Only forty-eight miles of swampland at Panama separate the two greatest bodies of water on the earth’s surface. Nature has done so much that there is little left for man to do, but it will have to be some other man than a native-born Central-American who is to do it.
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS, THREE GRINGOES IN VENEZUELA & CENTRAL AMERICA (1896)
anama has a singular place in the El Dorado myth, the fantasy of lucrative discovery that fired the imaginations of conquistadors and expansionists. It has been one of the hemisphere’s most volatile sites of political positioning and a crucible of transnational communities. By the time Richard Harding Davis wrote the aforementioned opinions, North Americans had been operating the interoceanic Panama Railroad for forty years and the French had spent most of the 1880s digging their way through the jungle, exhausting their laborers and funds in the process. For U.S. observers such as Davis, it was as if nature had presented them with a circuit that was nearly closed; all that was left was to throw the switch. In one sense, he was right—the Americans succeeded where the French failed, and credit and glory redounded to them when the first ship passed through the locks in 1914. But he could not have been more wrong in claiming there was “little left for man to do.” Despite its propitious location, Panama’s topography was no kinder than any of the other contemplated routes, and the land did not cleave easily. The French attempt was by all accounts a cataclysmic disaster, involving shady financing, engineering miscues on a massive scale, illness, injury, and the death of twenty thousand laborers. The subsequent American effort, although successful in the strictest sense, was only slightly less lethal and took ten years. When Davis remarked that it would “have to be some other man than a native-born Central-American” to undertake a canal, his suggestion was that only North American ingenuity could get the thing done right. But the fact is, the “other man” was not just the North American but also the West Indian, thirty thousand of whom contracted with the Isthmian Canal Commission. They found that neither the land nor its residents welcomed the transformation their presence occasioned.William Walrond was not a ditchdigger, a dynamiter, or a fumigator (positions most West Indians held) but the factors that brought him were similar—a collapsing economy at home and the promise of decent wages. For Eric Walrond, Panama became the place with which he most closely identified, declaring himself in 1924 “spiritually a native of Panama. I owe the sincerest kind of allegiance to it.”
I grew up there.
I went to school there.
I began working there.
I had my first struggles there.
I had my first—and possibly my only—love affair there.
I studied and played truant—I rambled and roamed and adventured—all there. (“Godless” 32)
The experience of Panama’s Afro-Caribbean community is well documented, and Walrond wrote a great deal about Panama after he left. A clear picture emerges of its decisive impact on his life and intellectual development. He came to see Panama as his ticket out of the West Indies, a springboard to the United States, but the area in which he lived was in an important sense a satellite of the United States, the Canal Zone a colony in the tropics.
Walrond was among the first Afro-Caribbeans to transmute the Isthmian experience into imaginative fiction. Caribbean journalists covered the region, as did some African Americans, and a vibrant, extensive oral folk culture arose, from calypso to schoolyard rhymes to legends retold throughout the islands. But not until later did a specifically literary Afro-Caribbean tradition take shape, treating Panama in Spanish and English. In Walrond’s time, Panama literature took two main forms: Hispanophone writing, which was belletristic with European pretensions, and travel writing, which relied on tropes and conventions that were sensational and exoticizing. Neither offered much to a writer who wished to engage in earnest with the questions of culture, nation, language, gender, and race confronting Panama’s Afro-Caribbeans. Neither called into question the premises of colonialist discourse, most importantly its denial of complex subjectivity to people of the global south. But no writer simply invents a genre, and Walrond’s debt to the popular discourse of “tropicality,” as some call it, is abundantly clear and exceedingly complex.1
Calling his book Tropic Death and dwelling with morbid fascination on the ways in which residents of the isthmus suffer and expire, Walrond seems to have drawn on the most sensational elements of writing about Panama. Particularly in writing about Colón, references to disease and decay had abounded since the mid-nineteenth century, when Panama Railroad builders gave the director of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, William Henry Aspinwall, the dubious honor of naming its Caribbean terminus after him. Travelers took delight in describing its unrivaled offensiveness. “Searching for the specialty in which Aspinwall excelled, we found it in her carrion birds, which cannot be surpassed in size or smell,” wrote a 1855 visitor. “The very ground on which one trod was pregnant with disease, and death was distilled in every breath of air. Glued furniture falls to pieces, leather molds, and iron oxidizes in twenty-four hours.”2
In this tradition, the people of the Isthmus were inseparable from the geography of putrefaction.
