by Julie Greene
Meanwhile, for comfort on the most personal level, Cora had found other male friends. She told Jack about all of it, noting that he himself had said he doubted they would live together again and so she needed to find friends. “Now Jack,” she wrote, “I am not trying to lie to you or keep anything from you. I have all ways went and had a good time but in a respectible way. And just as soon as you say you forgive me and are coming home to live with me then I will cut all out my friend and live as a wife should.” The children never saw anything, she insisted. Her friends visited only in the afternoon. One of her male friends began to scare her, never leaving her alone. She continued seeing her other male friend, but she claimed Jack was the only man she loved and that her only true comfort remained her children: “Clifton is so much comfort to me now realy he seems like a man and when I feel blue or sick why I could never ask for better care and he says only a few more years Mamma and you won’t have to work I will take care of you … he will come and put his arms around my neck and kiss me and say cheer up Mamma.” Cora paid for her frank confessions to Jack. With her letters as evidence, Jack sued Cora for divorce on grounds of adultery. The court decided in Jack’s favor and did not require that he pay alimony or child support.53
The case of Cora and Jack Gray, in which adultery emerged as the reason for granting divorce to the husband, was unusual. Typically, when a canal worker sued his wife in the United States for divorce, the case was decided in his favor on grounds that the wife had deserted him by refusing to move to the Canal Zone. A white woman in the Canal Zone might sue her husband for divorce on grounds of abandonment, cruelty, or violence, but such cases were quite rare. In citing desertion as the grounds, the men of the Canal Zone were in well-established legal territory, odd as it might seem to us that a woman unwilling to move thousands of miles to a construction camp would be construed as having deserted her husband. In much of the United States, a woman’s refusal to reside with her husband had historically constituted desertion. During the early twentieth century, divorce rates were unusually high in the U.S. West, where migrating settlers often confronted wives who refused to go with them. Divorce on grounds of desertion therefore seems to have gone hand in hand with American expansionism both domestically and abroad.54
“HER SKIN WAS HERS TO DO WITH
AS SHE PLEASED”
While white women’s role as homemakers on the isthmus during the construction era has been mythologized, the experiences of their West Indian counterparts have largely been forgotten. The scarcity of written records makes it difficult to uncover the thoughts and lives of West Indians in the Canal Zone, but it’s even more challenging to retrace the particular experiences of West Indian women. They emerge from the past as the most invisible, the most forgotten. When they appear in the historical record, most often it’s as the objects of other people’s fears and anxieties, the wailing women who frightened Rose Van Hardeveld, the seemingly careless or thieving servant girls who annoyed Elizabeth Parker.55
Like men from the islands of the Caribbean, West Indian women boarded ships for Panama in large numbers during the early twentieth century. And as in the case of West Indian men, mobility was central to their lives. They might head first to Panama in search of jobs, to join menfolk, or both, but often they headed onward from Panama to plantations in Costa Rica or Colombia, in search of better living conditions. Changing their names, their jobs, or the location of their homes provided them with some control over their lives. Similarly to West Indian men and white housewives from the United States, West Indian women often fell beyond the gaze of ICC officials. Unless their actions seemed potentially threatening to labor productivity, they could often move in a less controlled space. The private households in which most worked as domestic servants offered wide latitude for negotiations and for working in the way they wanted, in part because the housewife supervising them typically knew less than they did about the Isthmus of Panama and effective ways of keeping house there. White American housewives’ vulnerability and lack of knowledge surely empowered many West Indian domestic servants. Likewise, their relative independence from ICC regulations does not mean they failed to seek ways of shaping government policies for their own benefit.56
At the beginning of the U.S. construction period, in 1904 and 1905, as men began to take leave of their families across islands like Barbados, Jamaica, St. Lucia, and Antigua, some women asked their men not to go. Others set themselves to making do without their men around, just as many of their counterparts in the United States did. After the first year or two, however, many women began making the trip to the Canal Zone. Most went to join husbands, lovers, and fathers, wanting to reunite their families and provide support to their men working at extremely dangerous jobs amid potentially fatal diseases. And more than a few women traveled on their own, some even binding their breasts, according to the oral traditions of West Indians, so they might pass as men to win an ICC contract and board a steamer for Panama. Such women setting off on their own probably thought much like West Indian men had, wanting to make money, see the world beyond Barbados or St. Lucia, and find adventure. Others were simply single mothers desperate to feed their children.57
