by Colin Grant
By the age of twelve, Marcus had developed a talent to amuse his peers and irritate his sixty-two-year-old father. Wife- and child-beating were commonplace on the island among the peasant and artisan classes. Mr Garvey did not depart from the script of Jamaican fathers’ conventional approach to the imparting of wisdom and lessons to their sons, succinctly characterised by the local expression ‘if you can’t learn you will feel [the consequences]’. He was an intolerant and punitive husband and father. His self-righteous indulgence in the brutality of fact was aptly demonstrated when his young son Marcus and his idle, semi-delinquent gang were arrested after they were seen throwing stones that broke all of the windows in the local Wesleyan church. The boys were brought before the Juvenile Court on a charge of wilful destruction. Amy Ashwood recalled that when Marcus was found guilty, the magistrate turned to his father and gave him two options: he could either pay a fine of £1 or the boy would be imprisoned. ‘In his wrath, [Mr Garvey] wiped his hands of his son and urged the Bench to send his son to a reformatory,’ said Ashwood. Despite pleas from his wife Sarah, Garvey senior would not relent. The brutal fact was that the boy had broken the law and he, not the father, should suffer. Marcus was only spared imprisonment when Sarah ‘came forward and promised to pay the fine out of savings she could ill afford’.12
The incident strained relations between father and son. Even if Marcus Garvey had been able to move away mentally from such an act of paternal betrayal, there were other examples of brutality that would be stored up for adulthood. Perhaps the most bizarre took place under a backdrop of a seemingly tender moment of maturing co-operation. Mr Garvey had been commissioned to build a vault by a wealthy landowner whose son had died from pneumonia, and he asked the adolescent Marcus to help. After several hours down in the vault, digging, shovelling and pounding, it was time for a lunch break. Mr Garvey proceeded up the ladder, and immediately pulled it up, leaving Marcus in the unfinished vault, ignoring his tearful protests. After several hours Marcus fell asleep, and in a half-reverie imagined that he saw the dead man peering down on him. When Mr Garvey eventually woke his son and rescued him from the vault, he explained that he’d given Marcus a valuable lesson in conquering fear. In later life, Marcus Garvey recounted this story when seeking to explain his fearlessness. However, it is hard to imagine the experience inducing anything other than the opposite effect.
Garvey junior took refuge in the company of his maternal uncle, Joseph Richards, working on his small 50-acre farm. The turn of the twentieth century had brought a huge expansion in the number of peasant farmers. The vast majority of the more than 100,000 in Jamaica carved out a subsistence existence on smallholdings of 5 acres or less, growing fruit and vegetables for their own households and selling bananas, coffee and pimento. The bottom had dropped out of the sugar market soon after the emancipation of the enslaved in 1834. Even if it had been viable, few Jamaicans of African descent would have relished turning their land over to a crop that was associated with the brutalities of slavery on the plantations. This was much to the chagrin of the essayist, Thomas Carlyle, who equated the former slaves’ abandonment of the plantations as a sign of indolence. The archetypal Jamaican ‘Quashee’, Carlyle believed, was ‘sunk up to the ears in pumpkins, imbibing sweet pulps and juices … while the sugar crops rot round them uncut, because labor cannot be hired’.13 The actual model for such a description was hard to find and certainly did not fit Joseph Richards.
To the adolescent Marcus, Uncle Joseph (‘Ba Joe’) was the picture of benevolence. He was a hard-working Christian whom Garvey fondly remembered: ‘between his Bible and his [hoe] you could not separate him’. The land in the ‘Garden Parish’ was particularly fertile and Uncle Joseph prospered: ‘one farm brought him an income of about £100 per year. He was expanding and he was intelligent and he was able to educate me because my father would not do it. I helped to keep his books and so at the week end I got a commission of 13/- for selling bananas.’14 It might have been small change but it was income that would soon be necessary to bolster the family coffers.
