The Original Mrs. Garvey
by RHONE FRASER
in Spring 2018
Claes Gabriel, The Haitian Revolution, 2017
Introduction: This is a scene from the first act of the two-act play The Original Mrs. Garvey based on biographies of Amy Ashwood Garvey by Lionel Yard and Tony Martin. The play is a framed narrative based on actual events and, ultimately, a work of fiction. The primary narrative is a conversation that takes place in 1969 Kingston, Jamaica, at the residence of Amy Ashwood Garvey. The narrative is a conversation between OLDER AMY who is Amy Ashwood Garvey in her last month of life, at age 72, and RODNEY, a 27 year-old former University of West Indies student, and locksmith, who has come to the residence of OLDER AMY to install a lock on her door. Most of the play is OLDER AMY narrating her life experience to RODNEY at her kitchen table. YOUNGER AMY, who is Amy Ashwood from ages 14 to 44, acts out what OLDER AMY is narrating to RODNEY as a secondary narrative. Before this scene takes place, LITTLE AMY, who is Amy Ashwood Garvey at age 13, makes a promise to her paternal grandmother to visit her mother's (LITTLE AMY's great grandmother's) place of origin in Africa which is Darban in present-day Ghana. OLDER AMY also tells RODNEY about the first time a young organizer MARCUS GARVEY, then age 27 in 1914, invites her to fulfill his vision to start the Universal Negro Improvement Association (U.N.I.A.). Initially, YOUNGER AMY's mother, MAUDRIANA, who is about 40 years-old, supports the vision of her daughter and Marcus. However later, her mother becomes skeptical about their vision because she thinks Marcus is not making enough money to provide for her, and eventually forbids YOUNGER AMY from seeing MARCUS. MAUDRIANA sends YOUNGER AMY to live in Panama with her father who owns a bakery in downtown Colon. This scene takes place in the bakery in October 1916. Although MAUDRIANA sends YOUNGER AMY to Panama with the intention of separating her from MARCUS, this scene is the first time in the play where, as OLDER AMY narrates, YOUNGER AMY learns the skills she will need to do three things: one, rejoin MARCUS in New York and strengthen the U.N.I.A.; two, navigate a white supremacist world in order to protect dissidents like BOLO and strengthen independence and revolutionary movements across Africa and the Caribbean; three, fulfill her promise to her grandmother to visit her great grandmother's ancestral homeland in Africa. Also in this scene: MR. ASHWOOD who is the father of YOUNGER AMY and about 50; NILDA, a Garveyite printer who speaks only Spanish, also, about 50 years old; MR. NAEGEL is a white Zonian contractor and is about 70; MRS. NAEGEL is the wife of MR. NAEGEL and is about 40. There are WORKERS #1, 2, and 3 who work inside the bakery; and the SOLDIERS #1 and 2 work for MR. NAEGEL.
SCENE THREE
Colon, Panama,
October, 1916.
(YOUNGER AMY picks up the suitcase, walks to the partition, looks at stage left which is now her father’s bakery & luncheonette in Colon, Panama, the summer of 1916. The luncheonette is situated between Paraiso and a settlement called La Cucaracha. She puts her suitcase down, picks up a broom and begins to sweep the luncheonette. NILDA is washing dishes and wiping the counter. BOLO is preparing loaves for sale. MR. NAEGEL is seated at a table stage left, across from his wife MRS. NAEGEL. MR. ASHWOOD shuttles from the counter to the table of the NAEGELS, serving them.)
My mother thought she succeeded in separating me from Marcus. But all over Panama and the Spanish world, his message was reaching the masses. His ideas introduced me to the two most influential Garveyites I ever met.
NILDA: Hola, Senora. Hay papel hoy?
YOUNGER AMY: Is there paper? I have to check later today.
MR. NAEGEL: In order to maximize our trading potential, we have got to keep our operating expenses low.
MR. ASHWOOD: There is no question that is true, sir.
MRS. NAEGEL: Michael, these...these...boo-lah you call them?
MR. ASHWOOD: Yes, ma’am. Bulla. Bulla cakes.
MRS. NAEGEL: These boo-lah cakes are absolutely delicious. My, my, my. You ought to think about a delivery service just for these.
NILDA: Más pasteles, señor?
OLDER AMY: Nilda was a die hard Garveyite who taught me how to deal with backra. She only spoke Spanish and she was a Panamanian example of the Jamaican proverb, ‘play fool fi catch wise.’
MR. ASHWOOD: Thank you, ma’am.
MR. NAEGEL: No, thank you, Nilda. The canal affords us international trade around the globe. To Japan. We can move westward from Panama.