The palefaced sailor and the melancholy convalescent negro, sitting smoking their pipes on the steps, remind us that the ugly whitewashed buildings are hospitals, and soon passing by some outlying huts with half naked negresses and pot-bellied children sunning themselves in front, we make our way into the thicker part of the settlement over marshy pools corrupt with decaying matter.3
The residents join in the rhetoric of disease and death, symptoms of Colón’s virulent strain of tropicality. The writer who would tell these people’s stories faced the challenge of extricating them from established positions on the palette of Anglo-American travel writing. Walrond would make recourse to the tropes of the Anglo-American tradition, but he did so to subvert it, to remove the residents of the Isthmus from the amber of primitivism, passion, and perversity. He too would write about Colón’s hucksters and clerks, its shopkeepers and laborers, its indigenous people, mestizos, and Asians, but he would cast them as historical agents, struggling with modernity rather than sitting inertly in its way, creating communities with all the exuberance and conflict that entails.
It is hard to overstate the Canal Zone’s role as a contact zone, a point of convergence of different races, ethnicities, social classes, and linguistic and religious backgrounds. A part of the former colony of Nueva Granada, Panama was Hispanophone and Catholic, gaining independence from Colombia in 1903. Panama City and Colón consisted of a small number of elites from Spanish-identified families, many European creoles, descendents of Asian indentured laborers, and a number of West Indians and mestizos.4 Contact between Afro-Caribbeans and indigenous people dated back to slavery, when marronage and emancipation led to rural Afro-Panamanian villages. Over time, indigenous people and mestizos came increasingly to the cities. As complex as the resulting society became, it was not unique in Latin America, but what distinguished Panama was the peculiar presence of North Americans. They had not come simply to impose a military occupation; Panama was technically a sovereign state and a republic. But it had only gained independence through U.S. intervention, the compensation for which was the Canal Zone, a band twelve miles wide that bisected the Isthmus and determined conduct throughout the country. The treaty signed two weeks after Panama’s independence stipulated that the United States controlled the Zone and the surrounding waters, and did so in perpetuity.
Thus, as Walrond’s work reminds us, Panama’s significance as a contact zone derives not only from its startling diversity but also from the relations of power informing and deforming this diversity. Uncle Sam was not the buckra with whom West Indians were acquainted—the planter or landlord—though he shared their pigmentation. He was the Q.M., the quartermaster who supervised work and wages. General Goethals, head of U.S. operations, was clear about the mission: They were to carry out what they had begun in Guam, the Philippines, Hawaii, and Cuba, a neocolonial project that would secure U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere. As Theodore Roosevelt told the British Foreign Office:
It was a good thing for Egypt and the Sudan, and for the world, when England took Egypt and the Sudan. It is a good thing for India that England should control it. And so it is a good thing, a very good thing, for Cuba and for Panama and for the world that the United States has acted as it has actually done during the last six years. The people of the United States and the people of the Isthmus and the rest of mankind will all be the better because we dig the Panama Canal and keep order in its neighborhood. And the politicians and revolutionists at Bogota are entitled to precisely the amount of sympathy we extend to other inefficient bandits.5
The anti-imperialists caviled, but there was really no question of the official position. As the assistant secretary of state said, “No picture of our future is complete which does not comprehend the United States as the dominant power in the Caribbean Sea.”6
The Walrond family lived in an apartment in a six-story tenement—the Ant’s Nest, he called it—through whose back door lay Bottle Alley, a dirt street that took its name from the layers of discarded bottles embedded below the unpaved surface. This was a red-light district neglected by the authorities rapidly modernizing the city’s infrastructure. Originally built on a mangrove swamp, Colón had never been a welcoming place, and whatever development it enjoyed prior to the Canal resulted from its location as the terminus of the railroad completed during the California gold rush. It was little more than a collection of rudely constructed edifices destined to burn and burn again. It remained for years a terrifically unpleasant, even dangerous, place to live. Cholera and dysentery flourished, open sewers emitted “pestilential vapors,” and the rains averaged eleven feet per year. Improvements in Colón were limited until 1912, a year after Walrond’s arrival. “The public works created in the city of Colón between 1903 and 1912 could be counted on the fingers of one hand,” notes a local