Read an exclusive extract from the groundbreaking history of the BBC’s first Black woman radio broadcaster by June Sarpong and Jennifer Obidike, Calling Una Marson, out now!
CHAPTER 1
When Kingston Beckons
Kingston, Jamaica, May 1928
‘This is the age of woman,’ Una Marson declared. ‘What man has done … what man has done …’ She sucked her teeth, exasperated, her supple mind whirring a mile a minute, even after a full day’s work. Joining the after-work flow of passers-by on the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, she began to mentally draft the first editorial letter to the readers of her soon-to-be-launched magazine, The Cosmopolitan: A Monthly for the Business Youth of Jamaica and the Official Organ of the Stenographers’ Association. But Una’s rumbling stomach and the tropical heat made her thoughts stutter and start as she assembled the magazine’s objectives in her mind.
A swell of young people filed rank alongside her, smartly dressed as though they were in London in the summer. They were black and white and every shade in between, walking the pristine streets among tall buildings and through colonnades, or travelling by bus or tramcar to pop into the shops of some of the city’s main avenues: King Street, Orange Street and Harbour Street. A white-suited crossing guard stood in the middle of a palm-lined avenue, directing horse-drawn buggies and Ford Motor cars. Outside the business centre sat Victoria Park with its large beds of red and yellow canna in full bloom, poinciana trees ablaze with crimson blossoms, cassia trees laden with bunches of yellow blossoms like thick clusters of gold, and manicured grass plots.
Dark-skinned market women could be seen taking their posts at market, although it was not yet time to carry in baskets of mangoes from the outskirts of the city. Una often wondered how they made the load they carried look so light and effortless, ‘their feet bare, their heads bound with brightly colourful bandanas’. She looked forward to August, when she could tuck into a juicy mango. For now, their trees would be sprouting new leaves, ‘a kind of sulphur brown as if they had been singed by fire’. Boats and steamships from all over the world docked in the natural harbour, vessels from the United States, Panama, Cuba, Canada, South America, Germany and Britain – their flags swaying in the wind, as the ships ushered goods and people to and from the port, smaller fishing boats bobbing beside them. The homes of the elite could be found near the harbour, where the forest-laden Blue Mountains rose hazily in the distance, blowing their cool air onto the city, their peaks shrouded in mist.
Una began mentally rehearsing her editor’s letter again: ‘This is the age of woman, what man has done … what man has done …’ Among this burgeoning metropolis, the shadow of the country’s brutal colonial history, and the class and race structures that descended from it, loomed large. As Una left her office on King Street, she made her way to a meeting of the Stenographers’ Association, a collective of middle-class professional secretaries and typists, of which Una was general secretary and treasurer.
She stopped at a nearby shop for patties wrapped in paper, and as she bit into the crust, the flavours of the curried beef spoke of the influences that characterised the history of the island so well – the patty itself deriving from the Cornish pasty of Britain, the spices from India, the cayenne from Africa, and Jamaica’s own Scotch bonnet chilli, grown from fertile yet exploited lands.
Only a hundred years ago, African slaves would have populated these streets for the weekly Sunday market – a time to gather and to find what little joy they had. The streets would have heaved with pandemonium amidst thousands of people, pigs, goats and fowls not to mention the glorious bounty to be sold, an inexhaustible array of vegetables, fruits and homemade wares, including baskets, mats and jars.
As a young British subject, Una was taught very little about her island’s depressing history, and yet, if she had, the cold, hard facts about Jamaica’s past would no doubt have been one-sided and whitewashed through a British imperial lens. The voices of the oppressed, from the Arawaks, Maroons and Africans, would have been silenced, their stories missing from the history books – the magnitude of the cruelty and violence experienced, the lack of humanity, and the erasure of any sort of ancestral pride or achievement, diluted or erased.
What could a child’s mind possibly make of the fact that, before Britain’s stranglehold on the Caribbean island, the Spanish had seized control of Jamaica with the advent of Christopher Columbus’ ‘discovery’ of it in 1494, slaughtering the island’s original dwellers, the Arawaks, and leaving them to die from European diseases? All that before the Spanish had even had time to settle on the land, bringing with them a cohort of Africans who they exploited as servants to tend to the animals and lands. By 1655, Britain had come to conquer, the land officially relinquished by the Treaty of Madrid.
As the British rolled out their customs on the land, as they had done and continued to do around the world in their creation of an empire, the Maroons (those Spanish slaves now either freed or run away) fled to the mountains in a bid for their freedom. What questions might a young Una Marson have had of this knowledge that she would have been unable to ask? Did a country have a right to invade another, killing off its inhabitants and extracting shamelessly from the land? As a child, she had been taught to be kind to others, to treat people as she would’ve wanted to be treated … did this not apply to countries, and to the very land itself? Britain’s interest in Jamaica had come from the profits it had seen in Barbados from the cultivation of sugar some ten years prior. Jamaica’s landmass was larger than that of its West Indian sibling, and a decade of cultivation and export in Barbados had shown planters that their wealth could multiply twenty times over, that this new island could continue to reap financial rewards – at the expense of human life.
