headquarters at Beaumont Crescent could not solely be explained by the war. The UNIA’s membership in the US had dwindled. In October 1939 Garvey’s primary representative in America, James Stewart, wrote a grim report to the chief that catalogued the state of the organisation’s ill-health. In the town of Campbell, Stewart’s
share of the proceeds of the divisional meeting was $1.50 with a cost of $3.00 for making the trip. The Hamilton division was inactive as no competent person could be found to assume local responsibilities. The Cincinnati division was emblematic of all that was presently wrong with the UNIA. Stewart wrote, ‘They don’t seem to be able to separate themselves [from] magicians, candle burners, and number givers and recently I was informed, the hall was closed on Sunday and members went to church.’27 The record of Garvey’s reply to Stewart has not been found.

  ‘The collapse of the [UNIA] empire was sudden and tragic,’ wrote Adam Clayton Powell Snr in the New York Amsterdam News. From the Harlem headquarters of his Abyssinian Baptist church, Reverend Powell observed that no one had been able to galvanise the masses as Garvey had. ‘With Garvey’s exile he became a black Trotsky to the Negro masses. A sincere few tried to carry the UNIA along. [But] the old fire that could only be instilled by Garvey himself was lacking.’ In an echo of W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘Close Ranks’ editorial from the Great War, Powell argued that black nationalism should be set aside temporarily as the greater and more urgent need was for ‘the union of all races against the common enemy of Fascism’. In any case, the reverend concluded, ‘Except for isolated chapters, the UNIA is finished.28

  Even outside the USA, Garvey was virtually spent as a force. The beginning of the war had, as Powell rightly predicted, thrown up more pressing concerns than black redemption. The adoring crowds that had greeted Garvey at Speakers’ Corner had mostly melted away by the end of 1939. They were replaced by jeering Socialists who ridiculed him for his conservatism. A correspondent for the Boston Guardian wrote that ‘his anti-labor bias caused him to be hissed off the platforms of Hyde Park’.

  Amy Ashwood recalled a final chance meeting when, one Sunday morning, she saw Garvey out of the corner of her eye – as she had perhaps done before – but, rather than hurry past, on this occasion she decided to stop and approach him. As Ashwood later recalled she ‘forgot all the bitterness of the years’ that had passed, and walked with him to a nearby café for a cup of tea. Garvey had suffered from bouts of pneumonia and bronchitis during his time in London; he moved slowly but in his presence, she later wrote, ‘I felt for a while the dynamic quality of Marcus … Those little black eyes were still twinkling but on this occasion filled with tears.’ As they sat staring at each other, she imagined them transported to the past: ‘There we were our special version of “Napoleon and Josephine”, [and] I remember hearing Marcus utter in a low calm voice, lines of moving beauty and truth:

  The golden glory of love’s light

  Has never dawned on my way

  My path has always led through night

  To some deserted by way

  But though life’s greatest joy I miss

  There lies a greater strength than this

  I have been worthy of it.29

  Later that afternoon, when Amy Ashwood walked through Hyde Park, she saw Garvey again ‘stooping slightly, bending over his stick’, as he took his place at Speakers’ Corner. He caught sight of his former wife, and immediately ‘drooping shoulders were straightened and he mounted the platform in the manner of the old Liberty Hall days. He tried hard to recapture the power of those days, but alas it was too late … He could no longer carry his listeners; even hecklers got the better of him. The Marcus I was listening to was no longer the “Tiger”, the “Black Moses” … Tears were running from my eyes and I could stay in that place no longer … the old fire had gone.’30

  On 20 January 1940, a sobering letter was circulated to all of the fellow officers and members of the UNIA informing them that their leader was dangerously ill. Marcus Garvey had suffered a stroke that left him paralysed down the right side of his body, impaired his ability to write and cruelly robbed him of his lovely voice. ‘Immediate financial aid must be rushed to him,’ Ethel Collins, the UNIA secretary-general, wrote in a panic from Harlem. ‘We should see to it that Mrs Garvey reaches London as quickly as possible, if she desires to go.’31

  Amy Jacques had no intention of travelling to London. His secretary, Daisy Whyte, offered to nurse Garvey back to health, and when he felt a little brighter, she even ventured to hire a driver who would ferry him through Hyde Park, with Garvey, disguising his disability, waving to members of the public who remembered his orations from Speakers’ Corner. By March 1940, conversely, Garvey’s eldest son, Junior, had made a full recovery. He was able now to walk without crutches and Jacques had his photo taken with Julius and sent it to their father. It had a profound effect on Garvey. His face was rendered passive by the stroke so that the tears when they rolled down his cheeks were all the more disturbing to Daisy Whyte. Garvey insisted on keeping the photo under his pillow and seemed to go into a decline and hardly eat. ‘When the first money came in through the mails,’ Miss Whyte remembered, ‘he ordered me to send them [the boys] two pounds ten shillings which is ridiculous as there are bills to be paid.’32

  On 6 April 1940, Garvey wrote to his eldest son: ‘I am able to say a few words and am feeling a little better.’33

