ropic Death is a strange and brutal book, “a work of blistering imaginative power.”1 Written for a North American audience, it nevertheless refused to make the Caribbean easily accessible. Relying heavily on reported speech, it is an extended exercise in code switching, moving deftly between vernaculars and linguistic registers. A number of Caribbean dialects vie on the page with the narrator’s Standard English, and Caribbean place names and practices are rarely explained. In this sense, it is a terrifically impertinent performance. Four stories are set in Barbados, one in British Guiana, one on a ship between Honduras and Jamaica, and four in Panama. Reading it was a bracing experience, even for those who had visited the region. One reviewer admitted, “To those of us who know the West Indies as a pleasant winter resort, […] Eric Walrond’s picture is like a stunning blow. One asks oneself, can it be true?”2But Walrond was not just asserting an alternate truth about the Caribbean, he was revising the very terms of discussion. The book was primarily read for realism at the time, and although it often achieves a sort of verisimilitude, it frustrates realist expectations. Walrond abhorred what he felt was a tendency to disguise sociological tracts as novels and associated great fiction with the imaginative flights of romanticism, introducing supernatural elements into plausible plots. In one sense then, Tropic Death delivered the “stunning blow” of an alternate Caribbean truth but, in another sense, it contested truth telling itself, presaging the Martinican writer Edouard Glissant’s conception of the novel of the Americas: “Realism—that is, the logical and rational attitude toward the visible world—more than anywhere else would in our case betray the true meaning of things.”3 Tropic Death pursued this paradoxical project of depicting “the true meaning” of the Caribbean by discarding “the logical and rational attitude toward the visible world.”
The book was eagerly anticipated in New York, where its publisher Horace Liveright was a minor celebrity. In her Opportunity column, Gwendolyn Bennett wrote, “I can scarcely wait for the book to be on the market.… Few of the Negro writers that are being heralded on all sides today can begin to create the color that fairly rolls itself from Mr. Walrond’s facile pen. Tropic Death ought to have that ripe color that is usually the essence of Mr. Walrond’s writing.”4 As he finished the manuscript, he hoped it would put him in contention for a coveted prize, the Harmon Award, given annually “for distinguished achievement among Negroes” in several fields. He would have to wait a year to win it but the endorsements he received indicated the expectations for his book—from the editor of Forbes magazine to the Urban League’s executive director to Donald Friede of Boni & Liveright, who called Tropic Death “as fine as anything it has been my fortune to read in the last few years. I believe that Mr. Walrond has more real literary ability than all of the other negro writers put together.” Although he did not prevail that year, Walrond’s application drew attention to the book in advance of its publication.5
Walrond had long considered how to depict Caribbean life in fiction. At twenty-three, he wrote in Negro World about the Anglo-American tradition, which he called “literary sailoring.”
One of the joys of literary sailoring is to picture the moral depravity of the black. The travel literature of Africa and the West Indies, and paradoxical as it may seem, of our own Dixie, is full of this sort of thing. A Boston adventurer, let us say, goes to Turkey, or Martinique, or to a Spanish-American seaport. The first thing that attracts his attention is the awful lack of economic life, the free and unrestricted gratification of the sex instinct and the universal lowering of moral standards. He judges the native not by a local standard of things, but a far-fetched idealistic one. The art, morals, science, religion, and literature of a country [are] examined without regard to the country’s history, geography, or anything else. [But] if one were to proceed on the basis of absolute equality in the human family an unprejudiced investigator may prove that all is not hopeless with the darker race. (“Morality” 4)
What would it mean to write “by a local standard of things,” “to proceed on the basis of absolute equality in the human family”? To take account of the region’s history, geography, and value systems? Models were few and far between. Beyond questions of authorial perspective stood questions of form. What would such a literature sound like? What shape would it take? After all, Caribbean poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite has said, “The hurricane does not roar in pentameters.”6
Walrond felt compelled to write Caribbean fiction not only to correct a distorting tradition but for the affirmative reason that the region offered an untapped wealth of material. He asserted its “intrinsic artistic worth” in 1927.
In legends, folklore, and the primary essentials of a folk-literature, the islands abound. Rich in superstition, witchcraft, and Anancy tales, having in its cities and towns a social life quite as gay and abandoned as any to be met with in Venice or Milan; equipped with a climate that is designed to give color and ease to the pursuit of the native life, it is a bit disconcerting to find in the output of the native, with perhaps one or two ineffectual exceptions, none but the remotest idea of the intrinsic artistic worth of all this. Indeed, the poets and creative writers of the West Indies, who, it seems, are just beginning to get excited over the literary traditions of Europe and the British Isles, succeed usually in giving little more than a pretty continentalized version of the life of their exotic tropic heath. (“Color” 227)
Literary imitation of European models is disparaged for producing derivative, inferior work. But if Walrond wished to break with tradition, no obvious models existed. It would be seven years before McKay wrote Banana Bottom, ten before C. L. R. James wrote Minty Alley, and a whole generation before the Barbadian Brooklynite Paule Marshall wrote Brown Girl, Brownstones. “[W]riters of African American descent provided Walrond’s fiction with no clear and direct models,” notes Carl Wade, and the existing Caribbean fiction—“a handful of texts by white Jamaican writers”—was of limited utility.7 Tropic Death was not sui generis, but the quality and force of its originality are stunning. Its relationship to available traditions is worth exploring, for Wade is right that it was at once their product and their rejection.8
Realism has a distinctive resonance in discussions of African American literature. Generally understood to mean verisimilitude in character and dialogue, probabilism at the plot level, and a repudiation of sentimentality, in its African American literary context realism meant a departure from the tradition of buffoonish or cloying “Negro” characters and a willingness to depict not only the virtuous and successful of the race but also its raffish and disreputable members. Realism was a contested term, a proxy for arguments about class, popular reading, and literature’s relationship to journalism and photography. But even as Anglo-American modernists arrayed themselves against realism, African Americans tended to use realism and modernism interchangeably; to become modern meant discarding shopworn tropes and writing authentically about the race, showing things “as they are.” Thus, the rhetorical divergence between realism and modernism in interwar Anglo-American writing was not mirrored in African American letters, despite the efforts of Toomer, Hughes, and Hurston to challenge realist constraints. Like much of their work, Tropic Death was excessive; it could pass for realism but announced its status as a linguistic performance, calling attention to its formal construction. It was difficult. Despite continued efforts to read it back into the domain of literary realism, and despite its engagement with material conditions in the Caribbean, it is a spectacular failure on realist grounds.
To be sure, geography and folk life appear in meticulous detail. Readers learn the differences among the lush verdure of the Guyanese coast, the marl roads of Barbados, and the tenements of Colón, between life above and below deck on a steamship plying Caribbean waters. Structures of class and race reveal themselves through dialogue and exposition rather than the didactic voice of an intrusive narrator. And in Walrond’s greatest feat, speech is rendered with a careful ear for diction and pronunciation, a massive project in making the Caribbean audible. Thus, one could imagine it as realistic, a transcript of the author’s observations. Finally, the book was averse to sentimentality, the realist’s bête noire. Walrond’s refusal to sugarcoat the squalor of his characters’ lives, to dignify their motives, or to pull punches in resolving his storylines was the most consistent observation contemporary readers made. It was partly a question of plot; Walrond devised as many ways for his characters to perish as there were stories in the collection, each ending in a casualty. Three are murdered in cold blood, three fall prey to supernatural phenomena, and four die of ostensibly natural causes: disease, fire, malnutrition, and shark attack. But the book’s antisentimentality was also a question of tone; the struggles and deaths are handled with clinical detachment.9 Many take place offscreen, as it were, reported after the fact with ironic understatement. One hears in the ending of “Subjection”—a story about an insubordinate West Indian laborer who is chased off his Canal Zone worksite and shot by a marine—a precursor to Chinua Achebe’s conclusion to Things Fall Apart. There, the death of the rebellious colonial Okonkwo is abstracted into a tally mark in a bureaucrat’s ledger. “Subjection” ends similarly, “In the Canal Record, the QM at Toro Point took occasion to extol the virtues of the Department which kept the number of casualties in the recent native labor uprising down to one” (111). Walrond’s tone suggested that the severity of Afro-Caribbean experience should be rendered with implacable directness. For this quality as much as his unhappy endings he was considered realistic.