To cultivate sugar a labour force was needed to work the plantations, and the skyrocketing of profits saw a rise in the ‘expendable’ African slave, whose numbers rose from a few hundred to over 20,000. British ships from Liverpool, London and Bristol soon embarked on journeys to West African ports, where African leaders, seduced by European goods and the plumping-up of their egos, haggled for them in exchange for men, women and children who could work on the sugar plantations. From the mid-seventeenth century until the abolishment of slavery, an estimated 750,000 to 1 million human beings, many from the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and Nigeria, were crammed into claustrophobic ships with little food and water, or access to basic hygiene measures, disease left to spread unchecked.
They were transported across the Atlantic’s Middle Passage to West Indian islands such as Jamaica, where those who had managed to survive the journey, which could take anywhere from six to twelve weeks, disembarked at Kingston Harbour. Trade goods from the island, like its famed sugar, rum and tobacco, were brought onboard and sent back to England for merry consumption. ‘This is the age of woman,’ Una Marson repeated walking along the streets of Kingston. ‘What man has done … what man has done …’
Despite the riches being made in Jamaica and England by a handful of wealthy planters and businessmen, there were those who inevitably saw beyond the greed when it came to the exploitation of the enslaved, namely Baptist missionaries, black and white, who had an important role to play in advocating for the abolition of slavery, making the religion one of the most followed in Jamaica. Perhaps young Una felt pride at this fact, as her beloved father, Reverend Solomon Isaac Marson, had been a Baptist minister. Would he have been as noble as Reverend George Liele, an ex-slave from Savannah, Georgia, who brought the Baptist teachings to Jamaica in 1783, the religion drawing an ever-growing following of slaves and ex- slaves? Would he have helped to rehabilitate the slaves? When the full abolishment of slavery came into effect in 1838, the establishment had no interest in helping those freed to achieve a steady footing in society. Although these people were no longer enslaved, their options were limited. They could either accept dreadfully low wages while paying high rents back on the sugar estates, where their basic needs were provided for, or they could migrate further into the mountains and survive off the land, impoverished but free.
Planters too wondered what they should do – the idea of hiring those who they had once owned as property seemed unthinkable. Instead, many chose to take on a new workforce, an influx of indentured servants from India or China, and even those classified as ‘Free Africans’, who were coming to Jamaica of their own free will to find work.
The ex-slaves making their own way purchased lots that had been bought by English Baptist missionaries like William Knibb, who had the foresight to buy and divide estates before and after the emancipation. These free villages, populated by the peasant class, now able to own the freeholds of their lands, allowed families to make money off the crops they grew as small-time farmers. Una’s paternal grandparents were one such family, residing in the village of Brown’s Town in St Ann Parish, where they raised a few farm animals and grew breadfruit trees, coffee, citrus, yams, sweet potatoes and small green cabbages. Yet their humble beginnings were disrupted with the eruption of the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1858, seven years after Una’s father was born, signalling a major turning point in Jamaica’s history, and a foreshadowing of the ever-present desperate conditions the peasants and labourers found themselves in. The lack of financial and material support from the Colonial Office for the freed slaves facilitated a layering of desperate conditions – small planters found it impossible to secure lands to cultivate, and the ones who had them continually found themselves impoverished by a series of floods and droughts that ruined their crops, leaving families without an income or food to eat. The people of St Ann, starving and in need of assistance, wrote a petition to Queen Victoria, which was sent to the Colonial Office for a reply, but the words that came back were heartless, suggesting that the peasants employ ‘hard work as the solution to their difficulties’, and that they use ‘their own efforts and wisdom to improve their conditions’.
Instead of a strategy to solve the plight of a large majority of the island who had been let go without recourse to assistance, the government and the elites blamed them for what they perceived to be their own inadequacies. And so the peasants – angry, hungry and desperate – rebelled. The uprising cost hundreds of lives, and even though small reforms would take place along the way, depending on which English governor swooped in to ‘rule’, for decades to come unemployment would continue to be rife, with taxes high and wages low.
*
The trouble with Jamaican society was that change always seemed to just trickle in as opposed to flood – even the presence of black faces in Jamaican government (all men, of course) took an inordinate amount of time, but by the 1920s, it just so happened that much of the council were black, together with a few black civil servants. When the world was rapidly changing, especially after the chaos of World War I, Una refused to sit on the sidelines simply working as a secretary for elite white men. This couldn’t be her lot in life, where her only concern was to be an exceptional stenographer, maintaining her health to be of service to a man. Una had her own ideas about how to transform Jamaica on a practical level, and how women could effect this. She had her own desires, her own ambitions, and she wanted to put them out into the world – but how?
By May 1928, as Una walked through the business district of Kingston, the labouring class of Jamaica could still be found engaging in another iteration of modern slavery through the continued production and export of goods – the most lucrative of which was still sugar, its value skyrocketing and crashing over the decades.
Bananas, otherwise known as ‘green gold’, were also profitable, the fruit’s trade prospects discovered by American sea captains in 1868, bringing prosperity to small planters and monopolising companies. When technological advances in production systems came onto the scene, labourers no longer needed to work in the sugar-cane fields under a cruel planter; instead they toiled for low wages and under deplorable conditions for American and British companies such as the United Fruit Company of New Jersey and the West Indies Sugar Company, a subsidiary of England’s Messrs Tate & Lyle Investments Ltd.