  Not long after that, on Saturday 18 May, Daisy Whyte opened the post for Marcus Garvey. She placed the newspapers in front of him and he scanned the front pages. One in particular caught his eye. The top right-hand corner of the front page of the Chicago Defender carried the most extraordinary headline: ‘Marcus Garvey Dies in London’. The Defender’s London correspondent, George Padmore, had heard the rumour of his passing and had rushed into print with Garvey’s death notice. The news report triggered a rash of further obituaries, telegrams and letters of condolence. Apprised of the falseness of her leader’s premature death, Ethel Collins wrote to Amy Jacques that every paper, including the white papers, had picked up the story and ‘were bur[y]ing him alive’. In the past, when Garvey had been the victim of inaccurate reports, he hadn’t hesitated to sue the culprits, but now he had fallen silent, shocked at the news and the bilious and vitriolic obituaries that were printed. Believing in the reports’ authenticity, UNIA members and admirers of Garvey held memorials in his honour. Daisy Whyte, tried to shield him from the worst obituaries but Garvey insisted on reading them. ‘As he opened all his letters, and cables, he was faced with clippings of his obituary, pictures of himself with deep black borders,’ wrote Daisy. ‘He collapsed in his chair, and could hardly be understood after that.’34

  Marcus Mosiah Garvey died on 10 June 1940. He was fifty-two. Amy Ashwood, along with Sergeant William Grant, had attended a wake held for Garvey at the Kingston division of the UNIA, when his passing was prematurely announced. She had told mourners that Garvey could not be dead because ‘he would not die without contacting me’. The night after Garvey’s actual death, Amy Ashwood had been disturbed by a dream. Garvey beckoned her to come out to the back of the house into the yard: ‘There I saw him on the scaffold[ing] of a big ship driving rivets into its side. After he completed his task, he turned to me and cried out loud, “Build for Africa, work for Africa.”’35

  EPILOGUE

  Alas, when will the happy period arrive that the sons of mortality may greet each other with the joyful news, that sin, pain, sorrow and death are no more … We will see the myriads descended from the Ark, the patriarchs, sages, prophets and heroes.

  We will mingle with them and untwist the vast chain of blessed Providence.

  Ignatius Sancho, Letters of Ignatius Sancho 1777

  Marcus Garvey was buried in a vault in the catacombs of St Mary’s Catholic Church in Kensal Green, west London. But surely Garvey could not be dead – so believed his most ardent supporters. To them, the obituaries – for the most part unflattering – that appeared in newspapers throughout the world were the culmination of a concerted conspiracy to destroy the movement once and for all. The previous, erroneous reports of Garvey’s passing had reinforced that perception. Even though a photograph was taken of Garvey in a lead-lined oak coffin, which was then distributed throughout UNIA divisions and other parts of the Negro world, it failed
to convince some of Garvey’s devotees.

  The second round of wakes and memorials was staged in cities where support for Garvey was still strong; markedly so in Kingston and New Orleans. But perhaps the most elaborate ceremony took place in Harlem where members planned a procession through the streets to the memorial service, carrying a huge photograph of Garvey, escorted by uniformed members of the African Legion, and followed by the congregation and choirs.1

  Later in the year, disbelief gave way to anger amongst friends and supporters of the dead leader, some of whom considered George Padmore’s original obituary of Garvey to have been printed maliciously. On 18 August 1940, his widow, Amy Jacques’s opening address to the UNIA conference was a mournful wail: ‘Reporter! Newspaper Editors and Mud-slingers! You have killed him!’ Ethel Collins recalled that indignant UNIA members had urged that they ‘should not let [Padmore] the originator of this lie go free’. Marcus Garvey’s death notices, they all concluded, had killed him.2

  The UNIA leader had been spared a pauper’s funeral but it had been an undignified end to such a momentous life. Garvey’s secretary, Daisy Whyte, reported that it had been his ‘last request to have his body brought back to Jamaica’. However, the turmoil caused by the Second World War effectively ruled out that possibility, and thereafter an ugly and unseemly spat developed between the two Mrs Garveys who fought over his corpse. On 16 February 1946, under the heading ‘British Court Gets Contest Between Wives’, the Chicago Defender sought to explain to its bemused readers that Ashwood was suing Jacques for the rights to the body.

  At the heart of the dispute between the two Amys was the continuing legal wrangle over who was the ‘real’ Mrs Garvey. Both Amy Jacques and Amy Ashwood laid claim to the title ‘widow of Marcus Garvey’, and this, invariably, led to confusion, most memorably so at the fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in northern England in 1945. Amy Ashwood had helped to organise the international gathering, and she found it galling to note Jacques’s presence at the official opening. For her part, Amy Jacques had stifled her objections at that meeting when George Padmore introduced W. E. B. Du Bois as the ‘father of Pan-Africanism’. Such an honour should surely have been shared with her deceased husband, if only posthumously. By now seventy-eight years old, Du Bois was revered for his steadfast championing of Pan-African ideals as much as for his longevity, but the great lightning conductor of the temper of Africans and people of African descent had passed to younger men. A young Gold Coast Nationalist, Kwame Nkrumah, caught the mood of the 200 delegates with defiant Garveyite flashes, promising ‘strong and vigorous action to eradicate [imperialism]’.