Garvey senior’s miserliness had ultimately tripped him up. From early adulthood Malchus Garvey had regularly received a journal from a publisher, on the assumption that the subscription was a gift. Decades later, when the publisher died, the executors of his estate sent Mr Garvey an unexpected bill for twenty years’ supply of the newspaper. Incensed, he withheld the back payment of £30; he was sued by the creditors, contested and lost the case. Even so he stubbornly refused to pay; he was penalised and one of the family’s properties was attached to the court to meet the costs. It was a pattern that would be played out with increasing regularity. Cussed bloody-mindedness led to a series of petty disputes with neighbours over land boundaries and property rights. The arguments escalated quickly and culminated in litigation which Malchus seemed to specialise in losing, so that little by little, in a series of court rulings, the Garveys saw all of their plots of land disappear until they were left with just the rump few acres where the family home stood. Perhaps not surprisingly, Mr Garvey’s spirit darkened thereafter. His withdrawal was now more pronounced, typically characterised by a locked-jaw retreat behind a bolted door to fester in his library, burning his kerosene lamp long into the night. In an attempt at autobiography some years later, Garvey recalled, ‘My father was a man of brilliant intellect and dashing courage. He was unafraid of consequences. He took human chances in the course of life, as most bold men do, and failed at the close of his career.’15
The lesson would be well learnt. Garvey senior’s recklessness had succeeded in depleting the family fortunes beyond penury. His recourse then was to abandon his wife, leaving his adolescent son to provide for her and his elder sister, Indiana, when he was just fourteen.
Uncle Joseph was in no position to help. He leased his farmland from the wealthy land-owning Pratt family in Mammee Bay. In line with the precarious fortunes of tenant farmers reliant on the benevolence of their landlords, Joseph Richards had, after he’d ‘cleaned and cultivated’ the 50 acres, been forced off the land at the landlord’s whim. Edward Carol Pratt had other designs on Richards’ leased acres. Cattle were to be given preference over people. The shock of losing his home and livelihood induced a kind of catatonia, draining Garvey’s uncle of all his resourcefulness. Even the strength of his Christian faith and his profound sense of vocation towards his stewardship of the Laurinston Presbyterian Church, could not help. Marcus Garvey would later write with aching tenderness about the injustice of ‘Ba Joe’s’ loss which so broke his uncle’s spirit that he never recovered.16
It was at about this time that Garvey recorded yet another emotional blow in a scene reminiscent of his future rival William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s early brush with the colour line. Garvey was friendly with Reverend Lightbourn’s daughter; though she was white and he black, they had played throughout childhood with no regard for the difference of their races. All that changed when the girl reached fourteen. She informed him that she would be leaving shortly to continue her education in Scotland, and that, though there was every possibility that she would return to the island later, her departure marked the end of their friendship. Garvey was perplexed as to why this should be; when he pressed her for an explanation, she confessed that the decision had been made for her by her father. The minister had instructed his daughter that ‘she was never to write or try to get in touch with me, for I was a “nigger”.’ As told by Garvey, it had never occurred to him before that he was such a thing.17
St Ann’s Bay was a seaside town of 2,000 souls. Marcus and Isaac both attended the local church school until they were fourteen. Lack of finances meant that further education was not an option. The teenage Garvey bemoaned the cultural climate in which peasant families believed there was ‘nothing practical to be gained by irrelevant brainwork. After all, one was slated to be a cowhand or labourer, a blacksmith or shoe-maker.’18 Even so, in 1901, he gratefully accepted the offer of an apprenticeship to a local printer, Alf
red ‘Cap’ Burrowes. Apprenticeships were much sought after and rarely attained; fortunate boys of Garvey’s class would normally have had to pass a trade scholarship examination set by the government. But Alfred Burrowes was a friend of the family and saw himself as acting in the role of the boy’s godfather. So, whenever the young apprentice asked for an increase in his wages he was wryly reminded of his debt of gratitude towards his godfather. The learning of a trade was, surely, more valuable than any pecuniary considerations. Garvey was a conscientious and enthusiastic student; he experienced all aspects of printing and seemed to have a special talent for the art of the compositor. Although he learnt quickly, he was always restless and harboured greater ambitions than his immediate prospects seemed to warrant, remembered Isaac Rose. Even now Garvey was beginning to frame a picture of himself that was bigger than his surroundings.
