Post on 01-Mar-2023
The Terminal: Eric Walrond,the City of Colon, andthe Caribbean of thePanama CanalJennifer Brittan*
All my readers must know—a glance at the map will show it tothose who do not—that between North America and theenvied shores of California stretches a little neck of land,insignificant-looking enough on the map, dividing the Atlanticfrom the Pacific.
Mary Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in ManyLands
Matter in the wrong place: five words waiting for the largest
public works project in US history. Single syllables are best for
being matter-of-fact, and the four in this phrase pronounce with a
self-assurance that doesn’t budge. Not so the physical stuff in
question; the generically identified matter identifies a material
referent already neither here nor there. The phrase was put to use
in 1908 by geographer Vaughan Cornish, who adds a particularly
memorable superlative to the many used to describe the American
Panama Canal. Reflecting on the mammoth labor of removing a
width of that little neck of land separating the Atlantic and Pacific
oceans, he writes, “nowhere is the classical definition of dirt as
‘matter in the wrong place’ so appropriate as on the Isthmus”
(167). Maps confirm this characterization; whatever the scale and
however detailed, the canal is first and foremost the stretch where
*Jennifer Brittan recently completed her doctorate in literature at the University
of California, Santa Cruz.
American Literary History, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 294–316doi:10.1093/alh/ajs077Advance Access publication March 6, 2013# The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
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the continent isn’t. With the completion of the canal in 1914, the
transit route evolved into a perfect watery nothingness.
What makes the Isthmus so uniquely illustrative of this “clas-
sical definition of dirt?” Cornish’s remark is rooted in Victorian
interpretations of Enlightenment natural theology, which made
human beings instrumental in the achievement of a harmonious
and rational natural order. Of particular concern was the urban
problem of human waste, or “dirt.” Viewed as “an anthropological
phenomenon: a product of man’s defective efforts to organize the
material world” (Crook 205), “dirt” was form estranged from func-
tion, and thus “a temporarily aberrant substance (‘matter out of
place’) within an orderly and intelligible cosmos” (219). Charged
with repurposing this material, humans became vital in a concep-
tion of nature as a “social-technological whole” in which order
required “the artifice of engineering” (208). Here we find the
bridge that connects the Isthmus of the canal construction to
Victorian urban reform, and the canal detritus to human waste.
When Cornish makes the Isthmus exemplary of matter in the
wrong place, one assumes he’s referring to the millions of cubic
yards of material (over 37,000,000 in 1908 and 262,000,000
overall [McCullough 529, 611]1) excavated from the canal route.
Might his remark not also extend to the very stretch of continent
this debris came from, that little neck of land? Either way, the
canal promises to affirm the natural order that results from putting
things right.
There’s a comic irony to Cornish tagging the Isthmus of
1908 as the very place where the definition of “dirt” (matter
wrongly placed) is most right; however, to quibble thus would be
to forget that nothing was more at home in descriptions of the
Panama Canal than superlatives. In this same spirit, we might say
that nowhere is Cornish’s assessment of the Isthmus so appropriate
as in the Panama described by a later writer: Eric Walrond. Born
in British Guiana in 1898, Walrond grew up in rural Barbados and
in Panama’s port city of Colon. His short-story collection Tropic
Death is set in the Caribbean of the Panama Canal, but belongs to
the cultural and literary life of Harlem in the 1920s. He wrote
Tropic Death in New York, where, arriving from Colon in 1918,
he would gain prominence as a journalist and fiction writer in the
New Negro movement. Walrond’s Panama stories occupy the
physical center of a collection that ranges in setting from rural
Barbados, British Guiana, and Honduras to Panama’s Atlantic
coast. Colon marks the collection’s origin and endpoint: positioned
last, the title story follows the move in the writer’s early life from
Barbados to this city, the port of arrival for the canal’s largely
West Indian labor force, and the place of residence for many.2
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Making the canal central to a vision of the Caribbean was
nothing new; supporters had long cast the waterway as crucial to
unifying the region. Water isn’t this collection’s connective