The fact was, few North American readers could gainsay his representation of Caribbean folkways and speech, so a great deal of what passed for authentic was a projection. Readers hoping to find evidence of life as it was truly lived in the tropics were encouraged by Walrond’s vivid evocations to feel satisfied. Certainly it was the promise Boni & Liveright made, calling the book “realistically drawn,” its stories “a cross-section of tropical Negro experience.” Happily for Boni & Liveright, what was “realistic” on Caribbean terms was extraordinary for others, conveniently fusing the book’s realist and antirealist qualities.
Only the exotic intermingling of races below the Gulf Stream could yield such a bountiful harvest. Culled from a varied and authentic experience, Eric Walrond’s work is stark, brilliant, true. There is poetry, folk essence in it. […] The people who come within the range of the author’s vision are as colorful as a pheasant. They are British whites—buckra johnnies—and upstage blacks, senoritas and wordy West Indians, American marines and Latin seamen. It gives a cross-section of tropical life indeed.10
Framed as a survey, Tropic Death was offered as a distillation of “folk essence.” Not poetry, though there was “poetry in it,” another gesture reconciling objectivity and creative license, realism and lyricism. They went on to anoint Walrond as unique, but by negation: “With this book the least sentimental of Negro prose writers arrives.” Publicity blurbs may tell us little about publishers’ real opinions, but they say a lot about what they thought readers valued. The absence of sentimentality was emphasized, as was the novelty of the subject, for with Walrond’s arrival “a region hitherto steeped in utter mist looms broodingly on the literary horizon.” Boni & Liveright may have imagined African Americans among Tropic Death’s readers, but the target audience was mainly white readers who considered themselves cosmopolitan and progressive.11
The most significant statement may be one in which the copywriter hazarded a bit of literary history: “Stories by American negroes have busied themselves largely with problems of race either in the South or in our larger northern cities. Here, for the first time, are purely objective stories, devoid of prejudice, propaganda, or excessive race consciousness.”12 It is striking that Walrond is not distinguished from “American negroes,” given the importance of his Caribbeanness to the book’s publicity. More striking still are the terms in which Walrond’s priority is established: the first to illuminate a “region hitherto steeped in utter mist”; the first “Negro” to write objectively, without “prejudice, propaganda, or excessive race consciousness.” It is a willful misreading of the book, but revealing of the problematic as it stood at the time. Boni & Liveright similarly endorsed There Is Confusion as “a new sort of book about colored people” because of what it lacked: “no lynchings, no inferiority complexes, no propaganda.”13
In fact, Tropic Death makes some of the most strident anticolonial statements in early-twentieth-century fiction and expresses a profound race consciousness. Only its lyricism and painterly quality obscure these commitments. “Once a day the Rums ate,” Walrond writes of an impoverished Barbadian family in “Drought.” “At dusk, curve of crimson gold in the sensuous tropic sky, they had tea. English to a degree, it was a rite absurdly regal. Pauperized native blacks clung to the utmost vestiges of the Crown” (31). The imagery and sibilance of the prose compete for attention with the substantive claim, the absurdity of “pauperized” islanders imitating their colonial rulers. Far from evading questions of imperial power, Walrond dramatizes them vividly, as in his approach to a shark attack—a tourist ship “came near. Huddled in thick European coats, the passengers viewed from their lofty estate the spectacle of two naked Negro boys peeping up at them from a wiggly bateau. ‘Penny, mistah, penny mistah!’ Somebody dropped a quarter. Ernest, like a shot, flew after it. Half a foot down he caught it as it twisted and turned in the gleaming sea” (80). When his brother dives into the shark-infested waters the crowd gasps, “Where has the nigger swimmer gone to?” (73). In another story, a West Indian mother explains to her “vagabond” son his stark options in Panama: “Yo’ go to work, sah, an’ besides, who is to feed me if yo’ don’t wuk? Who—answer me dat! Boy yo’ bes’ mek up yo’ min’ an’ get under de heel o’ de backra” (103). As her designation of the Canal Authority as “de backra” suggests, rule is rule whether English or American. This is also made plain in “Subjection,” where a laborer provokes a U.S. foreman, who retorts, “I’ll show you goddam niggers how to talk back to a white man” (111). The political dimension of these stories is barely concealed by their stylized surface, but style was critical to the book’s presentation as “devoid of propaganda” and “excessive” race consciousness.
More important than its individual storylines, the collection traces the tumultuous process of migration and acculturation so many Caribbean residents experienced. Significantly, this is not represented as natural or inevitable but the result of contingent forces bound closely to capitalist development in the hemisphere. Tropic Death is a narrative of the entry of the Caribbean into industrial modernity, the transition of its inhabitants from estate labor and small farming to proletarianization. Tillers of the soil have become industrial workers, provincial estates are abandoned for markets, and the serfs and squatters of the old order now collect wages at the pay car. Culture provides continuity, linking back home through evangelical Christianity and familiar foods. Even the stories set outside Panama reveal its influence throughout the region as a labor market, a catalyst for disaggregating and reconfiguring communities.
Despite these concerns, the book passed as “objective” because its prose suggested a break with the politics of racial representation. It moved with the lapidary style and syntactic compression of much American modernism: “Blue cassava—unfit for cakes—about to be grated and pressed for starch; withering twigs, half-ripe turnips, bolonjays a languid flood of green and purple, a graveler—a watery corklike potato endwardly dangling; a greedy sow, tugging at a stake, a crusty, squib-smoked ‘touch bam’” (116). Moreover, because it was set in the Caribbean, Tropic Death’s relationship to American race relations was equivocal. The impression the book gives of impartiality on the charged issue of race arises from a displacement. Walrond evoked the figure of the “Negro” only to conjure him away, still speaking eccentrically but now in new sounds. Locating Tropic Death in the Caribbean, he avoided the pitfalls of the two established literary traditions: the plantation tradition, suffused with sentimentality and stereotypes, and the protest tradition, often disparaged as artless. In fact, strong elements of both traditions persisted in Tropic Death, but its Caribbean location invited claims for its novelty.
Walrond challenged the North American tendency to see race first, ignoring intraracial differences. Mr. Poyer, recently returned to Barbados in the story “Panama Gold,” runs a grocery that Ella Heath visits one afternoon. A kindly neighbor alerted her that Poyer lost a leg, “Got it cut off on de canal” (39). As Ella approaches, Poyer boasts to his friend, Bruin, of having forced the Canal Authority to pay damages by invoking his British citizenship.