Adina Richards of Holder’s Hill in the parish of St. James, Barbados, remembered years later how her mother departed for Panama when Adina was only three years old. Adina’s father, a skilled mason, had died just weeks before she was born. With money difficult to come by in Barbados, and Adina’s mother undoubtedly hearing stories about the riches to be made in Panama, the steamers heading for the isthmus must have beckoned as the right solution. So off she went, leaving her children in the care of their godmother. Three years later, Adina and her brother journeyed with their godmother to Panama to join their mother, who was now making a good living ironing clothes at an ICC laundry. She was able to support her young family and send a bit of money home to a sister, but most of her savings she kept in a bank in Panama. When she and the children returned home twelve years later, she used her Panama savings to buy an acre of land and thus gain a bit of independence. In 1982, when the geographer Bonham Richardson interviewed Adina about her and her mother’s experiences in Panama, she recalled how significantly the Panama money had shaped her life.58
Adina’s mother traveled on her own, but more commonly West Indian women journeyed to the Zone to meet up with male partners or husbands. According to the Zone census of 1912, West Indian women in the Canal Zone outnumbered North American women by nearly two to one. More than 6,000 women of African descent aged fifteen or older lived in the Canal Zone: this number includes 861 Panamanians and a few Colombians and Venezuelans, but the vast majority were West Indians. They were joined by more than 2,000 family members under the age of fifteen. Several thousand other West Indians lived in rural areas bordering the labor camps of the ICC, building dwellings on their own in order to win more privacy and independence from government rules, thus allowing them to grow a few vegetables and raise chickens. Finally, these numbers include only those who lived within the Canal Zone; thousands more West Indian men, women, and children made their homes in the congested ghettos of Colón and Panama City.59
Like their American counterparts, these women helped their menfolk survive the travails of the construction job, providing them with food and, as much as possible, clean and dry clothes. Unlike American housewives, West Indian women did all the household labor themselves, calling upon only their children or extended family for help with cooking, cleaning, and child rearing. By 1912 the official census listed nearly two thousand West Indian children six years old and under who had been born in the Canal Zone, further occupying their mothers. Many children labored, like their mothers did, in the households of white Americans. Children as young as five or six worked as servants, showing white American housewives how to light their stoves or get rid of cockroaches. Their small wages helped West Indian families who felt desperate not only to make ends meet but to create a pool of savings that would make their journey to the is
thmus seem worthwhile. Photographs tell us as much about the lives of these families as any printed sources. The stagnant water near their dwellings and the absence of screens on the windows meant that disease, especially malaria, was a threat to women and children as much as to men. Women nursed husbands and lovers through illnesses and torrential rains, in wet seasons and dry, and comforted them when they or their co-workers were injured by one of the frequent workplace accidents.60
Like Adina’s mother, most West Indian women—between two-thirds and four-fifths of them—worked for a wage in the Canal Zone or in the bordering cities of Colón and Panama to bring money into the family economy. The ICC employed only seventy West Indian or South American women in 1912, according to the government census. The census listed four thousand women who were not U.S. citizens working in the Canal Zone for independent employers, and most of these would have been West Indians. Of these, the vast majority, more than three thousand, worked as domestic servants. The remainder were listed as manufacturers, tradespeople, merchants, or agriculturalists. This accords with the memoirs and oral histories of West Indians. Barbadian women remembered their mothers working as laundresses, seamstresses, and domestic servants. They also earned money by selling fruits or other goods, running inns or restaurants, or helping clean up after patients in hospitals.
The most prestigious job for a West Indian woman was teaching in the ICC schools for “colored” children. Only a handful of West Indian women were awarded such jobs, but they were paid very high wages and were admired figures in their communities across the isthmus. Work as a domestic servant in a white American family’s home was more readily available, and this was also a popular job since it was accompanied by suitable hours, safe and clean working conditions, and a sense of respectability. Work as a washerwoman could be fairly lucrative, with women able to make nearly $ 7 each week (a female silver worker with the ICC would make less than $ 5 per week), but it also proved fairly dangerous, as women typically used rivers as their washbasins.61
While white American women were hailed as civilizers, West Indian women were either ignored or considered suspect for poor morals and sanitation. Some of the first West Indian women to travel to the Canal Zone found themselves in the unwelcome gaze of U.S. government officials. Bowing to the demands of Martinican canal workers in 1905, the U.S. government arranged for several hundred women to be brought to Panama from Martinique. Soon after they arrived, Poultney Bigelow made his famous accusation that the women had been brought to Panama by the U.S. government specifically to serve as prostitutes. An uproar resulted. President Roosevelt ordered an investigation, and the U.S. Senate interviewed everyone involved, including the Martinican women themselves.62