historian, but with the arrival of North Americans and their families came modernization of the two port cities, an effort to approximate el estilo de vida estadounidense (the U.S. lifestyle).7 The “Yanks” lived in Cristóbal, separated from the rest of Colón by the railroad and docks, and the majority of resources went there. But even in Colón, streets were paved, sewers installed, and a battalion of mosquito-fumigation crews staffed largely by West Indian men were deployed to eradicate blood-borne diseases. A central refrigerated depository adjoined Colón’s train depot, and merchants established laundries, bakeries, even ice cream parlors. By 1912, the Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC) had built twenty-two commissaries to feed employees and twenty-four schools to educate their children, hung telephone lines between Panama City and Colón, and established modern hospitals.8
Amid this modernization, Walrond’s neighborhood remained a notorious slum, trying his mother’s commitment to raise her children as proper Christians. The title story of Tropic Death depicts her character dragging her reluctant son to Plymouth Brethren meetings each night. “There, he’d meet the dredge-digging, Lord-loving peasants of the West Indies on the sore knees of atonement asking the Lord to bring salvation to their perfidious souls” (186). No fewer than thirteen Anglican churches with “Negro congregations” sprang up, thanks largely to Barbadian immigrants.9 Their function was not confined to worship but included cultural and social welfare activities. Nevertheless, challenges to the faithful abounded. Prostitution flourished, and the disproportion of men in the Canal workforce meant that women with whom they might engage in noneconomic relationships were scarce. British and American officers and ICC employees also patronized the brothels, one of which, located on the top floor of the Walronds’ building, received florid depiction in Tropic Death’s story “Subjection.” On the ground floor was a “canteen,” one of the many in Bottle Alley where Canal workers slaked their considerable thirst with rum and Cerveza Balboa, and gambling was rampant. The West Indian men lived in close quarters, severed from the homes and communities in which their values had been rooted.10
Because canal labor was difficult and dangerous, physical and mental health were tenuous luxuries. “What the rigors of nature spared West Indian workers, the hazardous strain of the construction of the Panama Canal demanded from them,” writes George Westerman. “Particularly during the construction era, hosts of them died violent deaths or sustained permanent physical or mental injuries, by premature or delayed explosions of dynamite, asphyxiation in pits, falling from high places, train wrecks, landslides and falling rocks in the Canal Cut, and other hazards of their work.”11 Readers are often taken aback by Tropic Death’s spectacular morbidity. It has been attributed to the author’s peculiarity, the influence of European naturalism and the gothic, or a modernist aversion to sentimentality. What each of these compelling ideas misses is the extent to which suffering and death were endemic to the Canal Zone.12 The reverence with which historians celebrate the engineers who vanquished the Panamanian wilderness is matched only by their admiration for the ICC medical staff, led by William Gorgas. It is an article of faith that the Americans succeeded not because they possessed superior technology (though they did) but because they realized something the French neglected: pursuing the work of the canal meant first caring for the workers themselves. Although West Indians were often the beneficiaries of U.S. medical care, the ICC was capable of terrible exploitation of their injuries and illnesses. Julie Greene has argued that “Gorgas’ determination to study pneumonia while doing little to treat it reflects the concerns of an ambitious young medical establishment eager to analyze and tame the tropics in order to make them safe and comfortable—for whites.” In the area of mental health, West Indians were institutionalized for insanity at alarming rates.13
Perhaps it is not surprising that many West Indians struggled with isolation and despair.14 Their relationship to the place was provisional, economic. The West Indian community proved that piety and religious practice were not impossible to maintain, but the challenges were acute. This was the environment of Walrond’s adolescence. Of course, for a boy of his age, it also offered plenty of amusement and excitement. The character who is his surrogate in Tropic Death pursues “secret escapades to the alley below, and spin gigs and pitch taws with the boys who gathered there.” But he “had to be careful of the pacos,” the police, and “careful of the boys he played with. Some of them used bad words; some had fly-dotted sores on their legs. A city of sores. Some of them had boils around their mouths. Some were pirates—they made bloody raids on the marbles” (179). When Walrond writes “a city of sores,” he invokes not only the disfiguration of the children’s legs but all of Colón. It was not without intrigue and appeal, but it was a far cry from the St. Stephen’s churchyard in Barbados.
