Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(4)
The threat of violence and grinding poverty prompted many to migrate north or west in search of a better life. Sometime after the turn of the century Stephen Ragland’s daughter Ann and her husband, Cosby Smith, whom she married in 1892, together with their six children decided to make the three-thousand-mile journey to start a new life in Los Angeles in the days when oil and oranges were more important to the town’s economy than making movies.
Their decision to move inspired Stephen’s youngest child, Jeremiah, and his wife, Claudie Ritchie, daughter of the wonderfully named Mattie Turnipseed, and their growing brood to leave Georgia as well. Around 1910, when Claudie was twenty-five, they made their way to Chattanooga, Tennessee, with the hope of building a better life for themselves.
It is likely that neither Ann nor Jeremiah would see their father, Stephen Ragland, whom Meghan believes renamed himself “Wisdom,” ever again, even though he lived to the relatively ripe old age of seventy-eight, breathing his last in the town of Paulding, Georgia, on October 31, 1926.
By then Jeremiah and Claudie had raised five children; one died in childbirth. Claudie, who was at the time officially designated in the census as a mulatto or of mixed race, worked as a maid at Miller Brothers department store, then the biggest store in the region. Her husband, Jeremiah, found casual jobs working in a barber shop and as a saloon porter before setting up his own tailoring business. At that time black people were barred from well-paying jobs or obtaining loans. Self-employment was the only route for self-improvement.
Just as the women in the family raised the children, they also made more of their opportunities, as they became available. Jeremiah’s daughter and Meghan’s great aunt Dora was the first Ragland to go to college and the first to set herself up as a professional, becoming a schoolteacher. Her younger sister Lillie did even better. She studied at the University of California as a mature student before training as a real estate agent and setting up her own business in Los Angeles. She was so successful that she was listed in the African American Who’s Who.
Their brothers did not climb so high: one worked as a waiter, while Meghan’s great-grandfather Steve found employment as a presser in a cleaner’s shop in downtown Chattanooga. As Meghan’s uncle Joseph admits: “Culturally, our family did not have male figures.” Steve married Lois Russell, the daughter of a hotel porter, when she was fourteen or fifteen. In the census of 1930, the couple were recorded as living with their baby son, Alvin Azell, who would become Meghan’s grandfather, as well as Lois’s father, James Russell, and assorted nieces and roomers.
When Alvin was old enough he made his way to Cleveland, Ohio, in search of work. There he met Jeanette Johnson, the daughter of a bellboy and elevator operator at the five-star St. Regis Hotel. Soon after the end of the Second World War, Johnson had married professional roller skater Joseph Johnson, by whom she had two children, Joseph Junior and Saundra. It was not long before Johnson, who traveled from town to town to show off his skills, skated out of her life, leaving Jeanette to raise their children on her own. Enter the smooth-talking, snappily dressed Alvin Ragland, who soon had Jeanette’s heart beating a little faster.
They married and moved into a basement apartment in a three-story building in downtown Cleveland. Their first child, Doria, Meghan’s mother, was born in September 1956, and it was soon afterward that Alvin uprooted the family and embarked on that famous cross-country ride to begin a new life in Los Angeles, where their Ragland relations had settled. For a time, he worked for his aunt Lillie in real estate and then opened his own bric-a-brac and antique store in downtown Los Angeles. However, by then his marriage was over, and Jeanette was once again left holding the baby. He married for the second time on May 6, 1983, and his new wife, Ava Burrows, a teacher, gave birth to their only son, Joffrey, a few months later.
By this time, Doria Ragland was all grown up and with a child of her own. Two years earlier she had given birth to her daughter, Rachel Meghan Markle, at 4:46 in the morning of August 4, 1981, in West Park Hospital in Canoga Park in Los Angeles. Meghan’s arrival would change the narrative of her family forever.
The blooming of Meghan’s family from picking cotton under the blazing sun to seeing one of their own taking her wedding vows to a royal prince under the camera lights is an extraordinary story of upward mobility. And what a sublime contrast it makes with the not so distant past. The last American to marry a member of the British royal family was Wallis Warfield Simpson, who hailed from Baltimore, Maryland. Though she was twice divorced with two husbands living, King Edward VIII insisted on marrying her despite overwhelming opposition from the church, the government, and the empire, who objected to a divorcée becoming royal consort. As a result, he abdicated the throne, marrying Wallis at a modest ceremony in a French chateau in June 1937. Billed as the royal romance of the century, the king gave up everything for the woman he loved.
Fast-forward eighty years. While the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as Edward and Wallis became, would have been delighted that the House of Windsor had embraced the reality of divorce, they would have been astonished that Prince Harry’s bride was to be of mixed race. Wallis’s family, the Warfields, had built their various fortunes on the back of slave labor.
For their part they did consider themselves benign and enlightened masters. Wallis’s third cousin Edward Warfield, who was elected forty-fifth governor of Maryland in 1903, gave several speeches on the topic of “Slavery as I Knew It.” However, Edwin’s tolerance only went so far; in the election for governor he stood on a platform of white supremacy, believing that ill-educated blacks should be denied the franchise.