by Julie Greene
THE WORLD OF SILVER WORK
When U.S. occupation of the Canal Zone began in 1904, nearly two thousand Jamaicans already lived there, many of them men who had migrated to the isthmus to work for the French canal project during the 1880s.3 These West Indians witnessed a spectacular transformation of the isthmus as the Americans began to arrive. The story of one young Jamaican, Constantine Parkinson, suggests how dramatic the reconstruction of Isthmian geography must have seemed. Parkinson was born on the isthmus in 1894 and lived in the little town of Playa de Flor on the Atlantic coast near Toro Point, just across the bay from Colón, where the sound and smell of the sea were a part of daily life. The town was made up mainly of Jamaicans. Parkinson’s father, originally from Jamaica, probably worked on the French canal effort. When Parkinson was nearly nine, Panama achieved independence, and the United States acquired control over the Zone. Then, like a hurricane hitting the isthmus, the Americans built roads and bridges, housing, cafeterias, hotels, and commissaries. Whole towns sprang up to provide homes for the thousands of canal workers, with sections casually referenced as “Jamaicatown” or “Greektown.” Other towns disappeared altogether. Parkinson’s home village of Playa de Flor vanished as the United States undertook fortifications of the coastline and built a vast Army outpost named Fort Sherman in its place. Parkinson played a small supporting role in these transformations. As a teenager, in 1909, he felt himself pulled into the eye of the Americans’ storm, taking a job as flagman in a surveyor’s gang near his home. The survey gang was clearing a path to build a railroad through the area as a preliminary to the fortification work. In that first year alone, Parkinson changed jobs two more times, working as a water boy for a clearing gang and as a chain man with a different survey gang. In the next years he kept switching jobs, finally ending up in 1913 with work as a railroad brakeman back at Toro Point, where construction of Fort Sherman had begun.4
Most West Indians working on the canal during the American period were not born on the isthmus, like Parkinson, but came from islands across the Caribbean. From the beginning of the project, West Indians dominated the workforce: according to the ICC’s 1912 census, out of a total population in the Zone of sixty-two thousand, more than thirty thousand originated on islands across the Caribbean. Their world included a complex set of cultures, a diversity that is hidden by the generic label of “West Indian” that observers applied to them. West Indians were most often from the British Caribbean, but many came from French islands as well. The major recruiting offices were in Barbados, St. Kitts, and, until 1907, Martinique and Guadeloupe, and thus many West Indians who boarded ships for Panama had come from these islands. Hundreds of others, however, came on their own from islands that had restricted emigration. Most commonly they had left jobs as plantation workers on islands like Barbados, Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Kitts, Antigua, Grenada, and Trinidad, kissing loved ones good-bye and heading for the Americans’ jobs in Panama. They ranged in age from their early teens to their midthirties. They were leaving islands where unemployment, labor surplus, and low wages made it difficult to earn a decent living.5
There was a broad range in skill level among West Indians, and they inhabited a wide spectrum of social and economic status and respectability. The ICC classified them according to one of three categories that overlapped rather murkily: laborers, artisans, and those on a monthly salary. Laborers were West Indians who performed unskilled labor; artisans were those engaged in a craft; and the monthly salaried category included both skilled and unskilled West Indians whose hours of work were irregular. During the peak period of construction in 1909, the ICC recorded more than five thousand silver roll employees on monthly salary, at least half of whom would have been West Indians (other silver employees paid on a monthly salary included Europeans, Panamanians, and Colombians). Several hundred of the salaried West Indians were white-collar employees such as policemen, teachers, storekeepers, and clerical workers, who composed the elite of their society in the Canal Zone. Policemen and teachers played especially important roles as fig-ures of authority in the West Indian community, even though their numbers were relatively small. Close behind them were West Indians on monthly payroll whose work was seen as involving some skill and responsibility: bakers, cooks, waiters, barbers, foremen, watchmen, ship captains, steam-shovel and dredge engineers, firemen, and blacksmiths, followed by less skilled workers such as grave diggers, coal passers, janitors, and launderers.6