“Pay me,” I says, “or I’ll sick de British bulldog on all yo’ Omericans!” […] I let dem understand quick enough dat I wuz a Englishman and not a bleddy American nigger! A’ Englishman—big distinction in dat, Bruing! And dat dey couldn’t do as dey bleddy well please wit’ a subject o’ de King! Whuh? I carry on like a rattlesnake. Carry on like a true Bimshah. (44)
We may not be meant to take Poyer’s bravado at face value, but the strategic use of the legal protections of the Crown did constitute an intervention in business as usual in Panama, and Walrond’s strategic use of Poyer challenged prevalent assumptions about who built the canal and who was a “Negro.” Poyer’s refusal to be taken for “a bleddy American nigger,” his claim to Englishness, reflects an important tension. Intraracial differences were not only cherished elements of cultural identity, they were matters of legal consequence.
Poyer’s account was at odds with the Panama mythology Americans knew. In this respect, it exemplifies Tropic Death’s broader concern to articulate a counter-narrative about the region and about Panama in particular. This involved dramatizing a collision between West Indian life as elaborated under colonial rule and industrial modernity as administered by North Americans. It also involved changing the grammar of history, transposing Caribbean people into the subjects of the narrative not merely its objects. Finally, as important as the story were the voices, for as Walrond knew the voices were themselves the story.
Panama was central to the mythology of the United States’ emergence on the global stage through ingenuity rather than force. It is “a tale enshrined in popular memory and innumerable histories and novels,” notes historian Julie Greene, the United States becoming “a world leader at the very moment when World War I broke out and split the nations of Europe apart.”14 Despite adversity and against all odds, the Panama Canal succeeded through the Americans’ steadfast resolve and native genius—so goes the popular narrative.15 Starting with the French attempt in the 1880s, the U.S. popular press had been intrigued by the canal, but the U.S. revival of the project fired the public imagination, and periodicals sought to convey the grandeur of the project’s scale and instill national pride.16 Its completion occasioned public expositions, extolling the project as a triumph of the American character and suppressing the imperial dimension of the U.S. occupation and the role of West Indian labor.
Tropic Death exploited this popular fascination but challenged its premises. Instead of casting Panama as a testament to American ingenuity and civilization, Walrond wrote about its laborers, their families, and their communities. North Americans had been encouraged to imagine the area in touristic terms, “one of the world’s greatest travel thrills.” My Trip Through the Panama Canal, authorized by the U.S. Canal Administration, called itself “an accurate guide to the Panama Canal” without one reference to Panamanians. On its cover, smartly dressed tourists populate the deck of a steamship passing through the canal locks, parasols and bowler hats shading their eyes as they observe the lush forest and lounge on divans. “Not even the pyramids of Gizeh, for centuries counted the greatest of man-made wonders, can compare with the Panama Canal,” it read, “The pyramids stand for the mystic past; the Canal is an imperishable tribute to the genius of the present.”17 The canal not only heralded the momentous entry of the United States into world affairs, it was also a gorgeous spectacle, replete with “flowers amidst the green along the shores,” “waving foliage of banana plantations,” “purple slopes of the mountains in the Continental Divide,” and “red roofed military stations.” A feast for the senses and spur to the imagination, the canal was framed as pleasurable and picturesque.
Walrond wrote explicitly against the grain of this mythology, beginning “The Wharf Rats,” a story set on the outskirts of Colón, with the labor behind the spectacle.
Down in the Cut drifted hordes of Italians, Greeks, Chinese, Negroes—a hardy, sun-defying set of white, black, and yellow men. But the bulk of the actual brawn for the work was supplied by the dusky peons of those coral isles in the Caribbean ruled by Britain, France, and Holland. At the Atlantic end of the Canal the blacks were herded in boxcar huts buried in the jungles of Silver City; in the murky tenements perilously poised on the narrow banks of Faulke’s River; in the low, smelting cabins of Coco Té. (67)
He affirmed the vivid pictorial quality associated with the region—its human mosaic—but restored a black presence and colonial history. He also introduced the Colón Man, around whom an entire mythology formed in the Caribbean.18 The Colón Man was the prodigal son who returned to his island, resplendent in his new wealth, talking “Yankee” and acting proud. As Tropic Death indicates, he was regarded with a mix of envy and suspicion. Ella Heath, the Barbadian protagonist of “Panama Gold,” smells arrogance on Poyer, the shopkeeper who lost his leg in Panama. “T’ink dat ev’y ooman is de same,” she accuses him, “But yo’ is a dam liar! Nutting can frighten me. All dem bag o’ flour yo’ a’ got, an’ dem silk shut, an’ dem gold teets, an’ dem Palama hats, yo’ a spote round heah wid—dem don’t frighten me. I is a woman what is usta t’ings” (47). Just as Poyer meets his death in a house fire in this story, others dramatize the plight of the Colón Man, both on the islands and the isthmus. Given this concern, it is striking that several of Tropic Death’s protagonists are women; six of its ten stories are devoted to women’s experiences and the challenges of motherhood in particular.
Tropic Death also left no doubt that Panama was a new American frontier. “The Palm Porch,” first published in The New Negro, was revised to amplify this critique. It originally began by introducing at length the owner of the brothel of the story’s title. It proceeded to describe the surrounding area, transformed by dredges from a swamp into a habitable plain, but it cast the Americans as civilizers: “Before the Revolution it was a black, evil forest-swamp. Deer, lions, mongooses and tiger cats went prowling through it. Then the Americans came … came with saw and spear, tar and Lysol. About to rid it … molten city … of its cancer, fire swept it up on the bosom of the lagoon” (“Palm” 115). Not so in Tropic Death. The same story begins with the landscape’s transformation, no longer a benign development. Blackness no longer signifies evil but the bodies of West Indian labor.
Below, a rock engine was crushing stone, shooting up rivers of steam and signaling the frontier’s rebirth. Opposite, there was proof, a noisy, swaggering sort of proof, of the gradual death and destruction of the frontier post. Black men behind wheelbarrows slowly ascended a rising made of spliced boards and emptied the sand rock into the maw of a mixing machine. More black men, a peg down, behind wheelbarrows, formed a line which caught the mortar pouring into the rear organ of the omnivorous monster. “All, all gone,” cried Miss Buckner, and the girls at her side shuddered. All quietly felt the sterile menace of it. […] “All of that,” she sighed, “all of that was swamp when I came to the Isthmus. All.” (85)
Miss Buckner’s reminiscence deepens, painting an impressionistic history at odds with the original story’s affirmation of the U.S. subjugation of savage wilderness. “Dark dense thicket; water paving it. Deer, lions, tigers bounding through it. Centuries, perhaps, of such pure, free rule. Then some khaki-clad, red-faced and scrawny-necked whites deserted the Zone and brought saws to the roots of palmetto, spears to the bush cats and jaguars, lysol to the mosquitoes and flies, and tar to the burning timber-swamp” (86). This is not salvation but the fall, a bucolic idyll slashed and burned. It is pursued with reckless abandon: “A wild racing to meet the Chagres [River] and explore the high reaches of the Panama jungle. After the torch, ashes and ghosts—bare, black stalks, pegless stumps, flakes of charred leaves and half-burnt tree trunks” (86). This is a new world Waste Land, notes Michelle Stephens, the European nightmare of postwar impotence recast as the cataclysm of industrial modernity, a “sterile menace.”19
Traditionally, the poetics of Caribbean representation were characterized by two dominant elements: a silencing or caricature of Afro-Caribbean voices and a “tropicalization” of the region through a discourse of the picturesque. Walrond’s characters were not stock types splashing local color on the writer’s canvas. Their voices expressed history in the stories they told and in the very shape of their sounds. Walrond dwells on exchanges such as the following between the Barbadian Ella Heath and her neighbor Lizzie Dalrimple, whose adolescent daughter has offended Ella.
