Leslie Gordon Goffe

When Banana Was King: a Jamaican Banana King in Jim Crow America Leslie Gordon Goffe

When Banana Was King looks at a time when Jamaicans battled Americans for control of the billion-dollar banana trade. They battled in boardrooms and battled on wharves with knives and guns over the tasty, strangely shaped fruit. The most controversial of the banana men back then was Jamaican, A. C. Goffe. "There are two prominent men in the shipping world today who Jamaica and Jamaicans are bound to respect. A. C. Goffe and Marcus Garvey," a newspaper reported in 1920. Goffe, a black man whose mother had been born a slave, courted controversy. In 1908, he was arrested in Baltimore and charged with conspiring with the Mafia to kill a banana rival and in 1918 he was charged with murdering a Jamaican who stole coconuts from one of his plantations. Not surprisingly, Goffe, who owned a chunk of the Ocho Rios area that is today a centre of the island's tourist industry, clashed with everyone from Jamaica's Prime Minister to reggae star Bob Marley. Love him or hate him, A. C. Goffe was, an observer noted, one of the Jamaicans who "crossed the Frontiers, put Jamaica beyond the pale of the primitive and brought the country into modern trade, commerce and business."