The ICC’s use of the term “artisan” to describe West Indian craftsmen was particularly interesting. The label was intended only for West Indians. Although many Europeans worked on the silver roll, they were virtually never referred to as artisans. During congressional hearings into labor conditions in the Canal Zone conducted late in 1909, the chief quartermaster, Carrol A. Devol, characterized the artisans: “Altogether negroes… . Very few of the Spaniards are artisans.” Although thousands of white U.S. citizens worked at a craft much as these West Indians did, they were referred to as skilled mechanics, not as artisans. Devol explained: “The skilled mechanics are on the gold roll, and what are called artisans are on the silver roll.” One gold carpenter (typically a white
U.S. citizen) might oversee eight to twelve silver carpenters (West Indians); one gold plumber might manage an area with a few silver plumbers under him. Organizing the work around a small number of mechanics versus a larger group of artisans was useful and efficient, Devol declared, for “there is economy in it.” The congressman interviewing Devol in this case finally grasped the situation: “The difference between an artisan and a mechanic is a matter of color?” Devol responded affirmatively.7
From 1907 onward, as concerns about cost efficiency led ICC officials to replace white firemen, electricians, painters, masons, and other skilled craftsmen with West Indians, the number of artisans increased. As excavation work moved toward completion after 1910, the number of West Indian laborers diminished. As a result of these trends, artisans became a more important part of the West Indian community. Their group included plumbers, blacksmiths, masons, painters, electricians, carpenters, coppersmiths, car repairers, machinists, boilermakers, drill runners, drill helpers, molders, and pipe fitters. In 1909 the ICC reported having more than thirty-seven hundred artisans on its payroll; by the summer of 1914 that number had risen to more than nine thousand. The ICC paid most artisans the equivalent of sixteen to twenty cents in U.S. currency per hour throughout the construction decade. Several hundred more artisans, those with the greatest skills, were paid as much as twenty-five cents in
U.S. currency per hour.8
Although the artisanal and white-collar elite might come from any of the Caribbean islands, two main groups were represented: Jamaicans and Martinicans. Most policemen and teachers and many skilled workers were Jamaicans. Their higher status in part derived from the experience many had gained during the French construction era. In addition, the steep emigration tax imposed on Jamaicans by their government meant that those who traveled to the Zone were more likely to have some resources, skills, and education. Because they formed one of the largest groups in the Zone and held elite positions in the community, Jamaicans were at times resented by other West Indians. During the early years of construction, especially from 1905 to 1907, Martinicans also held many of the skilled jobs, although they often spoke little or no English. By 1907, when the Martinican government changed emigration laws, approximately fifty-five hundred Martinicans had entered the employment of the ICC.9
Most West Indians, however, filled the much-needed category of unskilled laborers, and this, too, was a complex, regimented, and carefully categorized group. Nearly ten thousand West Indians worked as unskilled laborers as construction hit full intensity in 1909. Unskilled laborers included, at the lowest wage category (five U.S. cents per hour), young water boys and messengers and adult men who had been injured on the job and thus could not perform taxing labor. Most West Indians (more than six thousand in 1909, for
example) worked as the classic “pick and shovel” men, earning ten U.S. cents per hour and doing the heaviest, hardest work in Culebra Cut, on building construction sites, or at Gatun Dam. They were typically separated into gangs and supervised at tasks like digging out a steam shovel buried in a landslide, pulling a car along railroad tracks when there was no engine to do the labor, or building roads. A final category of West Indian laborers included some two thousand men who worked as helpers to artisans or skilled mechanics and received thirteen cents per hour.10