Jamaica’s class structures as enforced by the British were still apparent by the 1920s, with minor adjustments between those at the top and those firmly at the bottom. A white elite planter class continued to reign, despite being only a tiny fraction of the population, and a middle-class ‘coloured’ or mixed-race group with lighter skin followed, a product of the melting pot of ethnicities that inhabited the island, not to mention the so-called ‘relationships’ between slaves and planters that had taken place behind the scenes. A darker class of white-collar, lower-middle-class workers and professionals – police officers, secretaries, teachers and nurses – were situated below the coloured group, and it was members of this class who subconsciously understood that it was easier and in their best interests to aspire to constructed values of whiteness: and any traces of a rich African heritage were to be squarely rejected. Why would anyone want to align themselves with the poor and oppressed, those whom the Europeans slandered as barbarians, ugly and inferior, only worthy of being conquered and tamed? As a result, it was the dark-skinned labourers – the majority of the island underpinning the country’s economic foundations – who sat at the bottom of the social hierarchy, continuing to line the pockets of the few.
It was the predicament of the labourer that inspired the Jamaican businessman, publisher and activist Marcus Garvey to set up the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914 as a backlash to white supremacy and colonial rule and its impact on the consciousness of coloured people both at home in Jamaica, across the West Indies and further afield. His ambitious, out-of-the-box efforts, though, made him a pariah in the national and international newspapers across the globe. Labourers all over the world knew they had an unceasing and powerful ally in Garvey, as he divided his time between the West Indies, the United States, Britain, and South and Central America. It was Garvey who publicly acknowledged how the Jamaican labourer, long seen as an ‘asset’ to the world, could no longer exert himself for low wages and an unstable quality of life. His plight was not just an issue in Jamaica, but abroad, too, where he often went for better and more plentiful opportunities, despite antagonism from natives and unfair work conditions. Jamaicans had joined large numbers of West Indian men and women who were migrating to work on other shores, and by the tail end of the nineteenth century they contributed to hundreds of thousands of men who relocated to Panama to build the canal between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans – a prime route for American trade and military excursions – or else Cuba to help the Americans harvest sugar and coffee, and build railways, before a mass of Jamaican labourers were expelled back to their homeland in the early 1920s due to Cuba’s economic crisis.
Garvey became the voice of those who were unable to advocate for themselves. He became the seed of self-worth and black African pride that had been buried and suppressed within the black consciousness for centuries, and thousands of people internationally joined his movement wherever they sprung, feeling on some deeper level, past the calloused skin of survival, the truth of his words.
Governments all over the world took note of his mobilising, finding him to be a ‘dangerous’ renegade – a threat to the smooth operation of certain structures and institutions dependent on black labour and subjugation. Six months before the launch of Una’s new magazine, Garvey’s ability to galvanise the oppressed black masses wherever he went caused panic, and when he landed in Kingston on 10 December 1927, after being expatriated back home from the United States after time in prison, crowds previously unseen blossomed in Kingston, officials bristling at the threat of an uprising. The Colonial Office took precautions, watching Garvey’s every move. They refused him and his wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, visas to visit West Indian, South and Central American islands, countries where UNIA was popular among labourers. Despite this, Garvey and his wife would make it to England in April of 1928. They began networking with coloured students and seamen from World War I, having issues of their own in the motherland. Although many individuals of all races disagreed with some of Garvey’s tactics, Una among them, she nevertheless respected him. She could not help but be infected by the spirit of change and leadership that men like Garvey ushered in.
Una began again. ‘This is the age of woman, what man has done … what man has done …’ Fellow pedestrians on the bustling streets would have seen the 23-year-old lost in thought, stylish in the way fashion-conscious, middle-class Jamaican women were in the 1920s, clad in a knee-length, sleeveless dress and sporting a fashionable bob. Una’s choice of patterned dress was quirky, her accoutrements modern, yet a sharp-eyed individual would have noticed the way the young woman shrank into herself ever so slightly, no doubt uncomfortable in her body. This air of awkwardness that clung to Una, the sense of never quite fitting in, was a residue from her years at boarding school at Hampton School or ‘The Society School’, an English-style public school for girls in Malvern, Jamaica that Una attended from 1915 to 1922. These years were spent boarding with girls who had seared into her consciousness that they were superior to Una and the other dark-skinned girls in every way – including looks and deportment, race, and class. These ‘white, or near-white girls’ were moneyed, their families owning luxurious properties and noisy Ford cars. They had not needed a Free Foundationers Scholarship to attend Hampton High like Una did, because many of them were descendants of the planter class, or otherwise came from families who had lucrative businesses in Kingston. Many would go on marry a handsome and successful husband one day, further cementing their status in high society, or otherwise take up decent work.
With their fairer skin and loose curls, these girls were deemed to be attractive by the limiting standards of Jamaican society, the kind of specimen worthy of a man’s attentions. Una, in their eyes, would never measure up. Firstly, her skin was much too dark. From a young age, she had understood very quickly that she would never be as pretty or as fair-skinned as her mother, whose grandfather on her mother’s side was Irish, having settled in Jamaica in the early 1800s, or her two sisters, Edith and Ethel. Secondly, her features were seen as unbecoming. ‘That jutting jaw line,’ her classmates might have whispered behind her back as she passed by. ‘That head of hers, much too big for her body. That wide nose! Those horse’s teeth!’ they might have sniggered, delighting in their teenage cruelty. Under normal circumstances, some of these girls would have found themselves studying abroad in Europe, but the aftermath of World War I put a spanner in the works, keeping them in Jamaica instead.