JIM CROW IN PANAMA
Above all, the defining feature of Panama’s transnationalism was the institution of Jim Crow. Imported by the Americans, segregation was neither native to Panama nor familiar to many West Indians. The Caribbean had codes of color, to be sure, but the Canal Zone practices were U.S. innovations. The most infamous was the differential payment of ICC employees, black workers in silver, white in gold. Gold and Silver workers were distinguished not only by their currencies but also by the establishments that accepted them and the locations that disbursed them. Segregation was not limited to employment but extended into almost every arena of public life, including housing, health care, education, and recreation.
Even as Jim Crow subordinated Panama’s “Negroes,” it masked their differences from one another. Caribbean immigrants spoke French, Dutch, English, and varieties of Creole. Newcomers shared a common background of rural life, agricultural labor, and a history of colonial rule, but many professed loyalty to the mother country, an allegiance that militated against pan-Caribbean consciousness and persisted long after their arrival in Panama.15 Such expressions caution against assuming race as the primary mode of identification among Caribbean migrants to Panama. The majority came from Barbados and Jamaica, but a striking diversity flourished even within the British islands. Coming together in Colón, West Indians found that their differences were uninteresting and immaterial to the Americans and Panamanians. For Walrond, Panama’s racial regime generated a critical tension that he never fully resolved. The experience of the “Silver People” underscored for him the necessity of collective action against oppression, galvanizing his interest in Garveyism and expressions of racial militancy. At the same time, he felt the very category of the “Negro” under whose sign the struggle was waged had to be deconstructed, retrieving the differences it collapsed.
Walrond received as extensive an education as a black child in the Canal Zone could, first attending “a Spanish boys’ school, then a school conducted by the Wesleyan Mission,” he said.16 The instructor was a graduate of Wolmer’s College, Jamaica, and class met in the vestry of the Wesleyan Chapel. Surrounded by Panamanian children, he learned Spanish, a skill that proved beneficial, but he must not have stayed long at the Wesleyan Mission because he graduated from the Canal Zone Public Schools in 1913 at age fourteen. This was a segregated system and, at the time the Walronds arrived, black children were only admitted through fifth grade. Barbados was highly literate, so it was jarring to have arrived someplace in which only half the children could read and write. The ICC expanded the school system to keep pace with the arrival of laborers’ families. In the summer of 1906 alone, the number of students and schools doubled.17 But an equal education was not provided to all students. Four ICC schools were white-only in 1906, while 26 others admitted both white and “colored” children (though in practice 90 percent were nonwhite). The following year, ten schools served white children and thirteen served “colored” children. Although “schools were provided for the children of all United States citizen employees,” no such provision was made for the children of noncitizens. Only those who lived in the Canal Zone proper were guaranteed access, and just “a small percentage of the non-citizen employees lived there.” In short, “the funds made available for education could provide for only a small portion of the children requiring education” during the construction era. The year the canal was completed, the student-teacher ratio in the