“Hey, I ask de gal if she mahmie home an’ Lizzie, yo’ know what she tell ma, why de little rapscallion tu’n me she back side an’ didn’t even say ax yo’ pardin.”
“Come in heah, miss, come in heah an tu’n round. Ax Miss Heath pardin! Ax she! Yo’ won’t—yo’ wretch! Vagabond! Take dat, an’ dat, an’ dat—shut up, I sez. Shut up, befo’ I box ev’y one o’ dem teets down yo’ t’roat! Didn’t I tell yo’ not to be rude, shut up, yes—didn’t I tell yo’ not to be onmannerly to people, dat yo’ must respect de neighbors? Like she ain’t got no manners! Shut up, I sez, befo’ I hamstring yo’, yo’ little whelp!”
“Dese gal picknees nowadays is ‘nouf to send yo’ to de madhouse! Hey, but Lizzie, what we gwine do wit’ de chilrun, ni? Ev’y day dey is gittin’ wussuh and wussuh.” (36–37)
Passages such as this confront us with the conjunction of sound and sense. The literal matter could not be more ordinary: Capadosia’s mother, furious at her irreverence, punishes her and laments the trials of motherhood. To say that Walrond was conveying something of the strictness of maternal discipline in Barbados would not be incorrect but it would be incomplete, for what is also communicated is the particularity of the women’s voices. Standard English orthography is violated so consistently that we are compelled to read differently, to shape the sounds in our mind’s ear, to aspirate differently and mind our glottal stops. This is not a question of translation, of substituting one lexicon for another. The daring is in the orality and the orthography: the dramatic compression of He gwine beat she fo’ true, the transcription of wussah for worse. A non-Caribbean reader can infer meaning from context, but the real labor—and real pleasure—of Tropic Death is its injunction to sound.
Comparisons may be drawn to Walrond’s Harlem contemporaries, who rendered folk speech on the page, liberating it from caricature by suggesting its ingenuity and integrity. But Tropic Death did something different. Unlike Hurston and Hughes, who worked principally with African American speech, Walrond addressed what linguists call the creole continuum, the range of influence by and divergence from English and other colonial languages. He not only attempted a variety of Caribbean dialects, from Barbadian English to Panamanian Spanglish, he mediated them with his own English, itself a North American inflection of the King’s English he acquired as a child. It was not until a generation later, during the era of Caribbean nationalism, that such an undertaking was really theorized. Glissant referred to his own writing as a “synthesis of written syntax and spoken rhythms, of ‘acquired’ writing and oral ‘reflex,’ of the solitude of writing and the solidarity of the collective voice.”20 Walrond aspired to a comparable synthesis, recognizing that this was a transformative activity, not an unmediated transcript of Caribbean speech “itself.”
Edward Kamau Brathwaite would express reservations about dialect during the nationalist era, distinguishing it from “nation language.” The challenge, he felt, was to represent creolized languages not as inferior, “broken,” but as repositories of a repressed history and consciousness. “It may be in English,” he wrote, “but often it is in an English which is like a howl, or a shout or a machine-gun or the wind or a wave.”21 Thus, as Walrond’s Ella Heath walks the marl road to Poyer’s shop she mutters, “Sh, carrion crow, me no dead yet,” repeating it again and again. “The evergreen leaves, caressing her face, brought it vividly to her,” he writes, “Sh, carrion crow, me no dead yet.”
An old Dutch Guianese had uttered the ghastly words. Black Portuguese legend … For sticking his hand in a pork barrel in a Portuguese grocer’s shop, a Negro had been caught and whisked off to a dark spot in the woods. His hands had been cut off and he had been buried alive, with only his head sticking out of the ground. That had happened at night. In the morning the crows had come to gouge the eyes out of his head. “Sh, carrion crow, me no dead yet.…” Evergreen leaves on Ella’s face … crows swirling around the head of a body buried on the Guiana mound. (43)
In this way “me no dead yet” figures colonial trauma, the folk expression of violence and resistance. His characters do not speak “broken” English, they occupy a range of positions in the creole continuum and evince a linguistic awareness. Shondel Nero describes Walrond’s extraordinary linguistic undertaking.
In trying to capture the range, cadences, and texture of Caribbean speech, Walrond undertook a monumental task. Not only are his characters as diverse as their language, but their experiences reach beyond the anglophone Caribbean into the francophone islands and Spanish-speaking Panama; hence the need to include the language of those territories. Add to this the fact that Walrond was writing at a time when very few writers dared to put Caribbean folk speech—a language with no standard orthography—into the written form. Yet Walrond, living outside of the Caribbean, captures the colorfulness of Caribbean speech with remarkable accuracy.22
Stuart Hall praised the linguistic “revolution” of a later generation, rendering Caribbean “languages in which important things can be said, in which important aspirations and hopes can be formulated, in which artists are willing, for the first time […] to practice.”23 But that revolution may be traced to Tropic Death.
I have been suggesting that Tropic Death is as much about its sound as its sense, that sound is its sense. This sonic quality is all the more striking given the priority accorded the visual in representations of the Caribbean during this period. Extensive public relations campaigns orchestrated by travel agencies, governments, and development boards made the region appear safe and attractive by rendering it picturesque. Postcards, images, and icons constructed the Caribbean as a picture, an emotionally stirring but safe sensory experience. These campaigns bolstered the tourist industry that was thought vital to the region’s modernization and enhanced the effort of corporations such as United Fruit and Kodak to reorient the region’s “imaginative geography.” Outsiders are used to envisioning the Caribbean as a tropical paradise, but this was not the prevailing view a century ago.
Despite the availability of preventative medicines for “tropical” diseases in the 1880s, tourism promoters had to dispel the fear of the islands, which haunted the imaginations of potential tourism clienteles in Britain and North America. They had to radically transform the islands’ much maligned landscapes into spaces of touristic desire for British and North American traveling publics. Photographic images played a constitutive role in this process.24
The imagery was pastoral: “exotic, strange, or grandiose forms” of flora and fauna abounded, but they were made to appear “cultivated or perfectly manicured into orderly displays.” If people appeared, they “joined the parade of the picturesque,” cast as “loyal, disciplined, and clean” colonial subjects. As the image industry expanded during the period in which Tropic Death appeared, promoters focused “on the islands’ seascape as a repository of their ‘tropicalness.’ At this time representations of the coral reefs, surrounding marine life, and later the beach became increasingly popular. Images of the islands’ transparent waters emphasized another tamed aspect of nature in the Anglophone Caribbean, in this instance, the ocean.”25
The “tropicalization” campaign implied that colonial rule was effective and normalized the established social order, prompting Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) to cite the role of postcards in sanitizing oppressive conditions.26 In 1958, Guyanese novelist Edgar Mittelholzer would register his objection to the “deliberately falsified” photographs trained exclusively on “grass-roofed huts and palms and jungle trees” because they justified “a refusal to see the islands as intrinsically a part of the modern world.”27 Mittelholzer’s remark raises a crucial element in Tropic Death, for it is above all an effort to disrupt the prevailing visual economy of tropicality, which denied a place for the Caribbean in modernity. The book is relentlessly counter-pastoral, propelling the Caribbean into the twentieth century. Walrond trafficked in visual imagery as obsessively as did the “tropicalization” campaign against which he wrote. But his word-images functioned differently from the imagery constructing the Caribbean picturesque. As the prevailing discourse of tropicality worked to make the Caribbean suitable for consumption, Walrond’s Caribbean voices literally stuck in one’s throat, and his imagery saturated his pages with an equal and opposite intensity.28
As if to figure this narrative strategy, the blood of Walrond’s injured protagonist drips vivid red on the blank white road of Barbadian marl in the book’s first story. Returning from the quarry under a blazing midday sun, Coggins Rum, a shoeless laborer, stubs his toe on a rock jutting through the marl. “Pree-pree-pree. As if it were frying. Frying flesh. The nail jerked out of place, hot, bright blood began to stream from it. Around the spot white marl dust clung in grainy cakes. Now, red new blood squirted—spread over the whole toe—and the dust became crimson” (24). His injury presages the death of his daughter, but the vividness of its rendering is an apt figure for the furious image production Walrond performed in his writing, which is like nothing so much as hemorrhaging. It was as though the author, foundering to the point of suicidal despair in 1925, had instead opened a vein upon the page.