MR. ASHWOOD: Remarkable.
MR. NAEGEL: And eastward from the Ottoman. Well, what is left of it, that is.
OLDER AMY: She knew how to “catch wise” in order to promote the Negro World newspaper.
MR. ASHWOOD: Most certainly, sir.
BOLO: Who is “us,” sir?
MR. NAEGEL: Why, the builders of the canal.
BOLO: The builders of the canal who are paid in gold who don’t have to pay for their child’s education, or those who are paid in silver and who do have to pay for their child’s education?
MR. NAEGEL: Actually those who pay both. Don’t you have plates to wash?
MR. ASHWOOD: Yes, Bolo, Mr. Naegel is a busy man.
(pours MR. NAEGEL tea and smiles at him)
OLDER AMY: I was disappointed in how my father behaved in front of the Zonians. I was glad he introduced me to my African heritage, but I was not glad to see how he cooperated with the English and U.S. imperialist interest in dividing the Colombian people. In creating Panama and catering quite literally to their interests. It hurt my head. My mother could never appreciate how different I saw my father from Marcus. By this time, he sailed to New York. My father played the fool too, but not with a purpose like Marcus, Nilda, and Bolo. It made me yearn for Marcus even more.
MR. NAEGEL: That’s the attitude, Mikey. Helen let’s go.
(rises)
Looks like that one there could use a bit more training. Nilda I’ll see you tonight.
(exits)
MRS. NAEGEL: And remember what I said, Michael. Delivery.
(exits)
NILDA: Necesitamos hablar de nuestros salarios, señor.
MR. ASHWOOD: Look so. Thank you ma’am.
OLDER AMY: My father was not ready for the questions I had about his Zonian customers like the Naegels. But he was ready to let Bolo and Nilda do what they wanted to do when the luncheonette was closed. And when no Zonians were around.
(BOLO and NILDA place stacks of Marcus Garvey’s Negro World newspaper on the counter and on the tables. BOLO moves a newspaper printer to the center of the bakery, while NILDA puts on glasses takes out a pen and notebook. The printer is an early Wharfdale, a cylinder press that requires three workers, one of which is WORKER #1. This worker turned the wheel, BOLO fed the wheel with paper, and WORKER #2 controlled the printed sheet, cutting the sheet, and putting it in a pile for NILDA to read and translate. YOUNGER AMY picks up a dustpan to empty what she’s swept.)
OLDER AMY: Bolo was from Saint Mary, Jamaica. A clandestine Negro World Panama correspondent for years. He was promoted after setting fires to the fields in Limón.
BOLO: We have enough paper that should last us about a month. Andrew, I need you to speed up your output! We’ve got a lot to finish before dawn!
OLDER AMY: And Nilda was seamstress, hostess, and mistress extraordinaire.
NILDA: Bolo tú necesitas poner eso en el papel. El precio de la electricidad y los salarios bajos.
BOLO: I know I need to put that in the paper. The electricity and the low salaries.
NILDA: Y Amy. Veo cómo te comportas alrededor de Neagel. Tienes que aprender a ser mucho más fuerte que eso.
OLDER AMY: She saw how I acted around Naegel. She said I have be much stronger than that. I learned the true meaning of Garveyism in Panama.
YOUNGER AMY: Y cómo lo voy a hacer?
OLDER AMY: I asked her how exactly do I show that kind of strength in front of backra?
NILDA: Viendo en los ojos de los gringos con la fuerza.
OLDER AMY: Look into the eyes of the gringos with force.
NILDA: Recuerda tu poder. Como dijo Garvey, sin nosotros, los europeos no tendrían nada y no sería nada.
(takes the papers and bundles them, then places them at the door of the luncheonette)
Todo lo que tienen proviene de nosotros. Una vez que conocemos nuestro poder, nunca podemos desmoronarnos ante el capital. Nunca.
OLDER AMY: She said ‘remember your power.’ Like Garvey said, without us, the Europeans would have nothing, and be nothing. All that they have comes from us. Once we know our power, we can never crumble before capital. And she practiced her power. She used her nature as a woman to exercise it, and I learned from her how to do the same.
NILDA: En este numero del Mundo Negro, el precio creciente del alquiler para los trabajadores de plata.
(places another bundle of papers at the door)
Pero no para los trabajadores de oro.
OLDER AMY: I remember one night Nilda and Bolo was preparing papers when she announced that the Canal Commission is going to raise the rent for the silver workers. But not for the gold workers. Negro World was the only paper writing about it.
OLDER AMY: Now that I am thinking about them, I never knew any one more serious about spreading the message of Garvey.