white schools was 30:1, in the “colored” schools 65:1. From the start, white children could attend through twelfth grade, while “colored” students were limited to lower levels that rose incrementally, eventually extending to twelfth grade in 1946. Thus, when Walrond says he graduated in 1913 from the Canal Zone Public Schools, we should understand that he probably completed seven grades. Given these circumstances, it was a privilege to continue one’s studies, but Walrond’s family sent him to private tutors. “I studied for three years under two private masters—Allan Thomas and W. C. Parker. Here, under these two men, graduates of Wolmer’s College in Jamaica, I did supplementary work in Latin, French, and higher mathematics.”18 He met his tutors at the Sixth Street Mission, near Bottle Alley, and Parker was well-known in the West Indian community, a friend of Marcus Garvey and his fiancée, Amy Ashwood, Walrond’s neighbor in Colón.19
THE ISTHMIAN CANAL COMMISSION
After concluding his schooling in 1916, Walrond continued his informal education in the streets, which offered an eighteen-year-old abundant opportunities for mischief. “I was thrust among a gang of boys whose ideal diversion was to hop moving trains, and I unquestioningly fell in. I don’t know how many times I’ve been chastised, in the most delicate manner, I assure you, for wanting to ‘get my legs cut off.’”20 His first job was as a messenger in the Quartermaster’s Department (QMD), which coordinated the construction and maintenance of Canal Zone buildings, painting, carpentry, sanitation, and the dismantling of old French-era machinery. The QMD requisitioned construction supplies, arranging delivery and storage throughout the Canal Zone, and as a messenger Walrond entered an elaborate traffic in invoices and receipts. With transactions of $11 million annually, the QMD was among the largest ICC departments, employing at the height of the construction 221 “Gold” and 3,113 “Silver” workers.21
Through this position, Walrond learned of a clerkship in the health department, across the train tracks in Cristóbal. He fictionalized his experience acquiring this job in “Wind in the Palms.” The young protagonist is ambitious, cunning, and linguistically precocious. Upon learning of the position he approaches the director, addressing him in a different idiom from his West Indian peers.
“Beg pardon, sir,” he said, “I would like to speak to you. Now that you’ve moved from the old Panama Railroad building on 3rd Street to new quarters in Cristobal, I understand you have been getting in a lot of new equipment.” […] “I also understand,” he went on, “that you’re looking for someone to help out with the work in the office. Do you think, Sir, that you could give me the job?” (“Wind in the Palms” 238)
The director bristles at having been accosted in the courtyard, but he gives the young man the job, admiring his pluck. If the story may be read autobiographically, Walrond did not do much more than “check and file the day’s sanitary reports,” but it put him in close proximity with white employees and at the “nerve center” of the ICC health operations, legendary for its eradication of malaria and yellow fever.22 He listened as the chief clerk bellowed into the telephone, “Fumigate every outdoor sink, WC and garbage can in the alleys of Colon; flood the G Street sewage canal with all the oil and tar the budget can stand; tear down and set fire to anything that looks like an invitation to pestilence!” (“Wind in the Palms” 236). Professional connections allow Walrond’s character to transcend the squalid conditions of his Bottle Alley flat, a leap attributed to his aquiline nose, his bronze skin (not too dark), and his facility with standard English.