AN EYE FOR THE TROPICS
Tropic Death begins and ends with the sun, with light and heat. It is a fitting motif given the play of light in representations of this region. “In the Caribbean world-view the sun is a dialectical entity,” Jan Carew observed, “it is creative and destructive, it gives life and takes it away.”29 Or as Walrond put it, the sun both “burned and kissed things” (164). On one hand, “It wrung toll of the earth.”
The sun had robbed the land of its juice, squeezed it dry. Star apples, sugar apples, husks, transparent on the dry sleepy trees. Savagely prowling through the orchards blackbirds stopped at nothing.… Turtle doves rifled the pods of green peas and purple beans and even the indigestible Brazilian bonavis. Potato vines, yellow as the leaves of autumn, severed from their roots by the pressure of the sun, stood on the ground, the wind’s eager prey. Undug, stemless—peanuts, carrots—seeking balm, relief, the caress of a passing wind, shot dead unlustered eyes up through sun-etched cracks in the hard, brittle soil. The sugar corn went to the birds. (26)
On the other hand, the sun helps coax another Tropic Death landscape into fertility.
Once more the peewits sang. […] Scudding popcorn—white, yellow, crimson pink guava buds blew upon the ground. Forwards and backwards the wind tossed the guava tree. It shook buds and blossoms on the ground—moist, unforked, ground—on Ella Heath’s lap, in her black, plenteous hair, in the water she was drawing from the well. […] All of nature gave flavor to Ella, wrought a magic color in Ella’s life. (39)
Ella’s association with nature is clear, but more than a feature of the landscape, she transforms it. “[E]xperimenting with the green froth of the earth,” she grafts a pine to a breadfruit, cultivates tamarind, star apple, and almond trees, mates pigeons and ground doves (41). In contrast to her own condition, partnerless and without progeny, Ella encourages promiscuity, setting rabbits “in the thick sparrow grass […] to play and frolic,” ensuring that her “sows fared prodigiously” and her “boars grew tusks of flint-like ivory,” while her cow “streamed milk from fat luscious udders” (40). This bounteous yield is Ella’s genius, nature’s response “under her tutelage” (42).
Other examples of Walrond’s painterly sensibility abound, but it is most pronounced in depictions of the landscape. In “The White Snake,” an intense eroticism repressed from the level of the plot returns in narrative imagery.
Coral earth paved the one flake of road in Waakenam. Gathering depth and moss, the water in the gutters beside it was a metallic black. It was a perfumed dawn—the strong odor of turpentine and fruit flavoring it. For it was high up on the Guiana coast, and the wind blew music on the river. Vivid flame it blew on the lips of grape and melon, and ripened, like the lust of a heated love, the udders of spiced mangoes and pears peeping through the luscious grove. (134)
The fecundity of the land is evoked through image and sound, the consonance of peeping pears and gutter water, lust and luscious, love and grove occupying our ears and arresting the narrative. In this way we are invited to read as though scanning an image.
Rendering the sun’s wrath involved similar techniques. In the title story, the sun rises on Sunday, subjecting a pious woman and her son to unrelenting heat on their voyage from Bridgetown to Panama.
The sun baptized the sea. O tireless, sleepless sun! It burned and kissed things. It baked the ship into a loose, disjointed state. Only the brave hoarse breezes at dusk prevented it from leaving her so. It refused to keep things glued. It fried sores and baked bunions, browned and blackened faces, reddened and blistered eyes. It lured to the breast of the sea sleepy sharks ready to pounce upon prey. (164)
Again the inventory technique is employed, the sun figuring a litany of depredations, dissolving the glue of syntax no less than the joints of the ship. Tropic Death thus establishes a counter-pastoral practice of landscaping and seascaping in which the sun figures centrally but equivocally. It resonates with the Caribbean worldview proposed by Carew, the sun as creator-destroyer, with the counter-pastoral sensibility of Winslow Homer’s painting Gulf Stream, which disturbed viewers accustomed to Caribbean “tropicality” by modulating the play of light on a shark-filled sea, and with Aimé Cesaire’s designation of Caribbean colonialism as “the most putrid carrion that ever rotted under the sun.”30
Focusing on the first term of Tropic Death’s title allows us to see how Walrond troped tropicality, bending it toward the sun, rendering the Caribbean a more fraught object of knowledge and consumption, and affiliating it with death, the title’s second term. But death pervades the book to such a degree that it warrants separate discussion. The fact of death, the threat of death—these give the book its gothic quality.
TROPING DEATH
The preponderance of death and disease provoked speculation about Walrond’s morbidity, his “fevered imagination.” But there are additional reasons, historical and poetic, that a West Indian from Panama would feature death so emphatically. Nor was it simply an obsession with the return of repressed desire or trauma that led him to the gothic, for Caribbean folklore furnished its own expressive tradition—Anancy tales and legends of obeah, duppies, and brujería—that informed his reading of Poe, Hawthorne, Lafcadio Hearn, and Pierre Lotí. The cemetery at Colón’s Monkey Hill appears regularly in his Panama stories because he played there as a teenager, but in fact he saw all of the Canal Zone, perhaps the whole Caribbean basin, as sepulchral, a tomb whose dead were silenced by history. The fresh graves in and around Colón, the hospitals, quarantine quarters, and fumigation crews—all were reminders that death held a peculiar significance in this region, one whose entrance into modernity involved death integrally and on a massive scale.
This observation is made so consistently in Caribbean literature, especially on Panama, as to constitute a trope itself. Mary Seacole, a Jamaican military nurse who wrote the first Caribbean autobiography, characterized Panama as a mass grave well before the canal’s advent. Her Wonderful Adventures (1857) recalls a trip up the Chagres River, “as capital a nursery for ague and fever as Death could hit upon anywhere.”31 Work songs and testimonials of canal laborers document their peril, the myriad ways in which they were wounded, grievously if not fatally. When the Isthmian Historical Society solicited the “best true stories” of the canal construction era, submissions arrived from across the Caribbean, and many spoke frankly of the carnage. Death was so common it was discussed casually. A boiler man wrote, “Man die get blow up get kill or get drown during the time someone would asked where is Brown he died last night and burry where is Jerry he dead a little before dinner and buried so on and so on all the time.” Another said, “It was nothing unusual to be walking on Front Street and suddenly you sees a yard engine with one ICC [Isthmian Canal Commission] flat car attached with dead men stretched out.”32 Estimates put the fatality rate of West Indian workers at roughly one in ten, or 15,000 men.33 Caribbean families dreaded the postman’s delivery of the black-bordered ICC envelope, announcing that a family member had perished.34
In this context, Walrond’s obsession with death assumes a different cast. The severed limb of his cork-legged grocer, Poyer, seems less a lugubrious gothic device than a materialist critique of labor conditions. The murder of a young Barbadian at the hands of a vengeful marine sounds less like hard-boiled melodrama than a meditation on the vulnerability of workers who stepped out of line or organized. Indeed, the most chilling moment in “Subjection” is not Ballet’s murder, which is foretold in the first paragraphs, but an exchange in which he tries to persuade his coworkers to use their collective strength to protect a fallen man from the capricious abuse of their white boss.