If young Una wasn’t excluded for the colour of her skin, then she was certainly made to feel less-than because of her lower- middle-class standing. Even in Kingston – about a hundred or so kilometres away from the school’s village, situated high up in the Santa Cruz mountains – she could feel the cold, dead stares of her white and coloured classmates, could hear the cruel remonstrations of Headmistress Maud Marion Barrows, who would berate Una and the other scholarship girls in front of the entire school for any minor misdemeanour. They were continually reminded that they were getting their education free and ought to be grateful. Each time Una stood on stage she was made to feel inferior, as if the students, and even the teachers – a mix of English and Jamaican women, all of whom had studied in England – were doing her a favour, no matter how grudgingly, by allowing her to attend their prestigious school. Una’s treatment as a second-class citizen reeked of times gone by, when the planters of sugar-cane estates belittled and tortured their slaves for the pleasure and power of it, sometimes turning the instance into a form of education or entertainment. Una may not have been beaten or had her limbs cut off for something as innocent as giggling with a schoolmate, but the unfair degradation of the darker girls on scholarships held the same demoralising principles.
If this constant and pervasive sense of judgement, inferiority and rejection were not enough, the year that Una entered Hampton School at the age of 10 would also be one of devastating loss. At the age of just 57, Una’s father passed away. Adding to the crushing weight of being away from her home and her large family, of being thrown into a sea of girls who disdained her for the colour of her skin and social standing, her fragile heart now had to contend with the death of her beloved father.
With no one to confide in, and no one to console her, she most likely buttoned up her feelings and took to occupying herself with all the responsibilities and social demands of school. But Una’s grief, which must have niggled away at her over the years, would probably have created an outward air of detachment to her peers. Even as she half-heartedly took to her schoolwork, Una’s 10-year-old mind could not comprehend never seeing her father in the flesh again. What did they mean, he was dead? Never again would she sit next to him in the buggy as he went on his rounds through Sharon Village in the town of Santa Cruz, oftentimes preaching at four or five different churches, as well as seeing to a long list of other duties, both within and outside of the church. Gone were those rare instances when he allowed her to sit quietly and read with him in his handsome study that she loved, full of important- looking theological books, papers and English classics. It was this room in the house that excited her the most, not only because of its books, but because it was usually off-limits as her father diligently worked.
In contrast, she found the sewing room, where her mother spent most of her time, to be utterly dull. The study was where she stole surreptitious glances at her father, at once attempting to mimic his studiousness while simultaneously feeling afraid that she might do something to disturb or displease him. When he left for his rounds, she occasionally mustered up the courage to sneak into the study. She snuggled into his chair and pretended that she herself was the Revered Solomon Marson, carefully poring over his books, murmuring biblical passages to herself. When Una crept out again, she made sure to leave things exactly as they were, lest her secret visits were discovered, which would surely lead to punishment. The solace would no doubt have provided a welcome reprieve, too, from the bustling household – there were nine Marson children in total, with Una being the baby of the family. Six had been born to their chaste and devout mother, Ada Wilhelmina Marson, and three adopted, although it was her two eldest sisters, Ethel and Edith, that Una had spent most of her time with as a young girl before boarding school.
Una had spent most of her childhood exploring the surrounding countryside with her sisters, getting messy as they lost themselves in a wonderland of vegetation, flowers, and red-dirt roads. During the rainy season from September or October they sheltered indoors, the girls reading poetry, singing, or practising piano – a middle-class life, though lacking in the refinement of some of her peers at Hampton School.
After her father died, Una pined for his attentions more than ever. Even during the ten short years she’d had with him while he was alive, she had never felt that she had his sole attention on account of his relentless responsibilities. All her young life, Una had taken the Reverend Solomon in, breathless and transfixed, sitting in the front pews of his churches with her family, watching him deliver his sermons on a Sunday, come rain or shine. How was it possible that she would never experience those precious moments again?
In many regards, it surprised no one in Sharon Village that Reverend Solomon had passed away so young. He had extended himself considerably, like most other Jamaican pastors, working a hybrid role as magistrate and solicitor, domestic adviser, physician, and government agent. Parishioners far and wide would come to him to request his help in settling disputes about property or familial matters; to tend to the ailing; to help run a day school, to sit on a government board – not to mention his occasional duties on the board of trustees for Hampton School, as one of three ministers of religion. To help lessen the weight of the heavy burden of work on his shoulders, the Marson family had organised themselves to ensure that every facet of Reverend Solomon’s home life was comfortable – he was their mighty and charming breadwinner, after all; the man who, at the end of every Sunday, left his congregants looking forward to returning to church the following week. A content Reverend meant he could do an exceptional job, and in exchange, the full members of the congregation and the Baptist Missionary Society lined his pockets, furnishing him with an impressive £90 a year. The local Baptist church had provided the Marson family with the Sharon Mission House, the very house where Una Maud Victoria Marson herself had been born on 6 February 1905, referred to by Sharon Village locals as ‘Parson’s baby’. When Reverend Solomon died, however, the two-storey wooden house with its heavy gate and long, winding drive, leading to the back of a leafy property surrounded by trees, no longer belonged to the family.