‘Marcus Garvey was a fellow like this: all the time when I meet him he wear jacket and every time, his two jacket pockets full of paper,’ Isaac Rose recalled. He was forever ‘reading and telling us things that happen all over the world. Him know I don’t know but him telling us. He was very interested in world affairs.’ So with a jacket packed full of papers adorning his proud shoulders, and with his nose constantly in a book, Garvey ambled round the town square as if he were an undergraduate in the quad of an imaginary university, offering worldly tutorials to his bemused peers. Though they sometimes exchanged blows, Isaac Rose was clearly enamoured with Marcus Garvey. For the want of a better idea, Rose found himself shadowing Garvey as he edged ever more away from the countryside.19
Two years later in 1904, Garvey jumped at the chance to relocate to the town of Port Maria where Alfred Burrowes had set up another branch of his print works. Setting off in the morning from St Ann’s Bay, Garvey would have travelled along a coastal route and, depending on the serviceability of the horse and cart and the quality of the red clay road, might have reached the self-important town of Port Maria by nightfall. Only 25 miles away, Port Maria (though smaller than St Ann’s Bay) prided itself on being a key centre of operation for the United Fruit Company. It even boasted secure phone connections to Boston. Adding to the glamour were the numerous ships, their foreign flags snapping in the wind, that plied the harbour; conches sounded excitedly whenever an empty banana boat came in, summoning the loaders from the hills, who swarmed down to the wharves. They worked through day and night, ‘carry-go and bring-come’, loading the bananas until the ships, pregnant with their precious perishable cargo, departed. As well as serving the North American market there were fortnightly trips to England with the bananas kept cool and delayed from ripening on specially refrigerated ships. But no amount of big-city pretensions could disguise the provincial feel of the town. Marcus Garvey hungered for the excitement of a metropolitan centre, but it would take another year before the country boy could save up enough money to try his luck in the capital. Promising to send for his mother once he’d secured a good enough job and established himself, he moved to Kingston.
Garvey headed for the busy market district of Smith Village, where he boarded with the family of Thaddeus McCormack (a tailor who was to become a lifelong friend of Garvey) at 13 Pink Lane; he occupied a tiny room, attached to the main house, which, had the family been able to afford it, would have been set aside for a servant. Though the McCormacks aspired to a life commensurate with the educated classes, they actually lived in an impoverished working-class district. Residents had asked the council to provide gas lamps for the streets and concrete drains; and on 25 September 1905 their request, along with the general state of affairs in Smith Village, was discussed at the regular fortnightly meeting of Kingston City councillors. Rising to his feet, Councillor Davis complained that he ‘had occasion to drive through the district [of Smith Village] recently and on occasion the sanitation was absolutely disgraceful … If an epidemic broke out … the people of the village would die like rotten sheep.’ Mr Davis warned his fellow councillors that the situation was urgent as yellow fever was so close to the city’s borders. ‘But,’ countered the Mayor coolly, ‘where is the money to come from?’ And in any case, he reminded Councillor Davis, ‘that class of people don’t get Yellow Fever’. On the same page as the report of that meeting, the Daily Gleaner carried an advert aimed at the paper’s more affluent readers: ‘A Parisian Social Event is often a failure for the want of discretion of the hostess in the choice of perfume. No mistake, however, can be made or offence caused if “Rigand’s White Violet” is selected which is the most grateful and delicate flower perfume.’20
But it was the advert for the popular ‘Stearn’s Electric Rat and Roach Paste’ which would more likely have caught the eye of residents of Smith Village. Garvey had only to venture a few yards from Pink Lane to witness the local constabulary handing out fines and making arrests for soliciting, vagrancy, loitering and indecent language. Smith Village was also known as a perfect hangout for a hard core of criminals and for God. Garvey’s neighbours at number 25 had been particularly vexed by the noisy incantations to the Almighty round the corner on Beeston Street. The swell of singing and preaching from the local revivalist church had recently earned the pastor an audience with the courts. As reported in the Gleaner the plaintiff at 25 Pink Lane had been driven to the peak of distraction by ‘about twenty people in the [pastor’s] house who indulged in yelling, clapping their hands, stamping their feet and moving their bodies to tunes in a vulgar way’. Their numbers had swelled, complained the neighbour, after a recruiting drive heralded by the beating of drums, tambourines and blowing of horns, netted ‘a crowd of the unwashed’, recent arrivals to the area. The great drift of migrant workers from the countryside to the town had surged amid rumours that United Fruit, one of the island’s largest employers, planned severe cuts to its workforce. Anxious labourers descended on Kingston in search of work. In the poorest districts, like Smith Village, accommodation was just about affordable. Once there, unlucky job-seekers joined the ranks of the yard-boys who idled away their under-employed hours in yards, occasionally attending to their teeth with toothpicks or, when particularly energised, swatting mosquitoes.