These differences in pay, skill, and status made for significant disparities among West Indians in terms of their economic resources, their ability to send money home, and their ability to afford comfortable housing in Panama City or in Colón. Those who made a bit more money found it easier to escape the regimentation of the Zone and afford a nicer place in Panama. There were also differences between people who came from the various islands, and these contrasts typically escaped the notice of white observers. French and British West Indians might see life and work in very different ways, and even among the British West Indians tensions emerged. Besides the common resentment toward skilled Martinicans and Jamaicans, and the anger many West Indians reserved for Jamaican policemen they considered particularly cruel, cultural differences separated islanders from one another. Divisions based on language, religion, or the colonial policies of Britain and France meant that the diverse groups often had little in common. The ICC tended to put men from each island in separate gangs, but because they were housed and ate in cafeterias close to one another, disagreements among them often arose. A Jamaican carpenter working for the ICC explained that crowded housing contributed to such disagreements: “There is no sense in putting so many different races together—Jamaicans and Bims [Barbadians] and Martiniques in the same room. It is not right. What use are the Martiniques, anyway? They don’t understand English, and when the boss tells one to pick up a stick he will pick up a stone. They ought to get all Jamaicans and pay them better.” Over time, their presence in a foreign land and exposure to similar treatment by their U.S. employers would create a common bond among West Indians and consequently some basis for broader solidarities, but during the construction era the divisions between groups remained deep.11
“SOMEBODY DYING EVERY DAY”
In the 1960s the Isthmian Historical Society held a competition for the “best true stories” of work and life during the construction era, and this resulted in submissions from several dozen West Indians. The entries came from islands across the Caribbean and from Panama. Most of those who wrote up their memories had worked not as laborers but at a craft or white-collar job, so for the most part they had faced less danger than did the unskilled laborers working in places like Culebra Cut. Nonetheless, the memoirists repeatedly stressed the danger of their work. Dynamite explosions, landslides, steam shovels toppling over, cranes swinging quickly by and crushing heads as they went, railroad accidents, falls from scaffolding while building the enormous locks and gates, and all the various diseases generated significant anxiety. A man named Albert Banister worked in the boiler room at Cristobal and related how casually death appeared in conversations: “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.” Reginald Beckford, who worked as a messenger, a mail clerk, and then a salesman at a commissary, recalled: “It was nothing unusual to be walking on Front Street and sudenly you sees a yard engine with one I.C.C. flat car attached with dead men streched out, whose faces cannot be seen, because a piece of clean white canvas, the length of the car covers their faces, moving slowly towards the Old Colon Freight House… . The people in the vicinity gathers, including myself, trying to get a glimpse of their faces. You can’t. The canvas covers their faces. A policeman is on duty to prevent the people from going too near.”
Constantine Parkinson remembered various terrors that cast a shadow during the years he worked on the canal. He watched one time as a landslide swallowed a large number of workers, most of them Europeans. Workers toiled day and night to dig the bodies out of the dirt and rocks, finding money tied around the waists of many of the dead men—the safest place, in the eyes of Spaniards and Greeks, to keep the money they were saving. “In construction days,” Parkinson concluded, “people get kill and injure almost every day and all the bosses want is to get the canal build.” One day Parkinson unfortunately joined the ranks of West Indians injured on the job. In 1913, eighteen years old and working as a railroad brakeman in the Zone, Parkinson fell victim to a train accident. Rushed to the hospital in Colón, he underwent surgery to amputate one leg and part of his other foot. Doctors feared he would die, but Parkinson survived, and years later still remembered what he saw upon awakening: “I notice all kinds of cripples around my bed without arms foot one eye telling me to cheer up not to fret we all good soldiers.” The accident ended Parkinson’s service on the construction project. After waiting a year, he returned to the hospital, where doctors fitted him with an artificial leg. “It was a big day for me returning home as many said that I would not live.”12
