#karis jagger

Marsha, Mick and Karis JAGGER

Marsha Mellows

Marsha Hunt has rescued her grandmother from a mental hospital and in the process re-discovered her roots and written a book. Katharine Hadley meets the actress, model, musician and mother of Karis Jagger.

Marsha came floating to meet me through Joe Allen's lunch-time diners, her waist-lenght hair a cloud of ebony, the face a perfect oval. At 49, not a line around her eyes, glamorous and sexy but deliberately not projecting either, she was entirely focused on her latest project (another for her maternal urge), the rediscovery and rehabilitation of her 97-year-old grandmother Ernestine.

Grandchild of a Memphis slave, and the subject of Marsha's book "Repossessing Ernestine", she was locked away in a mental hospital in 1929 and rarely referred to while Marsha was growing up in her middle-class Philadelphia family. While Marsha was co-starring with Sean Connery in "Never Say Never Again", canoodling with Mick and sharing a house with Sting in the deep southern states, Ernestine was thrilled if she was allowed a banana for lunch. Hers was an unsolved mystery.

"Out of the family loyalty, I never asked. And to this day I regret it, because I could have gone and found her and got her out. As it was, I received a phone call from my cousin, Alan. He said somebody in Memphis had seen Ernestine in a hostel. I told him she must be 2000 years old or dead. He said: "Well, you know they used to put women away in those days to keep them quiet". That kind of did it".

"Repossessing Ernestine" is about Marsha's journey to save her grandmother and discover her own roots. Karis and Marsha drove, to find Ernestine, in a car that was a present from Mick to his daughter.

[Karis and Marsha went together to meet Ernestine and the house she was raised]

Ernestine was born of a black family, but has blonde hair and blue eyes. Her mother was much blacker and was one of the first generation whose siblings were not split up automatically and sold.

"Her grandfahter was bought as a slave for $2000 by the Blair Hunt family, who were plantation owners in Memphis", explains Marsha, who takes her name from the people who bought and sold her family, sometimes secretly siring their children.

"I never really got to the bottom of why Ernestine was put away. Perhaps it was this legacy of miscegenation, the family jealousy about her colour, her personal confusion. In America, fair-skinned black people are top of the social heap. Ernestine was pretty and blonde and married my grandfather - a pastor, famous teacher and campaigner for black education - when she graduated as valedictorian from high school. She was 19 and he was much older, himself the child of a slave... Then something went wrong... Certainly, when she was taken into hospital, the papers show that she said she was a white girl. Maybe it was also post-natal depression, she'd had three sons in quick succession."

[Ernestine in the garden of her Memphis home in the Twenties]

"The appalling thing is that her papers say she was a mental defective and had only reached fourth grade. She was shut away, in the black segregated bit, without her family who were far away in Boston. She was 52 years at that hospital and they took her teeth out. My grandfather virtually abandoned her. I brought her over to Folkestone for a while, but I just couldn't manage it. In the end it was "Do I go broke and become unable to help my gradmother? or do I take her back, make the family help and keep enough energy and money so that I can help her too?" In the end I took her back". Ernestine is now in the hostel once more, regularly visited and generally well supported by her family. "I nearly lost it" says Marsha, "because I couldn't do what morality told me was right. I have always tried really hard to be the best granddaughter. But I couldn't".

All this time Marsha was conscious of her colour in a way she has never been in this country [USA]. "I am very dark and I worried that my grandmother wouldn't want such a dark grandchild. Over here [England] you don't get this pale/dark problem because black people haven't come from slavery but from immigration, so the racial mixing is not a secret and guilty part of history. For Karis and my grandmother it was different. Karis is beige and half English, she had a different perspective too. When we visited the plantation house where my people were slaves, I felt peculiar because those white owners were probably related to me, but Karis just regarded it as an interesting piece of history".

Happiest 82nd Birthday to this handsome man!! Mick Jagger!! Hope he has the best day celebrating and enjoying himself, love him ❤️🥳

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‘I think the problem was that Marsha wanted something from him — i.e. money. At the beginning, she had told him she would deal with everything to do with the baby herself.

She’d said: “Don’t worry about this. I’m going to care of it.” And then she was suing him. I think that put Mick off, to say the least.