medium, though, and while each story brings a change of location,
the work doesn’t move forward in the manner of uninterrupted
transit.3 Instead, each story ends with a death, creating an abrupt
and absolute communicative gap. Put another way, what compels
the collection to cover ground is matter in the wrong place. The
collection is modeled not on the transit route but on the machi-
nery, physical matter, and labor of its excavation. The dredge
acquires emblematic status for Walrond, pointing to a canal that
accomplished its horizontal extension by blindly reaching and
wrenching objects out of the past: “It dug deep down, too, far into
the recesses of its sprawling cosmos. Back to a pre-geologic age it
delved, and brought up things. . . . Dross surged up; guava stumps,
pine stumps, earth-burned sprats, river stakes” (TD 87). Though
these twice-dredged objects refute the canal’s progress through a
single, shared space and time, Walrond doesn’t look back to the
period of the construction in order to defer the question of what
defines the Caribbean of the Panama Canal. Panama serves as his
point of reference for the Caribbean, in large part because
migrants from across the region funneled into the turbulent labor
hub of Colon, and the canal project established Panama as a key
site of American foreign policy and expansionist ambition. No less
important, modeling a new regionalism on the canal construction
demanded of the writer the kind of thematic and stylistic innova-
tions that made Walrond among the most admired black modern-
ists in the New York of his time. And so, even as Cornish casts an
eye on the great quantity of continental matter not yet removed in
1908, his remark aids in the long overdue labor of clearing a
path to the most-lauded, least-discussed work of the Harlem
Renaissance.
As the capital of Walrond’s Caribbean, Colon serves as a
vantage point from which to view the canal project’s imagined
“American Mediterranean” as well as the culture capital of
Harlem. Walrond shares with the more internationally minded of
his contemporaries an interest in mobile black identities and affili-
ations that exceed the bounded geographies of the nation, island
colony, and home empire. Articulating modern black identity
begins with diaspora for Walrond, and the canal is his metaphor
for the transit such mapping enables. First, the canal provides the
means through which the bodies of water on either side communi-
cate. In its spatial register, “communication” identifies “a connect-
ing channel, line, passage, or opening; a route, channel, etc., by
means of which transportation or travel . . . may be effected”
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(“Communication,” def. 9c). Communication thus denotes access,
or the capacity for movement between two points. While the canal
defines itself as a geographical communicate, for Walrond, the
physical work of connection means dredging underworlds. What’s
more, the stories in Tropic Death are self-contained, contracting in
their movement toward a single point, only reachable once. This
end point is the site of remains, material obstructions, and breaks
in the line. What links individual stories to the larger geography of
the collection is the terminal, meaning the deaths that provide the
stories with their final punctuation, and Colon, the canal’s Atlantic
terminus. While integral to the transit route, the terminal city was
a problem for the canal imaginary and official canal historiogra-
phy, presenting both with matter in the wrong place. Outside the
US-controlled Canal Zone and center of the canal’s unsanctioned
economy, Colon was a reverse Tower of Babel, drawing in such
a range of languages and dialects that the canal’s promise of
regional coherence coincides with the creation of a profound lin-
guistic confusion. It’s not surprising that a collection based the-
matically, structurally, and linguistically on this city should leave
Walrond’s readers silent. But the canal’s Atlantic terminal was
nothing if not noisy, and it’s by looking here that we find the con-
versations between Walrond and his contemporaries that couldn’t
quite take place.
1. Walrond, from Capital to Full Stop
Well-known as a journalist, fiction writer, and general
man-about-town at the height of the vogue noir, Walrond published
Tropic Death in 1926, eight years after moving to New York.
Called upon as a kind of ambassador to Harlem, often by
Opportunity editor and director of the National Urban League
Charles S. Johnson, Walrond escorted newcomers and white
drop-ins—impresarios, liberal intellectuals, and culture consum-
ers—into the private world and nightlife of Harlem’s inner circle,
from the uppercrust Civic Club to the insiders-only cabaret.