Gone too were the domestic staff, including three maids and a coachman.
Although Una had grown up middle class, her first glimpse of how different her own family and upbringing were to those who were truly wealthy occurred during a holiday when she was seven years old. Family friends named the Hutchinsons invited her to stay on their estate in Lacovia, a small village in the parish of St Elizabeth, nestled between Santa Cruz, where Una’s family dwelt, and the Black River. The land in Lacovia was fertile and lush, producing many a Jamaican staple, and when the season called for it, proud village women went around selling cashews. During World War I the village sprang to life, producing logwood for dyes, bringing money to the area, and attracting ‘a few wealthy landed proprietors who lived in the low hills or the plains along the thirteen miles to Black River or the eight miles to the Maggotty Falls’. To a young child, the trappings of the Hutchinsons left Una in awe, almost serving as a model of the perfect family. The head of the family, J C, was a sight to behold, a big man, quite black and good-looking with a ready smile and quick eyes. He was usually found well-dressed and with a gold chain attached to a flashy gold watch tucked into a waistcoat pocket, a cigar poking from his mouth. While his wife played host, their three grown-up children loped around the house, tall and stately. When J C’s daughter, Miss Maud, and a lady friend came to collect Una at the gate of her house, she and her siblings ran down to open it, and were stupefied by the elegance of the Hutchinsons’ carriage, or ‘double buggy’, as they nicknamed it. They looked up at the sleek horses, admired the shiny harnesses, and took note of the elegant way the two ladies sat with what looked like shawls covering their knees.
Time on the estate was spent observing how the Hutchinsons lived. J C often entertained ‘gentlemen of means’, holding dinners at one of the houses on the estate they called Belmont. Although Una’s father was a friend of J C’s, he never seemed to attend these gatherings, but in truth, she could not imagine him sitting around engaging in idle talk, smoking cigars, or drinking fine spirits and wines. On one special occasion, there was a great bustle and fuss days prior to an important dinner. ‘There was the boiling of hams, the roasting of pigs, the cleaning of silver and the polishing of all the brass and furniture in the house. The carpets were taken up, sunned and cleaned. The boxes of liquor came in. At last, the hour came for the carriages to roll up. The lady of the house was assisted by her daughter as they received the guests.’ Young Una observed the preparations but was sent promptly to bed at 7.30 pm. When she heard raucous laughter and booming voices from bed, curiosity got the better of her and she crept out, positioning herself by the door, cracked open just enough for her to see the dining-room table. She was used to her father holding dinners at the mission house when Jamaican English ministers gathered for meetings, and she was accustomed to seeing the serving of roasted pigs prepared by their beloved cook, ‘Old Cookie’, but the Hutchinsons’ dinner was something else entirely, with its huge dining-room table laid with a white damask cloth, silver cutlery and the cut-glass jugs. The servants came in and out with dishes of the most amazing-looking foods. Una watched, undetected, as ‘J C carved the pig and at the other end of the table was turkey and ham’. She observed a maid entering the room with a tray of delicacies before making quickly for her bed as someone approached the door, but when the coast was clear, she returned to her post to see that coffee was served, and afterward, the men and women parted ways, the former to the smoking lounge, the latter to the sitting room. There was nothing much to see beyond that point, and Una, pumped full of adrenaline, went to bed, conscious of her riding lessons with a man named William early the next morning.
*
Upon Reverend Solomon’s death, the family had no choice but to relocate to Kingston, where Una’s mother’s sister lived. When Una left Hampton School at 17, she followed her family to the city, deciding to learn stenography to help support her grieving and penniless mother. The decision had seemed straightforward enough for Una, but Headmistress Barrows admonished her when she learned of Una’s choice of career, ‘Only fools learn shorthand. Why don’t you take up teaching as your sisters have done?’ It was true that teaching ran in the family – as well as Una’s sisters pursuing careers in education, their father too had attended Mico Training College in Kingston to teach elementary school before becoming a Baptist minister.
Despite the many difficulties of Una’s educational experience, if there was one good thing that Headmistress Barrows had imparted, it was the idea that Una might as well be dead if she were not prepared to make a real contribution to the world. In retrospect, the headmistress had taught her to make something of herself, teaching her the invaluable lesson that women, too, could excel, despite the limited roles available to them. Heeding this message, Una looked to women like Florence Nightingale for inspiration. If Nightingale had sat in her luxurious home and lived comfortably instead of going out to heal the wounds of a nation, the world would be a vastly different place. Where were the Elizabeth Frys of this island? The Dorothea Dixes, the Harriet Beecher Stowes? The Josephine Butlers? Would Jamaica ever have similar female heroes to help solve its problems?