Chief engineer John Stevens conceded that he not only had ordered the women brought to Panama but also had taken the unusual (and never to be repeated) step of paying for their passage. He also admitted that brothels existed on the isthmus but denied that the Martinican women were brought for the purpose of prostitution. His labor recruiter, who had personally interviewed the women in Martinique before approving them for the trip, defended bringing them as necessary both because the Martinican men wanted their women on the isthmus with them (“The men were clamoring for their wives to come,” as he put it) and because of a desperate need for more domestic servants and washerwomen. Facing high rates of return from the isthmus to various Caribbean islands during the early months of construction, officials had accepted that creating a more comfortable family life for all employees, white and black, would be beneficial. As Charles Magoon, the governor of the Canal Zone, noted, “It is no doubt true that private contractors find it advisable, if not necessary, to supply their common laborers with women, and quite possible, if the practice is not permitted in the Zone, that it may affect the question of labor supply from the West Indies or elsewhere.” J. W. Settoon, the ICC’s labor agent, summarized the situation: “The agents reported that we could get a better class of blacks if they could bring their wives.”63
Thus, although it is possible that Bigelow’s charges were accurate, it is much more likely the government officials were telling the truth. ICC officials certainly accepted the need for prostitution, but the industry was already thriving by 1905 and 1906. Far more pressing for the U.S. government was to create a comforting family life for as many workers as possible. Further complicating matters, and probably inclining Americans to suspect that the Martinican women were immoral, was the fact that many West Indian couples lived together as common-law husband and wife. In the eyes of many U.S. citizens such cohabitation was itself sinful. Upon investigation, Stevens and his staff demonstrated that of the nearly three hundred Martinican women shipped to the Zone, approximately two hundred were married and living with husbands on the isthmus, fifty were living with men but unmarried, and the remainder were single women working for white families as domestics. “As a class these women are neat, clean, and industrious.” Only three or four of them had been determined to be prostitutes. The labor recruiter also noted that he had tried to make a point of bringing only “elderly” women of thirty to fifty years of age, believing they would make the best domestic servants.64
Members of the U.S. Senate remained concerned despite such assurances. They took the extra step of ordering the Martinican women to testify regarding their marital status, employment, and moral behavior while on the isthmus. More than 150 affidavits provided the women’s testimony. Undoubtedly bewildered at being called up in front of a government committee and fearful that they might be deported, many of the women cried as they were questioned. They spoke of wanting to be with their husbands, and they mentioned how labor recruiters promised good jobs with good wages. One woman, Rose Montrose, testified that she made money by washing clothes and sweeping camp quarters. She had been informed, she said, that she must either work or be married, or both. No single woman would be allowed to stay in government quarters unless she worked. Other women testified to working at jobs in the homes of white Americans or in hotels or running cantinas. To the chagrin of investigators, many of the women confessed they were living with men who were not legally their husbands. “I am not married,” one reported, “but do not lead an immoral life.” The senators clearly were in a quandary, believing it sinful for a woman and a man to live together without a marriage contract. They debated the matter and decided that the key lay in one’s intention. If a couple’s intention was to live together as a moral, married couple, then it might be permissible that they lacked the benefit of legal sanction. Great care was taken also to clarify the nature of single women’s lives. Senators heard testimony that single West Indian females lived in residences with watchmen and policemen keeping an eye on them. Their quarters were closed and locked at 9: 30 each night. Alfred Erimus, the watchman responsible for their quarters, testified, “None of them leave and no one is permitted to enter after this hour.”65
The furor eventually quieted down. In the years to come, thousands more West Indian women made their way to the Canal Zone. Whether they worked as full-time housewives or as wage laborers, their days were difficult, and most leisure activities accessible to American women—the baseball games, open hours at the YMCA clubhouses, and women’s club meetings—were not available to them. They did find ways of relaxing together, however, taking walks, visiting Colón or Panama City, or simply socializing with neighbors and singing songs together, perhaps sharing a meal and some rum. They brought with them rich musical traditions from the islands. The folklorist Louise Cramer found that West Indians had songs for virtually any situation—work, spirituality, healing, death, bantering, dancing, social occasions, and so on. Her sources were men and women who had either migrated to the Canal Zone from Barbados or Jamaica at a young age or been born in the Canal Zone and came of age working on the canal. Together the songs provided a fascinating and often humorous commentary on the lives of West Indians and the dangers they faced. One popular song spoke to men’s desire to have a woman care fo
r them:
WANT ONE WOMAN
Wan one woman like my cousin Sarah Brown
Wan one woman like my cousin Sarah Brown
Wan one woman like my cousin Sarah Brown
Bayma grass wouldn’ kill mi nigga nyams
Woi, woi, woi, woi, woi, Manuel.
Bayma grass wouldn’ kill mi nigga nyams.
…
Man go da groung da bwoil bun pan,
Man go da groung da bwoil bun pan,
Man go da groung da bwoil bun pan.
Bayma grass wouldn’ kill mi nigga nyams.66
The song suggests the importance of women in producing good food for their husbands and families. A woman would help weed the crops so that bad grasses (“bayma,” or Bahama grass) couldn’t kill the yams (“nyams”). “Man go da groung da bwoil bun pan” refers to the fact that men would cook themselves some lunch in the field near where they were working. As they couldn’t carry a proper pan all that distance, they would have to use an old, burned one for the job. Having a woman in one’s life would ease this burden as well, because she would prepare and pack a lunch for her man.