“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—”
“Ah know I ain’t gwine tetch he.”
“Nor me.”
“Nor me needah.”
“Who gwine giv’ me a han’, ni’?”
“Ain’t gwine get myself in no trouble. Go mixin’ myself in de backra dem business—”
“Hey, Ballet, if yo’ know wha’ is good fo’ yo’self, yo’ bess min’ yo’ own business, yo’ hear wha’ me tell yo’ yah.”
“Wha’ yo’ got fi’ do wit’ it? De boy ain’t got no business talkin’ back to de marinah man—”
“Now he mek up he bed, let ‘im lie down in it.” (100–101)
Despite Ballet’s exhortation, they are too intimidated to defend their coworker from being beaten near death. Their justifications—the caution not to bite the hand that feeds, the aversion to mixing in the “backra” business—suggest the ICC’s effectiveness at dividing and conquering, ensuring compliance, a “cowed obedient retinue limping to the boats,” Walrond wrote (109). He linked the U.S. occupation to previous colonial regimes, the overseer replaced by the marine, “the noisy rhythm of picks swung by gnarled black hands” echoing the rhythm of machetes in the old canebrakes.
In addition to Tropic Death’s laborers, its children, raised by doting but vulnerable West Indian mothers, are at considerable risk. Coggins Rum and his wife struggle to keep their children fed in “Drought,” and five other stories hinge on an anxious mother’s protection of her children. Even “Subjection” includes a pivotal scene in which Ballet’s mother chides him for becoming a “wuthliss vagybond,” carousing in “Spanishtown eva night”; “tek heed, ni, tek heed, yo’ heah,” she warns, brandishing her Bible (102). A Honduran mother in “The Yellow One” soothes her colicky infant during a sea voyage, but her husband refuses to go for hot water, prompting la madurita to go herself (57). Likewise in “The Black Pin,” April Emptage struggles to raise four children alone, contending with their “ownwayish” tendencies and with Zink Diggs, a resentful neighbor woman. April challenges Zink, “Why yo’ don’ le’ me an’ me chirrun alone, ni?” to which Zink responds, “Tell dem de little watahmout’ runts, not to come on my hedge-row an’ pick an’ mo’ o’ my tam’rin’s. Oi’ll set poison fo’ dem, too. Why yo’ don’t feed dem? Why yo’ don’t giv’ dem a good stiff ball o’ cookoo so dat dey won’t hav’ to teef my tamarin’s? Pack o’ starved-out runts!” (119–20). Zink not only threatens to poison April’s children, she steals their goat and sets fire to their house. The protagonist in “The White Snake” is as dutiful as these others in her maternal ministrations. She lives alone with her infant son in a hut on a remote Guyanese island, determined to be a good mother, to love him and raise him well despite his conception in what the residents of Georgetown called her lust and wickedness (130).
Miss Buckner, the owner of the Palm Porch brothel, is a less sympathetic mother figure; she prostitutes her own daughters. But even here Walrond illustrates the struggle of a single West Indian mother in a dangerous region. In Miss Buckner’s view, the Palm Porch is a controlled environment in which she sets the rules and protects her daughters’ interests, unlike the chaotic city of Colón. Their failure to appreciate their privilege provokes their mother’s ire. When one daughter makes a casual joke about a man’s erection—“wake up in de mawnin’ time wid ‘im marinah stiff out in front o’ him”—Miss Buckner reminds her that this is their vocation: “Mek fun, an’ be a dam set o’ fools all yo’ life” she warns (87). She needs them to attend at a party thrown by a Panamanian patron, and when her daughters resist, she admonishes them.
“Well, yo’ bess mek up unna mind—all ‘o unna! Well, wha’ a bunch o’ lazy ongrateful bitches de whole carload of unna is, dough he?” Suddenly she broke off, anger seaming her brow. “Unna don’t know me his hindebted to him, no? Unna don’t know dat hif hit wasn’t farrim a lot o’ t’ings wha’ go awn up yah, would be street property long ago—an’ some o’ we yo’ see spo’tin roun’ yah would be some way else, an’ diffrant altogeddah.” (88)
Even as she raises her children into prostitution, Miss Buckner believes she is saving them from becoming “street property.” Protected by the cronyism that sustains the brothel, her daughters enjoy comforts—gowns, books, gifts, and a chef. They feel they “ain’t owe nobody nothin’ ” but Miss Buckner replies, “Don’t fool yourselves, children, there is more to make the mare go than you think” (88). Indeed, the death that resolves the plot is orchestrated by Miss Buckner and implicates one of her daughters, but because of her consummate professionalism, this murder never sees a courtroom.
The most anxious of all of Tropic Death’s mothers is fashioned after Walrond’s own. Sarah Bright is a devout member of the Plymouth Brethren whose husband, a tailor named Lucian, has gone ahead of his family to Panama. The problem is that Lucian is undependable, “a wufless stinkin’ good fuh nutton vergybin’” (172). The titular death of “Tropic Death” is Lucian’s—he suffers from leprosy—but the story is of Sarah’s efforts to keep her children out of harm’s way. She appeals to her delinquent husband, who curses her for haranguing him with “the same old story.” “Old?” she replies, “It will never be old! As long as I’ve got breath in my body—as long as I is got my boy child to shield from the worle—from de filth and disease of dis rotten, depraved place—as long as I got my fo’ gal chirrun in B’bados in somebody else han’—um can’t be a old story!” (184). As her husband’s health declines, Sarah commits herself to protecting her son from the spiritual and physical depredations of Panama.
Whatever influence Walrond’s depression exerted on Tropic Death, whatever gothicism he learned from Dorothy Scarborough, Lafcadio Hearn, or Pierre Loti, the tenuousness of life in Panama was also fresh in his memory. Despite his lyricism and painterly sensibility, the book conveyed what he called the “sepulchral” quality of the region, exhuming graves to create a genealogy of the diaspora.