After training as a stenographer, Una threw herself into the world of social work to help support the family. She spent the first year with the Salvation Army who were, among other things, assisting Jamaican labourers to and from Cuba. Another four years were spent at the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) on 76 Hanover Street in Kingston, working for an English boss named Edgar B Hallet, who served as a seaman during World War I, and had returned with an injury that had marred his leg. Despite his characteristic limp, his prowess had not been deterred, and he proved himself to be an industrious man, one who required great effort to keep up with. Despite this, Una found herself to be well-suited to working with him and proved herself just as tireless. ‘You are the picture of a fine YMCA secretary,’ Hallet used to boom, his praise leaving her flushed and shy. ‘What with your Christian values, your enthusiasm and drive, your integrity, humility, and friendliness. I couldn’t have asked for a better right-hand woman.’
The work Una did alongside Hallet provided her with a mission and a purpose – to help improve the lives of Jamaican children and create for them better possibilities. She helped him organise clubs and summer camps for disadvantaged youths. She admired the way he exercised his leadership skills, teaching the young boys they encountered to respect themselves, and in turn teach their peers to do the same. Her years at the YMCA were comfortable – a good introduction to city life and urban woes. In her free time, she attended football, basketball and water-polo matches, whooping and hollering as she played the role of mascot.
On other days, she attended religious and social gatherings put on by the YMCA or went for weekend hikes to the Blue Mountain Peak. But her time with Hallet and the YMCA would come to an end when a member of the legislative council offered Una a job as assistant editor of his monthly journal, the Jamaica Critic, just shy of her 21st birthday. Una’s new boss made it clear that her role was not to contribute to the socio-political content of the magazine – the men could do that – but rather, to pepper in material more befitting her sex. While this was closer to the type of work she aspired to, allowing her to flex her creativity, the limited subject matter was tedious work for a brain such as Una’s, and so, when the opportunity came to jump ship and have more control over a project she actually believed in – The Cosmopolitan – she leapt, but not without gratitude for her new and improved editorial skills.
That afternoon in 1928, as she walked the streets of Kingston, pondering the opening line of her first editorial letter, she was better able to complete that troublesome sentence that mushroomed in her mind, so much so she couldn’t help but release the thought out loud. ‘This is the age of woman,’ she stated defiantly. ‘What man has done, women may do! Yes, yes! I think that’s it.’
While Una had one foot in the refined and worldly nature of high society, her other foot felt rooted in the plight of the lower-middle classes. She knew that class, much like race, was a barrier to understanding people more fully. The lower classes, the labourers, the have-nots, whatever society wanted to call them, still had the same exact needs as everyone else. Growing up, she had seen how the labourers lived around the parish of St Elizabeth, often accompanying her father to visit their cottages or attend a wedding ceremony or funeral in Reverend Solomon’s church.
She had wept with these families when they grieved, and rejoiced with them over picnics near the lime kilns, catching fish in the nearby ponds. These people were not as ‘miserable, hateful, oppressed, despised, starving, or filthy- mouthed’ as they were oftentimes depicted, and if there was one thing Una wanted to explore in her new magazine, it was the way the middle classes painted such a broad-brush stroke of hate and ignorance against their less fortunate brethren.
For days, she had been trying to work out the intentions of this new magazine, pounding away at her typewriter into the night, the chorus of cicadas, frogs and palm leaves outside her bedroom window amplifying the chaos in her mind as she scribbled down ideas, cobbled together thoughts on potential articles to be written, and added to an ever-growing list of possible contributors. As the newly elected publisher and editor of The Cosmopolitan, she felt immense pressure to make it a success, not just because it was the first Jamaican periodical of its kind, and headed by a black woman, no less, but because there was a lot resting on making a return on investment and maintaining the longevity of the magazine.
A businessman named Bowen, a managing director of an insurance company, had kindly helped her with initial funding for the publication. It meant a lot that he had trusted in her abilities as an administrator and writer, and she had no doubt that her middle-class education and charm, along with her direct and forthcoming personality, had convinced him that she could do the job. Yet, even so, she couldn’t help but think she was already in over her head, particularly with the business side of things.
It was difficult enough having to manage her own financial affairs – work as a secretary always provided her with just enough – but Bowen perhaps had bigger ideas than she did, and it soon became clear that The Cosmopolitan needed to have more of a global and international reach, namely America, and that she needed to find big-money advertisers to help support and sustain the publication for future success. It took all her effort to push back huge waves of anxiety that threatened to crush her each time she thought about what was at stake.
No doubt Bowen had been influenced by the rise of print media soon after World War I, particularly in New York City. After the war, money flowed into the hedonistic playground of a city as if from opulent Art Deco fountains, the influx of cash contributing towards a burgeoning broadcasting and entertainment scene, not to mention a wealth of creative and highly lucrative changes in fashion and art, book and magazine publishing. Five years before The Cosmopolitan, Henry Luce and Brit Hadden had launched the weekly news publication Time Magazine in 1923, and a couple of years later, Harold Ross debuted The New Yorker, his target audience being the Manhattan elite who had highbrow tastes and international lifestyles. The magazine often featured material from well- known writers such as F Scott Fitzgerald, who had documented the excesses of the Jazz Age in America, a time where ‘the parties were bigger, the pace was faster, the buildings were higher, the morals looser’. Of course, Kingston, Jamaica, could not compare to New York City, and Una Maud Victoria Marson could never have the privileges of a white man. To aim as high as the new periodicals springing up in New York would be impossible, and in any case, Una was far more interested in the types of women’s magazines blossoming in London, whose themes had much more resonance to the subjects she was mulling over in her own country.
