Ula Yvette Taylor. The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey.

Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. 328 pp. $39.95 cloth/$18.95 paper.

Amy Jacques Garvey was the second wife of Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Pan-Africanism's most successful mass movement. She also enjoyed an independent prominence unmatched by most other Pan-African wives. (W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, rarely mentions his first wife in his massive autobiography, and one of his few references is to her frigidity.)

Ula Taylor is to be complimented for attempting the first full-length biography of a major Garveyite woman. Taylor moves chronologically through Mrs. Garvey's life, from her birth in Jamaica in 1895 to her death there in 1973. She sees Mrs. Garvey as an early Pan-African feminist--a helpmate and mother, an active participant in her husband's political movement and one who eschewed "myopic gender politics."

Mrs. Garvey was a middle-class Jamaican who was racially radicalized by her experience in the United States. She moved to a position of great influence when imprisonment lessened Garvey's grip on the UNIA. Taylor sees the birth of their two sons, after Garvey's deportation from the United States, as a turning point in Mrs. Garvey's life. Thereafter she increasingly gave priority to her children, over Garvey's organizational needs. The last two years of Garvey's life (1938-40), were spent in estrangement, as she returned home to Jamaica from England, where Garvey had relocated in 1935. An ailing son was the proximate reason for her return.

In the years after Garvey's death Mrs. Garvey strove to keep her husband's ideas alive, notably through her Garvey and Garveyism, on which Taylor has leaned heavily.

Despite a book of over 300 pages, Taylor has not added significantly to the known facts of Mrs. Garvey's life. Mrs. Garvey revealed little of her pre-Garvey experience, and Taylor has not materially improved this situation. She interviewed only two people, but since one was Mrs. Garvey's sister, one might have expected more information. Other friends and family members, especially the Garveys' two sons, and surviving UNIA associates were not interviewed. Taylor does not explain why.

The gaps created by an absence of hard information are filled by conjecture and extensive contextualization, often farfetched or factually inaccurate. Taylor says, for example, that Garvey met the Ku Klux Klan in 1925; it was 1922. And she presents the Garveys as supporting an "alliance" with Hitlerite Germany, ignoring Garvey's nuanced admiration for German efficiency coupled with a warning on Hitler's racial ideas.

She similarly misses the nuanced position of the Garveys on communism. She sees Mrs. Garvey's insistence that Garveyites were not communists as somehow contradictory to her objection to American demonization of the word communist. The fact is that the Garveys were respectful of communists and other radicals, even where there were principled disagreements.

Taylor wonders at length why the Garveys did not extend their 1928 European trip to Africa. Yet, apart from their limited finances, which she mentions, Garvey's attempt to relocate to Liberia had been thwarted by Britain, France, the U.S., and Liberia. The British had earlier passed legislation to keep him out of their African colonies.

Taylor also does not understand nationalist rhetoric. Mrs. Garvey said that one must admire the white man for braving jungle and Arctic ice and committing genocide to obtain diamonds and furs for his woman. Taylor completely misses the irony here and takes Mrs. Garvey's statement to mean that she "joined ... 1920s classic blues singers--who connected grand attire with power."

Taylor's conjecture is sometimes tabloidish. The fact that Mrs. Garvey's first child was born eight years after the marriage elicits the speculation that, "though she makes no mention of this ..., gossip and rumor concerning her 'womb' must have hovered over her. No doubt," she further surmises, "today's observers" would have hypothesized that Garvey was impotent.

Taylor also insists on calling Mrs. Garvey a "mulatta." Her mother was half-white and her father was dark-skinned. On this point Taylor contrasts Mrs. Garvey with Garvey's first wife, Amy Ashwood. In fact there was little appreciable difference of color between the two women. Taylor also accepts several of Ashwood's notoriously unreliable claims, among them the assertion that seventeen-year-old Ashwood "co-founded" the UNIA with Garvey.

The young Queen Mother Moore is put in Harlem instead of New Orleans. Gordon K. Lewis is rendered Lewis K. Gordon. The UNIA's paramilitary women's Universal African Motor Corps becomes "car fleets." Educator Fannie Barrier Williams's middle name is rendered "Barrie." Garvey's lawyer Armin Kohn has become "Arim." Talgarth Rd in London has become "Targarth." "28 March" somehow has become "28 Marcus" (275n48). Ndugu Elombe Brath's name is spelled differently in succeeding footnotes. Footnotes contain some wrong page numbers. Often crucial assertions are not footnoted at all, or insufficiently so.

There are also some good moments. The author deals effectively with misguided accusations of Mrs. Garvey tampering with Garvey's speeches in her compilation The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, and she has usefully examined Mrs. Garvey's writings for the Harlem-based African and the Nigerian West African Pilot.

Tony Martin

Wellesley College