Interacting with Americans does not prevent him from code switching, however, once he is back in the company of West Indians. His friend in the story is the director’s chauffeur and an unrepentant roustabout: “No ten-cent dance on the dim, moonlight, balconied edges of the barrio at the lower end of Cash Street was complete without him; waxing and winding to the rhythm of a Jamaican mento was with him a nightly diversion” (“Wind in the Palms” 239). “The Major say you can go home now,” he tells Charleroy, “Him don’t need you any more today” (239). He slips easily back into the local vernacular: “Lahd, but you lazy, me son,” he teases, and he employs a characteristic Caribbean double construction, slyly accusing Charleroy of scrubbing the color from his skin: “Tell me something, is bleach you been bleachin’ again?” (239).23 In addition to code switching, Walrond’s character demonstrates shrewdness in managing his knowledge of the U.S. occupation of Haiti and incarceration of Haitian rebels, suppressing it during his impromptu interview with the health department director. If the story is to be credited, he understood as a young man the broader role his ICC bosses played in political maneuverings in the Caribbean.24
THE STAR & HERALD
During his stint at the Health Department, Walrond became a working reporter. “I began to write news stories for the daily press on the side. I wrote accounts of cricket matches, baseball games, and ‘rounders’ among the West Indian colony for the Star & Herald,” a Panama City English-language daily. “Eventually I met an editor who said he’d give me a regular reporter’s job, which he did.”25 Walrond made his beat sound romantic and hard-boiled: “I used to write up brawls, murders, political scandals, voodoo rituals, labor confabs, campaigns, concerts, dramatic affairs, shipping intelligence” (“Godless” 33). He held this position until his departure for New York two years later. The Star & Herald was an unusual newspaper and Walrond an unusual hire. It was transnational from its inception, the brainchild of three enterprising U.S. gold rushers who found themselves waylaid in Panama en route to California in 1849.26 When Walrond arrived on staff in 1916, the Star & Herald was one of Latin America’s premier dailies, with offices in Panama City and Manhattan. It published in Spanish and English, covered local and world affairs, and advocated a Pan-American vision: “We want to make the peoples of both continents more and more conscious of their common interest, their mutual dependence, their united destiny.”27 Its core readership remained the expatriates, but as this community evolved and adopted a Creole identity, so did the newspaper. Although its editorial orientation was decidedly North American, neither the editors nor the contributors wholly endorsed the U.S. occupation. Editorials differentiated between “the beneficial development” of Panama and its “harmful exploitation by foreign capital.” This vision of sustainable development allied the newspaper with Panamanians rather than North Americans and the shareholders of corporations such as United Fruit. This may have been one reason the Star & Herald hired a reporter like Walrond—it was not merely an arm of the ICC and recognized the benefits of a transnational perspective on Panamanian affairs. Another reason was the opening in the summer of 1916 of a Colón office. The Colón office may not have been intended to promote West Indian coverage, but because of their concentration on the Caribbean coast this was the effect, one that likely resulted in Walrond’s employment.
A column entitled “West Indian Circles” ran almost daily in 1916–1918, some of which was Walrond’s handiwork. “More than 3,000 West Indian Youths Attend Celebration of Emancipation Day Fete,” for example, and “Cricket Match Date Wanted: Silence Over Intercolonial Tournament Excites Curiosity.”28 Often “West Indian Circles” contained local interest blurbs which, despite their brevity, convey the texture of West Indian life in the Canal Zone and the newspaper’s role in consolidating that community. Results of cricket and boxing matches appeared with breathless accounts of upcoming contests, and notices ran for films at the Silver clubhouses. Myriad meeting announcements indicate the institutions West Indian residents established, including fraternal lodges, prayer groups, mutual aid societies, literary societies at the Silver branches of the YMCA, and the West Indian Democratic Club, a forum that facilitated organizing by Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Organization.29 The coverage reflected a desire to celebrate initiatives seeking to “uplift the race,” and the Star & Herald signaled an interest in Afro-Caribbeans not only as a subject to cover but also an audience to reach.
RACE AND NATION IN PANAMA
Walrond dramatized the relationship between Panamanians and West Indians in all of his writing about the Canal Zone. It was fraught with conflict, he suggested, yet inspired some of the most fascinating cultural action in the black Atlantic. He wrote about the prejudice Panamanians harbored toward West Indians in an essay published in England and reprinted in Jamaica, viewing that prejudice as primarily national and only secondarily racial.
In Panama, where thousands of British West Indians had settled, I got my first taste of prejudice—prejudice on the grounds of my British nationality! The natives were a mongrelized race of Latins with a strong feeling of antipathy toward British Negroes. But their hatred of us, curiously enough, had been engendered by our love of England. […] Emigrants from the British West Indies had settled in large numbers on the Isthmus. They kept sternly aloof. This, to the sensitive and explosive Latins, was regarded as a slight. It was interpreted as an affront to las costumbres del pais [customs of the land]. Reprisals took the shape of epithets such as chombos negros and occasional armed incursions into the West Indian colony. (“White Man” 562)
His autobiographical stories register his awareness of the tension even as a boy. Before it became a subject of intellectual reflection it induced an acute sense of vulnerability.
