The Silver Women by Joan Flores-Villalobos

Author:Joan Flores-Villalobos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

On a ship bound for Panama, American journalist Albert Edwards heard a chorus of West Indian voices singing the first song. He noted that the men on board sang it “with great fervor” despite the gloomy theme. In his Harper’s Weekly article about the journey, he referred to the traveling West Indians as a “cargo of black ivory,” characterizing these Black men as valuable commodities to be transported to the Canal. West Indian migrants heading to Panama understood the risks of death and disease there—they knew that the Yankees saw them as no more than expendable labor—but they weighed these concerns against the potential economic gains. Workers chanted the second ditty as they left plantations in Barbados, criticizing the low wages they received for farm work on the island. And as that song expressed, they wanted more wages and they wanted them now. Rather than a disincentive, these songs served as a rallying cry for workers gathered on steamboats departing for Colón. In the public arenas of the Caribbean, these songs created an image of the Canal project that tied death and economic promise together with a discourse of masculine worthiness.16

West Indians were right to be wary of Panama. A former white American track master of the Panama Railroad, S. W. Plume, described the mortality in the Canal Zone: “We used to run one train in the morning out of Colón up into Monkey Hill [where Silver employees were buried, later to become Mount Hope Cemetery]. Over to Panama it was the same way—bury, bury, bury, running two, three, four trains a day with dead Jamaican niggers all the time. I never saw anything like it.… They die like animals.”17 Plume’s quote describes not only the pervasive atmosphere of death in Panama but also the general disregard American managers had for the lives of these Black laborers. While awed by the volume of casualties, Plume nevertheless saw these men as subhuman and devalued their lives and deaths. Plume skirts placing responsibility for these deaths on the American project, instead suggesting that it was part of Black workers’ nature to “die like animals.” And indeed, these dead men were treated like animals. West Indian Constantine Parkinson remembered how bodies were dug up after an explosion, saying “It was a very awfull sight” but also noting how commonplace death had become to everyone around him. Ultimately, Parkinson suggests, these bodies were treated as disposable because “all the boses want is to get the canal build.”18 For West Indians, the casual deaths of the early construction period instilled a deep trauma. Every single respondent to the Isthmian Historical Society’s 1963 competition for “the best true stories of life and work on the Isthmus of Panama during the construction” vividly recalled West Indians’ proximity to death. Amos Park wrote, “Those days were horrible days to remember. Those were the times you go to bed at night and the next day you may be a dead man.”19

The numbers verify the ubiquity of Black deaths during this period.

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