Yes, one veteran remembered, “the flesh of men flew in the air like birds many days johncrows feed on the bowels of men around the jungles.” Illness could be avoided only with great luck. If you missed seeing a friend for a few days or a week, it was said, “don’t wonder, he’s ether in the hospital or at Monkey Hill [later renamed Mount Hope Cemetery] resting in peace.” Nehemiah Douglas recalled working as a rigger on a crane when the cable broke, killing several men instantly: “The amount of blood that flowed gave the appearance of a little gully, and when I saw what appeared an island of blood, I got nervous, I think, because how I got down, I do not know; but I got down and ran like never run a man before, straight home in Paraiso. So fast did I run that when I arrived home I heard the whistle giving the knock off signal.” Death became one more matter for the ICC to handle: officials extended railroad tracks all the way to Mount Hope Cemetery so that they might dispose of the dead more efficiently.13
Such dangers and threats were reflected in West Indians’ songs as well. Among a vast repertoire of work songs, they frequently chose to sing one plaintively titled “Somebody Dying Every Day.” In the geographer Bonham Richardson’s interviews with canal workers and their children in Barbados conducted during the 1980s, the death of loved ones remained a vivid memory. When someone died in the Canal Zone, a friend or relative would send a mourning letter, its envelope bordered in black, to break the news to family back home. Claudine Cadogan of St. James, Barbados, remembered the fear of receiving that black symbol of death: “Once when I was a small girl, I heard people moaning and crying out. I went to the house and saw the mother holding a black-bordered envelope and crying. That meant her son had died in Panama.”14
Government officials’ reactions to issues of health and safety provide an indication of how differently they and other white Americans experienced the construction project. According to officials, the death rate in the Canal Zone was remarkably low: by the end of the construction era they specified it was less than 0. 08 percent, a lower rate than in even the healthiest states of the United States. This statistic led to boasts that the U.S. government had finally “conquered the tropics for the white race.” Certainly conditions were vastly better than during the French era, and they compared favorably to those in many industrial and company towns in the United States and in sites of capitalist development around the world. However, accidents, illness, and death, like everything else in the Zone, followed a color line. Officials conceded that the vast majority of deaths occurred among West Indians. According to government figures, approximately 5, 600 people died during the U.S. construction of the canal. Of those, 4, 500 were black (predominantly West Indians), and only 350 were white U.S. citizens. However, this figure is inaccurately low, particularly regarding West Indian mortalities. The historian Mi
chael Conniff has shown that poor record keeping, a common tendency among West Indians to change both their jobs and their names, and the fact that they often lived in the towns and cities of Panama rather than in the Canal Zone resulted in many unrecorded deaths. Conniff estimates the mortality figure to be close to 15, 000 among West Indians over the course of the U.S. construction decade—or about 10 percent of all immigrants.15
Conditions were roughest in the early years. Claude Mallet, the British consul who represented the interests of British West Indians in the Canal Zone, reported on the hardship workers faced in 1905: “I was frequently appealed to by large bodies of labourers who alleged they had not been paid their wages, in some instances for six weeks, and were bordering on a state of destitution.” They also complained bitterly about the harshness of Zone policemen and foremen in 1905. And disease was at its worst during this early period. By 1906 sanitation officials had gotten yellow fever under control, and by 1908 sanitation and medical improvements had at last resulted in declining rates of pneumonia and malaria. Yet those diseases remained a threat throughout the construction era, as did accidents on and off the job. Few West Indians managed to avoid harm even if they did avoid death. In fiscal year 1912, for example, the Sanitation Department reported that 23, 800 “colored persons” had received treatment in the hospital or at the “sick camps” in each town of the Zone, or had been reported as sick in their quarters. According to the census completed in February of that year, 31, 525 West Indians lived in the Zone; even if we add the several thousand more who worked for the United States but lived in the Republic of Panama, this means that as many as two-thirds of all West Indians reported sick or required medical attention during that year. West Indian workers and their families learned their way around the hospitals of the Canal Zone, most of them catching malaria several times and confronting injury more than once. Like Constantine Parkinson, more than a few went home missing a limb or an eye.16