Suddenly a gang of boys came up, Spanish boys. One of them, seeing his top, circling and spinning, measured it; then winding up, drew back and hauled away. The velocity released made a singing sound. [He] stood back, awed. The top descended on the head of his with astounding accuracy and smashed it into a thousand pieces. The boys laughed and wandered on. At marbles some of the boys would cheat, and say, “if you don’t like it, then lump it! Chombo! Perro!” Some of them’d seize his taw or the marbles he had put up and walk away, daring him to follow. In the presence of all this, he’d draw back, far back, brooding. (Tropic Death 180)
The withdrawal and brooding of Walrond’s youth reflected his resentment toward West Indians’ marginalization, and he struggled to reconcile it with his acculturation to Panama and his emerging vision of common political cause among the country’s nonwhite residents, many of whom were vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the U.S. occupation.
Walrond grew keenly aware of the corrosive nature of colonialism, its erosion of the humanity of both oppressor and oppressed. He wrote about the intimidation of laborers and their efforts to resist. The short story “Subjection” dramatizes this struggle explicitly. An American Marine heading a West Indian canal crew knocks one of them down and kicks him in the head for talking back. The injured fellow lies bleeding on the ground but the others decline to help—all but Ballet, a valiant Barbadian who alone is willing to risk a confrontation.
“Hey, you!” shouted Ballet at last loud enough for the Marine to hear, “Why—wha’ you doin’? Yo’ don’ know yo’ killin’ dat boy, ni’?”
“Le’ all we giv’ he a han’ boys—”
But his coworkers are unwilling to risk angering the boss. Each demurs. “Wha’ yo’ got fi’ do wit’ it?” asks one, “De boy ain’t got no business talkin’ back to de marinah man.” Another agrees, “Now he mek up he bed, let ‘im lie down in it” (Tropic Death 100). The exchange suggests the divide-and-conquer strategy through which the Marines subdue the workforce. Only Ballet refuses the rationalization that the offending worker must “sleep in the bed he’s made” mouthing off to the Marine. He “staggers up to the Marine” and says, “Yo’ gwine kill dat boy.” To which the Marine replies, “You mind yer own goddamn business, Smarty, and go back to work.… Or else” (Tropic Death 101). The next day the Marine chases Ballet off the worksite and shoots him, muttering “I’ll teach you niggers down here how to mouth off to a white man” (Tropic Death 111).
“Subjection” is unusual because Walrond’s Panama writing generally relinquishes binary oppositions, white/black, exploiter/exploited. His work tends to emphasize differences of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and language. It is not that the dominant culture vanishes or that colonialism and racism dissolve, but their force is mediated through relationships among subaltern characters. The Panama stories that highlight this point revolve around sites of commercial exchange. Walrond was always drawn to the dramatic possibilities of commercial activity, setting stories in brothels and bodegas, beauty parlors and market squares, restaurants and import-export firms. They ask how the volatile proximity into which the canal project has thrown people of various nationalities will work itself out. These stories are discussed here in relation to their publication, but together they form an extended meditation on what the future may hold for Panama’s West Indians, the canal having been completed and the region’s social fabric altered fundamentally.
DEPARTURE
Like many ambitious intellectuals of his generation, Walrond realized that opportunities in the Caribbean were limited. H. N. Walrond was the owner and editor of an English-language weekly, The Panama Workman. It has been asserted that Eric Walrond was his nephew and assisted on the Workman—a Garveyite newspaper. Although it is possible Eric Walrond was involved, no extant evidence confirms it, nor does Walrond refer to the Workman or his uncle in any surviving documents.30 He was a reporter for the Star & Herald up until his departure, which he represented matter-of-factly: “Eventually, I got to the point where I thought I must be moving out into a bigger world of endeavor. So before I knew it I was on my way to America!” Among his regular beats was the popular boxing circuit. Covering a bout between two African American fighters, Walrond wound up in discussion with one of their managers, a white Bostonian who encouraged him to come north. “[He] drew for me after the rest had gone home graphic pictures of work and opportunity ‘up the States.’ It edged its way into me slowly, uprootingly […] and in a month I packed up, and was on my way to New York.”31