Garvey was more fortunate. Brandishing a note of recommendation from ‘Cap’ Burrowes, Garvey soon found work at the printing division of P. A. Benjamin Manufacturing Co. – a job that, while not guaranteeing him clean fingernails, came with the expectation that he would wear a suit. It might not have attracted the awe and reverence the black population held for even the humblest white-collar position, but he was surely on his way. By the age of eighteen Garvey said that he had already begun to feel ‘a yearning for service of some kind, because of [my] training in the first government – government in the family home’.21
At five feet and seven inches, Marcus Garvey was not particularly short. He had a broad chest, an overall stocky build, and a head that was slightly too large for the rest of his body; he did not have the kind of stature that would make him stand out from the crowd. Garvey’s eyes, though, were what people most often commented on. Resembling the stone from the fruit of an ackee, very dark, almost black, but sparkly and intelligent, they were said to explain his decisiveness of thought and action. Having caught the attention of his employer, Garvey advanced rapidly, promoted through the lower orders to the unprecedented position of foreman – a post which had, until then, been reserved for Englishmen. Jamaica lacked the facilities for training artisans and engineers locally, and industry was therefore dependent on foreign technical know-how. Hence the English foremen, shipped over as prized specimens from the motherland.
Life for the majority of Jamaicans was not so promising. The aftermath of the quake brought in an unpleasant and uncertain new order. Physical and social aftershocks were still being felt as late as April. Amidst the rampant looting and subsequent curfews the city teetered on the edge of economic collapse. As a result, businesses dismissed workers and enforced lower wages. Commonly, managers employed baton-wielding thugs to settle disputes with labourers who had the te
merity to ask for more; not far removed from the way overseers were used to subjugate plantation workers in slavery days, the memory of which was built into the cultural DNA of the island. Garvey loved an argument. By his own admission ‘strong and manly’, he was already garnering a local reputation of thrusting himself uninvited into volatile environments and, according to his fans, with a verbal talent to resolve conflicts. His handling of a local henchman of the employers, Tom Prang, a renowned waterfront bruiser, served as further encouragement. ‘Tom Prang was a big fat fellow,’ recalled Isaac Rose. ‘When any of the waterfront workers went to speak hard to the managers, the employers would get Tom Prang to beat them.’ One day Garvey confronted Prang and asked, ‘Did he think any white man would [ever] beat him friend for a nigger?’ Soon after Prang slunk out of town, and headed north to Montego Bay and obscurity.22
In 1908, Isaac Rose left Kingston to go back to St Ann’s Bay. A return to the north coast, to the simplicity and beauty of the ‘green parish’ of St Ann’s, was something that Garvey’s mother, Sarah Jane, also pined for after the quake, with greater intensity than when she had first been lured to the metropolis by her son. Going back would have made practical sense: town (Kingston) was rough and unrelenting. Sarah Richards left little trace of her time in the capital. She lived there for over a year but the tiny room on Pink Lane would have been too small to accommodate Garvey’s mother and sister. In Kingston both Sarah and her daughter, Indiana, struggled to find regular employment in a city saturated with domestic servants. Their life was harsh. At least in the country, when times were difficult and money hard to come by, you could go to your plot of land and reap the yam, cassava and callallo you’d planted the season before, or you could place your pan or basket at the end of the roaring river and when the river ‘come down’ catch the janga, snappers and crayfish. In town there was no outlet for poverty; people lived on top of each other in diminishing prospects. Not so for Marcus Garvey. Sarah’s son had great expectations at P. A. Benjamin’s. The pay, though modest, was reasonable.