RECEPTION
It was difficult for readers to hear the book’s dissonant registers, its competing commitments to anger and entertain. Reviewers struggled to reconcile its critique of Caribbean social conditions with its florid prose. Reviews appeared in the black press, where Benjamin Brawley, W. E. B. Du Bois, Theophilus Louis, and J. A. Rogers discussed it, and in mainstream periodicals including The New Yorker, The New Republic, the New York Times, and The New York Herald Tribune.35 Some positively glowed, and admirers agreed that the book’s virtue was the absence of overt propaganda or sentimentality. “There is nothing soft about this book,” Langston Hughes wrote, it is “as unsentimental as blazing sun.” “Unlike much American Negro prose and poetry,” he added, “these pages are untainted by racial propaganda.” Robert Herrick of The New Republic claimed Walrond “has no propaganda, raises no race question, nor is there in the writer’s hand a mutinous background of controversy or resentment. He writes of this colored world as if practically it was the only world—as he should and as no other Negro so far as I remember has written.” The New York Times said Walrond “recorded impartially” and within a single paragraph “terror and superstition and grim humor, oblivious tenderness and childlike sensuality and swift, brutal enmity.” The review commended the suspension of sentimentality: “Coggins and his daughter are enough to break one’s heart, yet Mr. Walrond offers no comment persuasive of commiseration. The story has been experienced rather than read.” This distinction between experiencing and reading appeared consistently. “These West Indies […] palpitate under his touch with light, heat, color,” wrote Herrick. Rogers agreed, “Walrond’s power in making his readers feel the milieu borders on the marvelous. One who has lived in the West Indies (as I have) will immediately recall the mannerisms of the peasants whom he portrays. It is as if the writer had almost transferred them alive on paper.” The New York Times praised the book’s “absorbingly interesting energy, as of life itself.”36
This sense of immediacy, of experiencing not just reading, derived from Walrond’s imagistic prose and his use of dialect. But the effectiveness of these techniques was debated. Even those who appreciated the writing found it eccentric. The New York Times called Walrond’s “skill with words” “pleasingly bizarre.” Another said, “The writing is not pretty, but it is well nigh indelible. […] And though the diction throughout the book is irresistibly fresh and striking, the most tolerant welcomer of modernist vocabulary chokes occasionally when he is asked to swallow wholesale doses of alliterative splendor.” Herrick noted, “His sense of color in words is remarkable, also the audacity of verbal manipulation. It is all intensely nervous, impressionistic, syncopated, even disorderly.” Hughes called Walrond’s prose “sometimes tangled and confused, yet tough as the hanging vines from which monkeys leap and chatter.” Others were put off, including V. F. Calverton, who called the stories “diffuse in narration, tardy in climax, and often tedious in conclusion,” and Mary White Ovington, who found the style “vivid and often beautiful,” but “at times trying.” She felt Walrond refused to meet his reader halfway: “His milieu is unusual and if he wishes us really to see the pictures that flood his mind, he must take a little more pains in presenting them.” Nevertheless, much of the book’s difficulty seems intentional, as though Walrond set out to write a challenging book, both in its prose style and its counter-pastoral vision.37
Two prominent African American scholars, Du Bois and Brawley, criticized the style, but both thought it among the most impressive achievements in “Negro” literature to date. “The book’s impressionism, together with its dialect, make it often hard reading and difficult to understand,” wrote Du Bois, “But on the whole, it is a human document of deep significance and great promise.” Because “our knowledge of the West Indies has usually come from the words of English rulers and tourists and the chance observations of white Americans,” Du Bois thought Tropic Death “a distinct contribution to Negro American literature in a field curiously new.”38 Brawley was more effusive; despite some deficiencies, he felt Walrond’s talent surpassed all other New Negro fiction writers, with the possible exceptions of Toomer and Walter White.
In a purely literary way, it is the most important contribution made by a Negro to American letters since the appearance of Dunbar’s “Lyrics of Lowly Life.” Mr. Walrond differs from other writers in the freshness of his material, in the strength of his style, in his skillful use of words, in his compression—in short, in his understanding of what makes literature and what does not. […] The book is not always a pleasant one, nor is it a perfect one. […] All told, however, the man who wrote this book knows something about writing; his style is becoming more and more chaste; and, in view of his firm grasp of his material and his clear perception of what is worthwhile, we feel that there is nothing in fiction that is beyond his capabilities.39
Celebrating Walrond’s “artistry,” Brawley indexed the opposing terms of the polemic over representation. It was not that propagandistic or sentimental expression was without value, but they contaminated the “purely” literary. Thus in discussing White, Brawley said his “work preaches perhaps more than it expresses; accordingly, regarded purely from the standpoint of the artistic, it belongs to a different order of writing from that of Mr. Walrond.”40 Consistently recurring in reviews of Tropic Death, whether laudatory or critical, was this approval of the absence of an overt message.
Of course, works of fiction convey different meanings for different audiences, and Tropic Death suggests a number of messages that may not have been available to its initial audience. For example, Walrond’s critique of European colonialism and North American neocolonialism is more pronounced than initial reviews indicated. Hughes wanted the book to stand on its literary merit alone: “Tropic Death is a book of short stories. Whether it is good Negro propaganda or not should be of no moment.” So he downplayed the role of the white characters and the themes of racism and color prejudice. “The Vampire Bat” was for Hughes a story about “the son of an old colonial family killed on a devil-ridden island,” not a meditation on social relations in the post-sugar plantation society. The shooting in “The Palm Porch” was an “incidental murder” arising from “some scraggy sailors drinking” at a brothel, a synopsis that, omitting the motive for the murder, obscures the story’s shrewd staging of racial and colonial history. In the most egregious statement, Hughes called the marine who viciously beats one West Indian worker and shoots another “a moron military representative of a great government.”41 Perhaps Hughes was pulling his punches, but his willingness to soften Tropic Death’s social statements reveals the length to which reviewers went to expunge messages that threatened its status as literature.
Reflecting the polarized terms of debate, Hughes defended Walrond’s many unflattering depictions of black people for precisely the reason J. A. Rogers criticized him. Hughes welcomed Walrond’s departure from the prevailing orthodoxy, an attitude of “O, see how nice and yet how mistreated we are.” Rogers saw Walrond as stereotyping, pandering to an audience that preferred its “Negroes” exotic and primitive.
The white public is not interested in the struggling, aspiring Negro—the one who is likely to be a competitor. What it demands is the bizarre, the exotic, the sexy, the cabaret side of Negro life. […] The Negro is a fixed type in the white man’s mind, including the white liberal and radical, and few will entertain any other. […] The critics are loud in their praise of Tropic Death. One of them, colored, says the stories “are as impersonal as an epic of Homer.” For my part I should say one of the defects of the book is that it is TOO darn impersonal—so impersonal that one would fancy it was some Negro-despising Englishman or Southerner, new to the tropics, that was speaking of these peasants. Not less than 20 times has the writer used such words as “nigger,” “coon,” “zigaboo,” mark you, not as one of the characters speaking, which is permissible, but as the author, Walrond, himself a Negro. Speaking of one character he says: “Black as sin.” The writer himself is a black man.42
It would be one thing, in other words, if Walrond put his slurs in the mouths of despicable characters, the problem is that they are his own, without mediating distance, tacitly endorsing them. Thus, Rogers could only conclude the book was “written particularly for the white market […] because the interest of the vast masses of the white people, and those of the self-respecting Negro in this matter of literature are poles apart.”43
But Rogers added a revealing codicil: “We are indebted to Mr. Walrond for much of the present vogue and interest in literature by and about Negroes, such as it is. His articles in numerous white magazines have done much to pave the way, as this reviewer, personally, knows.” Such were the stakes of trafficking in stereotypes after Nigger Heaven. Suspicions abounded that Walrond, Hurston, McKay, Hughes, and Thurman, whose characters were often motivated by appetite rather than intellect, sought to exploit the Negro “vogue.” These suspicions are understandable, but as they hardened into a litmus test they permitted little complexity or nuance. Already ambivalent about Walrond’s contribution to “the present vogue,” Rogers found his suspicions confirmed in Tropic Death. And although Hughes and Rogers disagreed about the book, they asked the same question of it: whether it was written for white people. As inevitable as the question was then, it foreclosed a number of others that have become more urgent since.