Walrond knew these people and places; in addition to being
Johnson’s protege (and the business manager for Johnson’s
Opportunity from 1925 to 1927), he was on close terms with
figures like Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn
Bennett. Countee Cullen once joked that the promoter of black
artists and writers, Carl Van Vechten, with his “excellent entree to
all social functions of color . . . must know more Lenox and
Seventh Avenue gossip than even Eric Walrond” (qtd. in Davis
73).
While the canal defines
itself as a geographical
communicate, for
Walrond, the physical
work of connection
means dredging
underworlds.
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With its wartime and postwar prosperity, New York attracted
historic numbers of West Indian immigrants, including many from
Panama, where the completion of the canal project in 1914 dis-
placed a sizable migrant labor force.4 This history intersects with
Walrond’s own: his father followed a well-established labor route
from Barbados to Colon, and after years in the port city, Walrond
joined the second of the “twin great migrations—from the rural
southern US and the colonial British West Indies—that overlapped
and intermingled in New York City” (Parker 113). Though
Walrond bridged the two often-fractious groups of Caribbean
immigrants and black Americans, his New York writing empha-
sizes the color line that kept these groups apart. Some of the same
tensions that characterized relations between West Indians and
black Americans in New York animate implicit comparisons in
Tropic Death between New York and Colon, and while Tropic
Death doesn’t follow Walrond’s trajectory north, Harlem, emerg-
ing in this period as a capital of the Caribbean, is the collection’s
silent setting.5 The pairing of these two cities has gone unex-
plored, due mainly to Walrond’s conspicuous obscurity as a writer.
Until quite recently, for Walrond’s place in literary and cultural
histories of the Harlem Renaissance, one needed only to look to
the role he assigned himself in one of his New York stories from
this period, “The Adventures of Kit Skyhead and Mistah Beauty.”
Mentioned in a crush of names—this is how Walrond imag-
ines himself in 1925, appearing as a name dropped among other
notables at the kind of Harlem cabaret where “you’ve got to be
part of the underworld pattern to fit in” (“Adventures” 176).
Sighted in the middle of a paragraph of people—
Spoof Moses, Four Eye Shadow, the prizefighter; Tunnah
Kasha, Mr. Burt’n, Bread and Cheese, Erasmus B. Black,
Polanque, Woomsie Nurse, Miguel Covarrubias, Trick
Skazmore, Bo Diddle, Eric Walrond, Jim Ar’try, West Henry,
Mary Stafford, Dolly May, Rachael Spilvens, Camilia Doo
Right (177)
—the writer anticipates a future in which he is squeezed among
names in commentaries. He will be cited, but little more, despite
considerable acclaim in his own time6 and special note in discus-
sions of the Harlem Renaissance—Kenneth Ramchand pairs
Walrond and Jean Toomer as “the two stylists of the movement”
(68), and Robert A. Hill refers to Tropic Death as “probably the
greatest short story work in the entire body of West Indian
Literature” (qtd. in Parascandola 25). He’s likely to come up in con-
nection with the Civic Club dinner of March 1924 when the
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landmark New Negro anthology project was first proposed, and
might be listed after Walter White and Countee Cullen as the third
black recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928.7 Anthologies
of African-American, Caribbean, and Harlem Renaissance writing
include his stories, but for decades Tropic Death was out of print
and rarely discussed.8 Unincorporated into any canon, this collec-
tion shares the fate of the footnote: given space on the page, but
not absorbed into the body. What, then, makes this book so
indigestible?
First, Tropic Death is inhospitable. Walrond offers no
gateway text, no introductory topography. Rather than being
escorted in and out of Walrond’s Caribbean, we are dropped into
its narrow confines and left in its underworlds. Punning on the
way each of the 10 stories in this collection ends, Robert Bone
concludes his discussion of this work with a statement of fact:
“Tropic Death turned out to be a dead end” (203). True, given that
Walrond would go on to publish articles and the occasional work
of fiction, but Tropic Death had no successor. However, this quip
also exacts a kind of revenge for the uncomfortable experience of
reading this work. While the movement between stories is lateral,
individual stories descend “from the deck to the bowels of a ship,
from the sparkling surface to the murky depths of the sea, . . . from
the human to the reptilian plane of being,” as Bone describes
(195). Settings take on an increasingly claustrophobic feel, tele-
scoping into the fixed spatial unit of the corpse. From marl dust,
snakes, and murderous Yankee foremen, to sharks, voodoo pins,
and leprosy, Walrond lavishes stunning prose on the distinctly
unappetizing: the diseased, the violently consumed, the dead.