BOLO: Price of electricity also gone up. The promises of the Panama Canal are not coming true for us. Rich a get richer, poor a get poorer. Me and Gladstone ready to strike while the iron hot.
YOUNGER AMY: You and who?
BOLO: Gladstone, man. Van Gladstone de Suze. We haffi strike, miss. Fi get rent down or wages up.
OLDER AMY: Bolo was about Garvey’s original plan, which was the dismantling of the United Fruit Company and their mercenaries.
BOLO: Those who work the most earn the least and those who work the least earn the most. It no easy when this work as hard as Culebra cut
(begins tapping out a rhythm that WORKER #1 & #2 follows that he repeats twice, then singing)
Before me work fe bit a day / Me would come out America cut
Dem bawl out ‘O Come out America Cut, O come out America cut /
Tussle and toil, clamor and curse / War is Hell but this is
worse / Those that stay with the cursed ditch / May get a medal
or the dhobie itch. A una!
OLDER AMY: Bolo would sing these incredible work songs. One night he was singing..
NILDA:
(while BOLO is singing, to YOUNGER AMY)
Deja la escoba solo y dejame enseñarte como ser una verdadera bruja. Siga mi ritmo. Uno, dos, tres, cuatro.
(YOUNGER AMY puts the broom down, and NILDA grabs her hand and dances with her.)
OLDER AMY: Leave the broom alone and let me show you how to be a real witch.
NILDA: Tengo Señor Naegel en la palma de mi mano. Sabes que?
YOUNGER AMY:
(puts the broom down)
You have Mr. Naegel in the palm of your hands. Do I know why? No. Why?
NILDA: No solo porque lavo su ropa y tuve a su hijo.
OLDER AMY: Not just because I washed his clothes and had his child.
(NILDA gives papers she has written on to BOLO who, still leading the rhythm he started, gives the papers to WORKER #1 & #2 who reads them and then pick up picket signs to walk around the printer)
NILDA: Pero porque le recorde, él no está en ninguna parte sin mi. El dinero del Canal no esta en ninguna parte sin mi. Uno, dos, tres, cuatro...
OLDER AMY: But because I reminded him, he is nowhere without me. The money from the Canal is nowhere without me. She taught me not only how to dance, but how to move in this colonial world that was being dismantled by the man I loved, Garvey.
NILDA: Amy, tienes este poder porque tu padre. Tengo mi poder no porque Naegel, es de mi gente. La huelga es mañana.
(BOLO, WORKER #1, WORKER #2 repeat Nilda’s last line, return to their stations at the printer and NILDA continues teaching YOUNGER AMY dance)
Uno, dos, tres, cuatro...
OLDER AMY: I have this power because of my father. But her power from Naegel does not come from him, but from her people. I was amazed with how she controlled the strikes. All because of Marcus’s words.
NILDA: El quiere una parte de la hegemonía, pero tú no lo quieres.
OLDER AMY: He wants part of the hegemony, but I don’t.
NILDA: Tu poder que lo tiene puede hacer un cambio asombroso. Uno, dos, tres, cuatro...
OLDER AMY: The power that I have from my father’s business can make an amazing change. Nilda convinced me that my father’s ability to own his business and make a space for my husband’s paper or, who was then my husband, could in fact mean that morality can increase with civilization.
(lights out at the bakery)
RODNEY: So even though you originally debated that morality cannot increase with civilization, you later found that morality can increase with civilization. Before you came to Panama, can you remember if you were intimate with Marcus?
OLDER AMY: Eh-eh! What a faas question. Listen sah, you here to change the locks on the door and not to interrogate my love life. I am not here to be...
RODNEY: I did not mean to offend you. I am just thinking about my daughter, who has questions with her love life and wondered where she was going. Mrs. Garvey I am very concerned. My daughter is in jail and she is not telling me why.
OLDER AMY: Well let me be the lady I am, and volunteer that kind of information, as I choose to volunteer it, and from that I am always willing to help your daughter in whatever situation she is in.
RODNEY: Yes ma’am. My apologies.
OLDER AMY: I remember thinking that color was not the problem of the twentieth century as Du Bois claimed. As in mental condition—that Marcus and I were slowly awakening. When I stopped, I remembered that I recognized one of the workers in my father’s store. A long time ago. As a little girl when I was no more than six or seven.
(SOLDIER #1, formerly WORKER #1, is laying bricks with a spatula on the lower level at center stage of a wall that divides the stage. BOLO enters and climbs the ladder from the lower level to the upper level, but does not have the strength to mount the upper level.)
He must not have been more than thirty. But I remember when my father took me and my brother down to the Gatun Dam. I saw the waterway that connected the Caribbean Sea with the Pacific.