This plethora of magazines had emerged in the interwar years, all produced by women who wanted to free themselves from false notions of duty and service propagated by World War I. The key idea that spoke loudly from many of these periodicals was the word ‘modern’, and after the war, there were many middle- and upper-class white British women desperate to thrust the female sex to the forefront of social and political decision-making and discussion. Time and Tide: The Modern Weekly for the Modern Woman was put together in 1920 by the Six Point Group, Britain’s leading gender-equality organisation, and they were offering political and literary debate from a feminist perspective. The formation coincided with the Representation of the Peoples Act coming into law a couple of years before, offering only a small subset of women in England the vote. Meanwhile, Modern Woman began in 1925, positioning itself as a ‘a monthly service magazine targeting middle-class housewives and career women’. Many of these magazines featured a range of exciting and practical content, from articles on the women’s movement to thoughts on motherhood and employment, as well as articles on homemaking and fashion. Many magazines published book and theatre reviews, alongside short stories and poetry, reinforcing the idea that the modern woman not only looked good, but was well-read, cultured and informed. Where the Representation of the Peoples Act of 1918 failed, the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 came into play, allowing women over the age of 21 to vote, giving them the same voting rights as men. The number of women now eligible to vote in the United Kingdom rose to 15 million, well ahead of the arrival of universal suffrage in Jamaica – something that wouldn’t emerge until 1944.
Una’s hope was that The Cosmopolitan could be the equivalent of some of these magazines, specifically aiming to reach the business youth of Jamaica, which included men, although the target audience would be modern businesswoman like herself. But what did the modern Jamaican woman look like? Did she even exist? Most women in Kingston seemed content with being at home or in the office and generally not aspiring to much else politically or intellectually. In Una’s opinion, the fact that more and more women were working – ‘over 800 in Kingston alone’ – was fantastic: some ‘forty years ago, the business girl would have been a rarity in Kingston and not known in the country parts’, but these women, she felt, could and should aspire for more, looking beyond their own immediate lives and circumstances. It was high time that professional women take hold of their destinies and relinquish the expectation of submitting to one’s husband as the breadwinner upon marriage, quitting work to attend to his and the children’s needs. Surely, the role of woman as an object to be admired, and as a husband’s loyal and passive subject was outdated, alongside the idea that men were the only ones who had the brains and the drive to engage in business and politics. Una would see to it that The Cosmopolitan ushered in public debate among both women and men about a woman’s role in society. She wanted to champion the accomplishments and forward-thinking activities of women, both in Jamaica and abroad.
There seemed to be much feminist activity in America and England – but she knew she would need to do all of this carefully and mindfully to achieve the right balance between seeking a more modern approach to gender and offering the viewpoints of other contributors who might think differently. She would use the magazine to boost her own sense of self-worth and capability; to express and push forward her politics and passions. Like those magazines from overseas, she would champion creative work too, and ensure that The Cosmopolitan included the promotion of Jamaican literature.
Una wanted to be responsible for facilitating conversations around modernity, no matter how slow or how endless the task may be. She would start at this evening’s meeting, where she hoped that, this time around, the room would be heaving with fellow secretaries and typists keen to hear talks, and to debate about women’s work and women’s rights in the workplace – not just for themselves but for their impoverished sisters too. But when she entered the community hall, it was, yet again, nearly empty. Una’s spirits dropped, and she felt the beef patties digesting in her stomach starting to churn. Nevertheless, she put on a brave face (something Hampton School taught her well), not just for herself but for the guest speaker who sat near the lectern on stage, rehearsing over his notes. The few women in the audience greeted Una with wry smiles as she made her way to the stage.
‘Let us wait just a few minutes more,’ Una announced, hoping her voice carried in way that conveyed encouragement and optimism rather than displeasure. These women had given up their evenings of leisure only to languish at a stale gathering that clearly had no momentum behind it even three months into its inception. After ten minutes had passed, she encouraged the speaker to begin, and as he spoke, she refrained from looking into the audience at the women who fidgeted in their seats or otherwise sucked their teeth in exasperation before eventually shuffling off in a huff.
She could hardly blame them for leaving. Why would anyone want to sit in a musty, dimly lit hall when they could be settled in the comfortable seats of a cinema watching the ‘talkies’ – black-and-white British and American films replete with sound, showing photogenic actors and actresses kissing passionately on screen? Who wanted to think about union organisation – still illegal – and protecting one’s interests, whether around possible unemployment or meagre wages, when one had more pressing responsibilities from a husband, children or immediate family? Who had the time to stretch oneself thin, especially when they weren’t paid for their time and the Stenographers’ Association’s objectives were unclear? Una had tried to create a clear plan of attack, but it was difficult juggling so many roles on her own, no matter how passionate she felt about them.