What finally may be less palatable, less communicative, than the
corpse?
The problem is also more subtle. Like the air around an
epitaph, Walrond’s settings feel both remote and too close.
Escaping from the oppressive confines of this collection’s 10 plots,
however, requires entering the geography of the larger work. This
proves difficult; the opening story begins in rural Barbados, and
ends in the excruciatingly narrow confines of an internal organ.
However, even as stories draw inward and settings contract,
Walrond uses style to shift scale. Rather than taking on the nativist
voice of the West Indian returned home, he uses the hard-boiled
tone of the insider at the Harlem cabaret. Thus he gives even the
most parochial settings of the collection—the rural gap, the fron-
tier backwater—an “underworld pattern” suggestive of the dis-
placement, flux, and opacity of a distinctly modern Caribbean.
Developing a language for the micro-immigrant settlements,
improvised localisms, and ad hoc enterprises belonging to a long
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tradition of survival in the Caribbean, Walrond connects the
insular parish and cosmopolitan Colon, old labor routes and new.
In British Guiana, he takes us from “Negro peasant lodgings” on
“the eeliest streetstream in Bordeaux” to “Georgetown muck on a
briny dash to the gold fields” (TD 128, 137).
Bone’s spatial metaphor of the dead end proves unexpectedly
helpful because for Walrond, problems of narrative form, most fun-
damentally between the singular (the death) and the communicable
(the event), are linked to problems of geography. Whereas a travel
narrative accumulates, Tropic Death records attrition, whether of
body parts (like an ear, part of a toe, a foot) or the capacity for nar-
rative itself. We encounter this collection’s disarticulated objects as
well as what soon seems the inevitable narrative roadblock of the
body as starkly defined examples of matter in the wrong place.
Cornish’s five words could well be this collection’s lost epigraph.
The first story opens with an image of monochromatic marl, the
mix of clay and quarried limestone used for fertilizer production in
Barbados. Aware of the North–South axis of American racial geog-
raphy, Walrond makes clear that this story situates us in the other
black belt: “It wasn’t Sepia, Georgia, but a backwoods village in
Barbados” (TD 20). Quarry workmen come into view in a series of
descriptive fragments: “Helter-skelter dark, brilliant, black faces of
West Indian peasants moved along, in pain—the stiff tails of blue
denim coats, the hobble of chigger-cracked heels, the rhythm of a
stride . . . dissipating into the sun-stuffed void the radiant forces of
the incline” (TD 19). With the whistle, men move, “throats
parched,” from “the white burning hillside” to the “dry, waterless
gut” (TD 19). While the story travels, moving from the worksite to
the cabin of quarryman Coggins Rum, “Drought” begins and ends
in the stomach. With her compulsion to eat quarry rocks and marl,
Rum’s daughter Beryl is the collection’s first death. The original
setting is swallowed, and we find our own role as readers mirrored
in the exercise of the autopsy.
Communication, understood as the capacity for movement
between two points, is precisely what is absent in Tropic Death.
Walrond’s subject is the terminal, the point where physical matter,
including the very words on the page, marks the event of commu-
nicative impasse. “The Yellow One,” set on a moving inferno of a
boat returning to Jamaica from Honduras, provides the most literal
illustration. As the narration pans over the deck, passengers make
a first and final appearance. Among them is an itinerant evange-
lizer, conjured in an inventory of body parts and belongings: “a
hoary old black man, in a long black coat, who had taken the
Word, no doubt, to the yellow ‘heathen’ of the fever-hot lagoon,
shoeless, his hard white crash pants rolled up above his hairy,
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veiny calves, with a lone yellow pineapple as his sole earthly
reward” (TD 53). This purveyor of the Word, with his objects, gar-
ments, and flesh, is fleeting, unrepeating, and irredeemably earthly.