(YOUNGER AMY steps outside of her father’s bakery and looks toward stage right and the audience. A blue light is shining on her and OLDER AMY.)
YOUNGER AMY: And I remembered the Roaring River in Saint Ann’s Bay. In that moment I remembered a message the river gave me when I was with Marcus days before. My mother could not erase our memories.
(A waterfall is heard and a blue light emerges on upper and lower levels, both YOUNGER AMY and OLDER AMY respond to it.)
We were fundraising from churches in Saint Ann’s bay, where he was born...
OLDER AMY: ...and I remember wanting to go inside this church...
YOUNGER AMY: ...but he told me to stay outside, so I did. After he went inside the church...
OLDER AMY: ...the sound of this waterfall at Roaring River got louder and louder as if walls grew up around my body and the only thing I could hear was the falling water...
YOUNGER AMY: I felt like the leaf that fell from the tree, being carried by the tide of human history, up and down...
OLDER AMY: ...left to right...
OLDER AMY: ...Until I reached the final destination of freedom...
OLDER AMY: ...no longer bound by narrow streams of family.
YOUNGER AMY: Of colonialism...
OLDER AMY: ...Of expectations by the husband or by the church...
OLDER AMY: & YOUNGER AMY:
(simultaneously)
I hear the Roaring River. Continue to conquer the world, educate the Negro, and awaken the Negro to its sense of racial insecurity.
YOUNGER AMY:
(begins sweeping the front section of the bakery)
This is what Marcus said we would do. Even if he had to beg and borrow money to drive here. Because he believed in awakening the Negro. But his absence in this moment...
OLDER AMY: ...foreshadowed a longer absence I could not anticipate...but the river said to continue.
YOUNGER AMY: With or without the blessing of my mother, I am going to conquer the world.
OLDER AMY: With or without Marcus, I am going to conquer the world. Do not forget this, Amy. Amy? Please do not crumble in the face of capital, nor any man capital presents. Amy? You hear me?
(YOUNGER AMY does not answer, sweeping)
RODNEY: She’s not listening.
OLDER AMY: She is listening. I was listening. I just didn’t want to listen at that time. It was many years later after I had married Garvey and had been separated and traveled over Europe and returned the Jamaica that I knew what the message was.
YOUNGER AMY: When my father took me to the Canal for the first time, we saw a church and washerwomen who do what Nilda did. I remember seeing this man lay bricks. I will never forget his face. Determined.
OLDER AMY: Hands and arms juggling cement in a circle at a feverish pace with sweat flying from his face.
YOUNGER AMY: Thirty bricks a minute.
OLDER AMY: When I returned a decade later, I walked down to the same dam and saw the huge quay wall he built next to the Dam.
YOUNGER AMY: Enormous.
OLDER AMY: I remember thinking: I wonder where all the fury in that man’s face went.
YOUNGER AMY: Fury, yes.
OLDER AMY: That fury said he was building something more than this wall.
YOUNGER AMY: Like if someone upset him, he would not dynamite the earth but the dam to spite Rockefeller and Woodrow Wilson.
OLDER AMY: But he knew he couldn’t because he would only be hurting the poorest. But the fury of those arms was building more than a wall. They were building a barrier to separate himself from his conscience. From the reality that we are the ones who own this Canal. Because we built it. Not Naegel.
YOUNGER AMY: Not Rockefeller.
OLDER AMY: And not Kaiser. We will not crumble in the face of capital.
(SOLDIER #1 picks up a rifle, now crosses in front of RODNEY and OLDER AMY, climbs the ladder to the upper level)
I saw this man come in my father’s shop, work my father’s printer, but I couldn’t imagine then that he would follow Naegel’s orders to arrest Bolo when Bolo was the one who got him the wage increase. Help feed him, his family. I hate to see our trusted correspondent Bolo get pulled down by this man. This man’s condition caused him to betray Bolo, not his color. Du Bois was wrong.
(SOLDIER #1 wrestles BOLO off of the ladder, BOLO falls off, then crawls on his knees offstage)
This system is set up where one Negro hates to see the other Negro succeed and for that will pull him down every time he attempts to climb and defame him. That is not a function of color but of condition.
(SOLDIER #1 walks to NAEGEL center stage, upper level, where NAEGEL fingers bundles of cash, puts the cash in the back pocket of SOLDIER #1, and pats him on his behind. They both exit to stage right.)
RODNEY: What Shearer did to Rodney.
OLDER AMY: The next day in my father’s business, I saw what Nilda said completely come to pass. My father was in Colombia.