When an agonising hour had passed, Una thanked the speaker for showing up, yet she couldn’t help but express her opinions on the members who failed to show up to meetings time and again. She admonished the lack of interest and support these women had shown since the association started and ranted about the members’ laziness and lack of foresight, all of which had boiled her blood these last few months. ‘Working women must get together – white – yellow – pink – brown – black – all office and shop workers. They must unite to form a strong working women’s association … an association with dignity and with a voice … an association that can be heard in the local Councils and if need be, in the Councils abroad!’ The poor man who bore the brunt of Una’s frustration grew tired and slunk away, bidding himself farewell.
An acute and familiar loneliness gripped Una as she made her way home to South Camp Road, where she lived with her best friend and eldest sister, Ethel Marson. Hopping onto the tram, she took a seat and stared listlessly out the window, the sky blazing a brilliant orange as the sun set hazy in the distance just beyond the Blue Mountains. She would have a familiar and loving soul to greet her, to ask of her day, to lay a plate of something warm on the table for her – saltfish and fried plantains, rice and peas, stewed callaloo and okra. The two of them would sit together and eat as they often did, chatting about their days, and the goings-on of the rest of the large but rather distant family.
Ethel worked as a secretary to George Goode, the deputy director of agriculture in the Civil Service, while their other sister, Edith Marson-Jones, worked as a schoolmistress and spent her free time as a member of the Jamaican Union of Teachers. Both sisters had never really understood the inner workings of Una’s mind, and where Ethel was more patient and supportive, better able to handle Una’s constant ideas, proliferating endeavours, and her tempestuous ups and downs, Edith was stricter and unforgiving, the precise qualities that made her an exacting schoolmistress who would go on to form her own secondary school by the age of 33. Their mother, Ada, very much approved of Edith’s path – after all, she had married a reverend just as her mother had done. In many ways, it seemed as if Edith were the apple of Ada’s eye, her spitting image, although she also approved of Ethel, who had a much more grounded and sensible approach to life than Ada’s youngest daughter, Una. When Ada felt up to it, she enjoyed listening to Ethel perform in the local ‘Diocesan Festival Choir or the fourteen-strong Kingston Glee Singers’ conducted by her boss George Goode, who Ethel seemed to be close to. Ethel and Edith adored music, much like their mother. Not only did they have lovely singing voices, but they excelled in the organ and piano too.
On church Sundays back when their father was alive, Ada could be found playing the organ beautifully, her delicate hands and feet operating the imposing instrument as she transported the packed church towards higher realms. She was a sight to behold, the perfect ornament to the powerful and persuasive Reverend Solomon, holding all the virtues of a good, Jamaican wife. Una, apart from not being terribly musical until later in life, couldn’t shake the feeling that she had always been a disappointment to her mother – Una, with her darker skin and her bookish ways, looked nothing like her mother or her sisters, instead resembling her father, both in looks and in studiousness.
In some ways, Una feared mentioning the news of The Cosmopolitan to her mother at all, mostly because no matter what Una did, there never came a hint of pride or congratulation, no soft touch of affection, no warm smile to say she approved. Once again, Una was meddling in matters of the mind, instead of focusing on the kinds of feminine pursuits that her mother and her sisters knew so well. The constant comparisons to her sisters, whether at home or at school, never failed to burrow deep – Edith, especially, took after their mother in looks and deportment, which further served to drive an energetic wedge. Yet it still wasn’t enough to deter Una from her calling; the lure of words was too great, and her desire to immerse herself in political action felt too important to set aside simply to keep her mother happy.
As Ethel and Una sat for supper, Ethel spoke of a letter from Cousin Angie, their father’s cousin, the only adult woman of Una’s childhood who had really left an impact on her. Gone were the days when Angie came to visit the house in Sharon Village, pulling up in her ‘mail and passenger mule-drawn coach’. Cousin Angie must have seemed like the ideal adult woman to a young Una –Angie, who seemed never to have wed, who owned a small cloth store, and made sure to arrive with gifts ,including material for dresses or a special tie for ‘Cousin Sol’, as she nicknamed their father. Ever the perfect example of Christian faith and independence, it was nonetheless Cousin Angie, alongside Ada, who raised Una and her sisters to be perfect ladies. This meant sitting nicely, closing doors gently, no shouting in the house, and no childish quarrelling – no mean feat, with so many children. Angie’s visits brought fun and excitement to the mission house, and Una, reminiscing, said to Ethel, ‘Do you remember how she used to read us bedtime stories? The ghost stories were my favourite.’ Ethel nodded fondly at her little sister before rising from her chair and starting to clear up, already sensing Una’s anxious urge to complete her work before bed. Besides, Una had never really learned how to cook or clean – not adequately, anyway – and she disdained the world of housekeeping beyond the basics that she needed to get by. Any attempts from Una to clean the kitchen would only result in Ethel needing to follow up after her. There were far bigger things for Una to think about and accomplish – finishing up the editorial letter for the magazine’s debut, for one thing, among the myriad other projects that brewed in her mind, like the possible first poetry collection she was working on. Now that Una’s stomach was full and she was a little more at ease, she made herself comfortable at the typewriter and began: ‘It can well be said of the people of our day as was said in connection with those of ages long past, “Where there is no vision the people perish” and also that a country may be unmistakably judged by the standard of the literature she produces.… We desire to be used as a medium to broadcast to thousands of our people the sentiments, convictions and suggestions of all our talented Jamaicans.’