For one thing, if Walrond wrote Tropic Death with the preferences and prejudices of white North Americans in view, he did a poor job. To be sure, he used terms to describe nonwhite people that were derogatory then and now, terms such as “nigger,” “coon,” and “zigaboo,” as well as “coolie” and “chink.” In fact, given the opportunity to revise Tropic Death for republication in the 1960s, Walrond sought to redact many such words, substituting inoffensive alternatives. At the time, however, he was working at the intersection of two discursive formations that made it seem necessary. One was the movement in American modernism to ruffle the residual Victorian feathers of the middle class. Nowhere is this clearer than in the advertisement for Tropic Death in The New Yorker, where it was announced alongside Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, and new books by Ezra Pound and Hart Crane. “There is a present here for everyone,” they recommended in this Christmas issue, “and many a book that will remove the inhibitions of the dear old lady from Dubuque.”44 Walrond wanted to be part of this assault on propriety. The other reason he indulged in epithets and terms of disparagement was to distance himself from the high-toned, sanitized uplift rhetoric of the New Negro movement. As he had done in Vanity Fair, Walrond’s willingness to use ethnic slurs was both a gesture of linguistic reclamation and a signal that “Negroes” could risk self-caricature. Their willingness to expose the race to ridicule marked a new self-assurance. It was a brash posture that reached its apotheosis in Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1937) and “A Story in Harlem Slang” (1942), accompanied by an extensive glossary and announcing itself as a tale “about this Zigaboo called Jelly.”
Walrond’s provocative language of race generated an unfortunate but perhaps inevitable critical impasse. Left aside were important questions about who, after all, were these “Negroes” to whom he sometimes referred in disparaging terms and how to square these terms with the characters themselves, whom he humanized and even dignified. Among the questions Tropic Death raised was the relationship between African Americans and West Indians. Tropic Death was a working out of the question of a racial “soul” in the multiethnic formation that was the turn-of-the-century Caribbean. His laborious project in Caribbean language is critically important—marked as speakers of dialect, his characters’ speech resembled African Americans, whose vernacular was similarly marked. And because they were black, the specificity of their departure from a North American standard affiliated them not with the Irish in Joyce, with Faulkner’s Mississippians, or with other vernacular speakers but with the characters in Hurston, Hughes, or Toomer. Reviewers tended to ignore the radical innovation of the book’s polyvocality by construing it as regionalism. They disagreed about whether the book was “racial,” whether it represented something uniquely black or spoke to universal concerns, but what got buried either way was the question of what difference it made to be West Indian.
Many reviewers simplified the matter by referring to “the tropical Negro,” “the Negro of the American tropics,” or as the New York Times put it, “these mystified, helpless blacks.” Herrick finessed it by declaring that “the African temperament, modes of thought, have never been more exactly interpreted in language.” Others bypassed the vexing questions of race and culture by observing that, after all, the book dealt in universals not in racial themes. “Like any book that deeply expresses the essence of any race,” wrote John Dos Passos, Tropic Death “is much more human than it is racial.” Devere Allen warned, “[T]o consider these stories of the lands bordering the Caribbean merely in terms of the output of any group would be an error. Here is a brilliance that will stand on its own feet against all comers.”45
Of all the displacements Tropic Death occasioned, however, Waldo Frank’s review in Opportunity was the oddest and most revealing of the critical climate. Frank was deeply impressed with the book, but he sided neither with the universalists, who saw it as “more human than racial,” nor with those who praised its depiction of “the Negro character.” For Frank, its significance lay in its language. Incongruously, however, the language he heard was “American.” In a stunning gesture of linguistic assimilation, he subsumed the polyvocality of Tropic Death within U.S. cultural nationalism. Confessing that his “ultimate impression of the book is rather paradoxical,” he wrote, “It seems to me that what stands in the way of the book, as a work of art, is its chief feature of interest and importance: to wit, its language.” Although he found Walrond’s prose overwrought, Frank hastened to add “that the deep aesthetic fault I find in it is the highest sort of promise,” for Walrond’s struggle was the struggle of all American writers to forge a national idiom, to break with European tradition. Informed by an opposition between European and American literatures, Frank perversely read Tropic Death as quintessentially American. “How can I make clear that the basis of this book—the very substance of its language—relates it to Poe, Melville, Thoreau even—and to their contemporary successors: excludes it radically, moreover, from the noble and long lineage of English literary prose?”46
Frank did not think Walrond was North American, but precisely for that reason he read Tropic Death as proof of the assimilative force of the United States.
I suspect he comes from the West Indies: and in this case, his background is probably English. I find myself hoping that this is so. For if it is, my own claim about the true and whole America is strengthened. I should like to think that Mr. Walrond speaks English with a London accent, and that his grandfather was a British Squire who drank small beer at breakfast. For if this is so, the Americanism of Eric Walrond is all the more convincing: his profound affinity in language and in language-sense with the rest of us—whose background may be Scandinavian or Russian or Jewish or Spanish—becomes less possibly accidental, more certainly the result of an organic occurrence in our cultural world.47
In his eagerness to define American literature against English literature, Frank’s voracious pluralism incorporates all cultural differences into one magnificent melting pot. Yet in rendering cultural difference the source and ground of America’s distinctiveness, he ensures that there is no escape, no outside, no departure from the English tradition that resists incorporation as American. Scandinavian, Russian, Jew, Spaniard, and West Indian, all take their place on arrival as descendents of Whitman, Poe, Melville, and Thoreau.
It is ironic that a reviewer who is so insightful about the book’s language, one who got the book right and refused to reduce it to “Negro literature,” produced such a tone-deaf reading, for what is lost is the book’s Caribbeanness, the fact that neither the setting nor the characters are American in the sense he means. It is precisely the alternate conceptions of “America” that Frank must forestall in order to read Walrond into a U.S. literary tradition. Other readers were all too willing to assume Walrond had been a Caribbean peasant just like his characters, but Frank erred in the other direction, claiming to “know nothing about Mr. Walrond’s background” despite the appearance of his review in the journal at which Walrond was employed, and despite having spoken to him at some length.48 Only in the 1920s could Tropic Death have been understood in so many conflicting ways: as taking its place in the American literary tradition, as New Negro literature, and as literature of “the tropical Negro.”
Many observers called Tropic Death a literary first. As discussed, some felt it was the first work of fiction to treat the race so dispassionately, others the first to bring such technical virtuosity to bear in representing black people, and others the first to address Afro-Caribbeans. Tropic Death was indeed a first, though not principally for these reasons. What makes the book so elusively groundbreaking is that it was a new form of black transnational fiction, one attempted many times since but not before. Its settings are Caribbean, as are most of its characters, and the Caribbean literary tradition has a claim to the book, but it is also in an important sense—here Waldo Frank was partly right—a product of North America. The reasons it could only have been written in New York have less to do with the limited publishing options in the Caribbean than with the book’s linguistic and discursive conditions of possibility. As the distance between the narrator’s voice and the voices of his characters indicates, it is as much of the United States as it is of the Caribbean, which is to say it is fully neither. It will not do to say that it is the work of a colonial writer because the resources on which Walrond drew—his lexicon, idioms, and political and aesthetic sensibilities—are not those of an English colonial subject. He had spent eight years immersed in New York’s linguistic cauldron, “a listening post, anchored in the middle of life’s gurgling stream” (“Vignettes” 20). Tropic Death was the product of both his political radicalism and his disillusionment with politics, of the color-consciousness of U.S. race relations and the uplift agenda of the New Negro movement, of his studies at U.S. universities and his identification as “spiritually a native of Panama.”
Walrond pursued a certain literary fashion—ostentatious in its technique, elliptical in its storytelling—yet he also confounded convention, turning the Caribbean picturesque on its head, or more precisely on its ear. Tropic Death took the first-person “I” that had traditionally yoked African American and immigrant literature to a sentimental discourse of personal experience and abstracted it into a narrative sensibility, a way of seeing and hearing rather than a disclosure of the author “himself.” It was in this sense and above all else an extraordinary exercise in self-assertion and self-effacement. Langston Hughes had one real criticism of Tropic Death. “I wish some of the stories were longer,” he wrote, “What else happens to these people?”49 What else happens is the rest of black transnational fiction.