(lights up on the bakery, with YOUNGER AMY sweeping the floor, WORKER #2 helping a customer, BOLO shuttles bread to and from the counter and NILDA writing in a notebook. A customer seats himself at the leftmost table at stage left, where the NAEGELS sat.)
NILDA: Amy tú tienes un cliente.
OLDER AMY: I was with a customer.
YOUNGER AMY: Bienvenidos al Oasis! Welcome to the Oasis!
(puts the broom down and approaches a customer)
OLDER AMY: When suddenly...
(MR. NAEGEL, WORKER #1 now in the role of SOLDIER #1 with helmet and rifle in hand following NAEGEL next to SOLDIER #2 with helmet and rifle)
NAEGEL: Who in the hell ordered the strike!
YOUNGER AMY: What is this?
NAEGEL: I am not the one to waste my time on greetings like these, but I couldn’t believe Mikey could entertain such goons.
YOUNGER AMY: Sir?
NAEGEL: Who in the hell ordered the strike! Where is Mikey?
YOUNGER AMY: My father is away on business.
NAEGEL: Nilda! Who in the hell ordered the strike!
NILDA: Señor, no sé a que huelga te refieres,
(slowly)
pero juro por Dios que te daré una huelga si una huelga es lo que quieres.
OLDER AMY: She stood her ground.
NAEGEL:
(turns from NILDA)
Who in the hell ordered the strike!
(SOLDIER #1 looks over the counter, seeing BOLO then jumps the counter to apprehend him. SOLDIER #2 handcuffs NILDA and all bakery workers except YOUNGER AMY.)
SOLDIER #1
He’s here, commander! He’s the one! Trying to escape through the back door!
(SOLDIER #1 fires, misses, then a tussle is heard. BOLO emerges from the tussle in handcuffs held by SOLDIER #1.)
Right here, commander. He was the one who delivered the newspapers to call the strike. He prints the papers and orders us to distribute him.
NAEGEL: And?
SOLDIER #1: And he caused the strike.
NAEGEL: Well, Mr. Bolo, what do you have to say for yourself?
YOUNGER AMY: Nothing more than what my father would have to say to you, Mr. Naegel about how this invasion with your guns is a clear flagrant violation of his establishment.
NAEGEL: Violation?
OLDER AMY: & YOUNGER AMY:
I said vi-o-la-tion!
YOUNGER AMY: Leave Bolo alone. This man has done nothing except expose the gross injustice and inequality. There would be no Canal without the men of work like Bolo. Fed by my father. Its my father’s food that filled your ungrateful bellies when you were hungry after working on this facety backra’s Canal! Put your fucking guns down!
(SOLDIER #1 & SOLDIER #2 put their guns down and listen.)
Mr. Naegel, you cannot develop what you call a Canal if you cannot develop a relationship with a man who has done strong business, committed business with your workers! You hear me! How dare you charge onto another’s private property without their permission! Especially when you can waste your time on as you say ‘these greetings’ but you can’t clean the shit out of your own house by investigating what makes your own workers so miserable they have to strike.
NAEGEL: I really am not here to argue.
YOUNGER AMY: Then get the fuck out of my father’s business.
NAEGEL: But…
YOUNGER AMY: Now.
(SOLDIERS #1 & #2 lower their guns. NAEGEL gives the orders to turn around and leave. YOUNGER AMY unlocks the handcuffs on the WORKERS that SOLDIERS #1 & #2 placed on them.)
OLDER AMY: I must have spoke with all the frustration of one witnessing how that worker whose name I long forget turned against us. Against everything we were trying to do. All for the lure of money.
RODNEY: So what happened to Bolo? Was he killed?
OLDER AMY: Absolutely not. They put their guns down and left. Because in that moment I looked in the eyes of Naegel. I remembered the strong I-yan will that Grannie Dabas reminded me of. That Nilda reminded me of. The next day Bolo and Gladstone proceeded with their strike. Governor Harding reduced the rent, set up the Silver workers commission, and increased our pay by eleven percent. All because I spared Bolo’s life.
(YOUNGER AMY is seen seated, stage right, writing at a desk)
But what happened to me? Stakes were getting higher and I had to leave Panama.
Rhone Fraser, Ph.D. is an independent scholar whose dissertation included literary analyses of plays by Lorraine Hansberry and Alice Childress. He is a dramatist of five plays, most recently, "The Original Mrs. Garvey" about journalist Amy Ashwood Garvey (1897-1969). He is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the former playwriting student of Leslie Lee (1930-2014), the former artistic director of the Negro Ensemble Company. He is the author of a forthcoming book of literary criticism about playwright and novelist Pauline Hopkins entitled "Pauline Hopkins and Advocacy Journalism," from the University Press of Mississippi in 2019.