Panama fever (77 page)

eorge Martin, an apprentice carpenter, had been eighteen when he arrived in Panama from Barbados. He had heard, he wrote, “A voice from a great people” inviting him to help build the Panama Canal. His first job was on the relocation of the Panama Railroad, identified by Goethals as a priority. The line had to be moved to high ground to avoid the area of the proposed Lake Gatún. The job was far bigger than the original railroad construction of 1850–55, requiring either fills, cuts, or bridges for most of its length. The work took Martin deep into the jungle, where spiders and snakes abounded, as well as what he called the “Goosyana Fly”—”when he stings, he leaves worms in the flesh.” There were also swarms of
Anopheles
mosquitoes. “The fever lashed good and plenty,” Martin writes. “In those days you watch men shake, you think they would shake to pieces.” As it was impractical to carry out antimosquito measures in the temporary camps along the new line, Gorgas's department was reduced to catching them in traps, one of which netted 1,800 specimens in a week. But Martin had a good boss who “did not order or compelled, he only pleaded, so we obeyed.” Martin worked on a culvert, and, when it was completed, on laying the tracks on it. “We took the spiking of the rail, to the pulling, like a merry-go-round,” said Martin. “This were a sight to watch us work along this line; the work was hard but we did it cheerful… Every man with an iron bar about five feet long, one would sing, and while he sings, you watch the track line move. The white bosses stand off and laugh. The Songster had a song, goes this way, he would sing the first part, and we comes in with the second part, it goes:

Nattie oh, Nattie O—first

2nd   Gone to Colón

Nattie O Nattie O

2nd   Gone to Colón

And so he would sing this song over and over, gentlemen watch track line move, the work appeared sweet, the white foremen enjoyed the singing they laugh and did laughed.”

Martin's is perhaps the most positive of all the hundred or so accounts in the “Competition for the Best True Stories of Life and Work …” collected in 1963 (he received the second prize of $30). He writes of the incessant rain and constantly wet clothes but adds, “We worked joyfully in these days.” The food he was given was good, and the boxcars they were first billeted in were “like palaces.” Martin worked for the canal for nearly forty-six years until the mid-fifties. Looking back at the construction days he saw them as a time of excitement, and also comparatively low prices. “$2.50 [commissary] book was plenty in those days,” he wrote. “Construction days were better days, never to be seen again, the money was paid small, but we live big.” On one occasion he was accidentally given two $5.00 books for the price of one. “What to do with $10 in those days? … I bought a ham, at that time it look as big as I were … real lean, I took ham to work every day in order to have it finish, my associate and I ate ham for days. I don't think about ham these days it's too high in price, now it is for the other fellow.” Best of all though was “our ice-cream, I am saying here it was refreshing. We worked hard, but cheerful, I can assure you,” he went on. “Our boss never had any worries, he only says what he wanted, and it was done.”

Mallet reported in early 1913 that the West Indians had become a “fine body of disciplined and skilled workmen.” Many of the Americans were beginning to agree. The secretary to the Commission, Joseph Bishop, would later write that the work of the West Indian artisans “proved very satisfactory.” Overall, he continued, the West Indians were “quiet, usually honest, as a general rule well and respectfully spoken, demonstrating an aptitude to learn the rudiments of the various sorts of work for which they were contracted.” Another engineer declared that the West Indian laborer had lived down his bad reputation and developed into a good workman, “and pretty certain always to make a fair return to the United States on the money it paid him in wages … The American republic always must stand indebted to these easy-going, carefree black men who supplied the brawn to break the giant back of Culebra.” Unlike the Spaniards, wrote Harry Franck, “the negroes from the British West Indies … could almost invariably read and write; many of those shoveling in the ‘cut’ have been trained in trigonometry.” (Not that any of this was reflected in their pay. A black West Indian would have to be skilled and to have served for a number of years to earn as much as the minimum for a European laborer—US$0.20 an hour. By September 1909 fewer than a thousand had qualified.)

As a rule, the West Indians were sober, industrious, and religious. Harry Franck remembers frequently coming across “young negro men of the age and type that in white skins would have been loafing on pool-room corners, reading to themselves in loud and solemn voices from the Bible.” “What was the black culture that the West Indians brought to Panama?” asks poet, social historian, and “silver-man” descendant Carlos Russell. “An amalgam of European customs and ideals with a decidedly British (Anglo-Saxon) veneer imposed on a fragmented African base, weakened, but not eradicated by centuries of slavery. It was a culture with a distinct penchant for things and ways British. Proper spoken English, conservative dress, a black suit, stiff collar and tie in the tropics, proper deportment and a loyalty and dedication to a job which demanded much and paid little.” And life and culture were changing as the construction years passed. “Now here comes a little improvement,” writes Jules LeCurrieux. “The West Indian Negro woman began to immigrate here, then the poor old bastards found themselves wives of their tribes and began to live like human beings and not beasts, or slaves, they found someone to cook them a decent meal, to wash their clothes, some one to be a companion.” Although the authorities approved of the increasing arrival of West Indian women and children, as they had for the whites, there were precious few ICC-provided accommodations for families, so most lived in expensive rented flats in the terminal cities. Harry Franck, while taking the census of the Zone in 1912, went into many of these. “They lived chiefly in windowless, six-by-eight rooms,” he wrote, “always a cheap, dirty calico curtain dividing the three-foot parlour in front from the five-foot bedroom behind, the former cluttered with a van-load of useless junk… a black baby squirming naked in a basket of rags … Every inch of the walls was ‘decorated’ … With pages of illustrated magazines or newspapers … Outside, before each room, a tin fireplace for cooking precariously bestrided the veranda rail.”

Not only was the black workforce ruthlessly excluded from Gold Roll facilities, but also virtually nothing was provided for their amusement, edification, or recreation. In one year, the ICC actually spent fourteen times more per person on “extras” for the white personnel than for the blacks, who, of course, made up the large majority of the employed numbers. So the West Indians were largely left to their own devices.

The church provided the center for the developing West Indian communities. “The men are kept hard at work full six days a week,” wrote a visiting American journalist. “On Sunday morning every religious community is busy—you would think a great revival was in progress.” By 1910, nearly forty “black” churches were in operation in the Zone, almost all established without any material assistance from the ICC. The majority were Anglican but there were also Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, and Episcopalians, as well as more “charismatic” congregations. For one of the leading black Panamanian historians, the church was “a forum for expression on many issues. It preserved the self-respect of the workers, and stimulated their pride.” Others were more cynical, seeing the white-dominated Anglican Church in particular as a tool to “tame them and provide a relief valve.” The loud singing, extravagant dress, and general exuberance of the low-church black congregations was commented on by Americans, with approval as well as condescension. As far as they were concerned, emotion and energies were being worked out that could otherwise be directed against them.

But the Christian churches of various denominations did not have a monopoly on the spirituality of the imported black workers. As in the islands, their influence was leavened by other traditions that took in “obeah,” or sorcery, herbal medicine, and rituals of spirit possession, all of which survived from their African inheritance.

Other carryovers from Africa via the Caribbean islands were the Mutual and Friendly societies, designed to protect those injured or bereaved. As during the French era, “Burial clubs” or “su-sus” became widespread in Panama, whereby small sums were deposited every month against the cost of one's funeral. This was not only because of the high death rate, but also because of the social importance of funerals to the West Indian community. Within the separate island communities—Barbadians tended to stick with Barbadians and Jamaicans with Jamaicans—there was in general a high degree of communal and interdependent living. Harry Franck comments that while West Indians seemed to know everything about their neighbors down to the most intimate detail, the Americans he came across would often not even be aware of their neighbors’ names. In the absence of any ICC-organized activities, the West Indians put together their own cricket teams, as well as card or domino-playing circles. Clothes and music were also important. The Caribbean people, says one “digger” descendant, “were the unquestioned leaders of glamour and glitter.” “Let me tell you,” says West Indian Benjamin Jordan. “To see people at night. Saturday night they have dances in different places. People put up huts and have dance parties and the rest of it. On Saturday night, it was a joyful time in Culebra. Liquor was common at that time. You give a dollar or a dollar and a half for a quart. That did a lot. To see those people dancing and making merry… Boy!” Another West Indian remembered “the elegant quadrille dances, men and women graciously moving though the many fancy figures” to the music of “Calypsos, mambos and meringues.”

For policeman Harry Franck, Saturday nights, when the men had just been paid, was “the vortex of trouble on the Isthmus.” On one occasion he went into “the rough and tumble” of New Gatún, where he encountered “a singing, howling, swarming multitude.” With a colleague, he went into one of the bars, or, more exactly, the white side of it. “Beyond the lattice-work that is the ‘color line’ in Zone dispensaries,” he wrote. “West Indians were dancing wild, crowded ‘hoe-downs’ and ‘shuffles’ amid much howling and more liquidation; on our side a few Spanish laborers quietly sipped their liquor.”

Indeed, the “Silver and Gold” distinction made no exception for Saturday nights or any other time or place in the Zone. Away from the works, there was next to no mixing between the races. In fact, the system was ever tightened. In February 1908, Taft, to please the unions as he prepared his bid for the presidency, declared that only U.S. citizens (and, after a protest, Panamanians) could be on the Gold Roll. The last of the West Indians were demoted, but the order also further complicated the tortuous euphemism of the Gold/Silver distinction. For one thing, there were a number of black U.S. citizens working for the ICC. Some five hundred had been recruited during the early years, almost all on the Silver Roll. It had been hoped that they would be good at “managing” the West Indians. But the authorities soon realized they had made a mistake—the American blacks were far less malleable and passive than the imported “third-country” workforce. As a West Indian writes, “The majority of them were employed as team drivers, and when delivering goods would refuse to unload same, claiming they were no labourers, they were team drivers. They also were tutoring the other employees to act accordingly. In the view of the fact, they were sent back home.” “We had colored Americans working, good men, skilful men,” remembered another West Indian. “But they can't pull with the White Americans always a fight and trouble.” Furthermore, the small number on Gold Roll contracts vigorously protested when, as blacks, they were refused service at Gold Commissaries, or ordered to take off their hats “although no such requirement is made of white employees.” Consequently, to preserve the color criterion that underpinned the Gold/Silver distinction, no more U.S. blacks were given Gold Roll contracts, and by February 1909 only one such employee remained, a Henry Williams.

So by 1908 there were hardly any nonwhite Gold employees left, but when Taft made his nationality order as far as Gold and Silver was concerned, it opened a can of worms for the authorities. Soon after, Goethals received a petition from ten Silver Roll American blacks complaining that as U.S. citizens they were entitled to the lavish Gold Roll privileges. After much discussion among the top brass, a compromise was decided on whereby the men were given home and sick leave entitlements, were paid in gold, but were still officially Silver Roll and thus excluded from clubhouses and commissaries.