Along with the other deckers, he creates a frame for the final act,
but the story’s direction is one-way. Set against the backdrop of
traffic between Jamaica and the Spanish Main, the narration moves
down into the galley, winding its inevitable way to the event of a
death–a coordinate reachable from any point, but communicating
with none. For all the underworlds in these stories, we do not meet
this collection’s dead.
The central question of Tropic Death is how the terminal
serves as the gateway to a region shaped as much by insularity as
complex circuits of movement and interconnection. With scale
being the foundational issue of the collection, Walrond enters
a conversation with his contemporaries about the “mode[s] of
framing blackness” (70) so important, as Brent Hayes Edwards
notes, to articulations of urban black internationalisms and the lit-
erary form of the black anthology, as well as the concept of the
race capital. In focusing on the canal construction, Walrond points
to Colon as a capital of the Caribbean, and gives the Harlem
Renaissance an unexpected American geography. Before entering
Walrond’s terminal city, we’ll need to place it in the context of the
American canal project and its vision for the region. We’ll see that
Colon poses a similar problem for the Canal Zone as Walrond has
for his readers.
2. 4,000 miles of telegraph line
The Panama Canal opens out onto a Caribbean long defined
as a strategic geography of shipping routes, coal fueling stations,
free ports, penal colonies, and naval bases, as well as the “bad”
communication of disease vectors, smuggling operations, political
radicalism, and foreign imperial powers angling to establish foot-
holds in the region. The latter most concerned American historian
and diplomat Stephen Bonsal, who, writing in 1912, anticipates that
the canal will reestablish the Caribbean as a nexus of rival imperial
interests. “To-day, again, the tables are turning” (9), he augurs.
“One hundred and fifty years ago all the powers of the world were
competing for the possession of the islands, which many of them
to-day would gladly abandon if the way to doing so were clear. And
those powers which to-day, like Germany, cannot successfully deny
the impeachment of coveting West Indian real estate, it is equally
clear, only regard them as strategic positions or stepping-stones to
more desirable places and heights beyond” (10–11). Here, Bonsal
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manages to capture the dual character of the Caribbean region—a
place where global economic forces have run aground, and a vista
of new horizons of imperial conflict and expansion.
Bonsal assigns the American Panama Canal the special func-
tion of opening up the region to free-trade economics and sealing it
off as a single spatial unit. Accomplishing the latter will require new
regional nomenclature. The “West Indies” is, for Bonsal, too loose a
term and too incohesive a region. The canal will resolve this
problem, transforming the Caribbean Sea into what Bonsal, echoing
Alfred Thayer Mahan, calls the “American Mediterranean.”9 This
regional imaginary predates Mahan and the canal, but gained greater
symbolic weight when the US acquired the rights to the French
canal project on the isthmus. The earlier French attempt to carve out
a waterway was led by the famed chief architect of the Suez Canal,
Ferdinand de Lesseps, who promised the Suez of the Caribbean.
When the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interoceanique went
bankrupt in 1889 and the US made moves to take over the project, it
was a small step from an American Suez to an American
Mediterranean. The Suez Canal connected the Mediterranean Sea to
the Red Sea and Indian Ocean to the east and the Atlantic Ocean to
the west, creating a thoroughfare for trade among Europe and both
Africa and Asia, while facilitating European expansion into these
regions. Likewise, the Panama Canal would connect the Atlantic
and Pacific Oceans, open up a quick route between the US posses-
sions off either coast, and fuel commercial expansion into the
Pacific. With water as its connective medium, this imagined region
requires, Bonsal suggests, more space on the map: “The vast extent
of the American Mediterranean, in which I include the Gulf of
Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, the encircling rim of islands, and the
coasts of the old Spanish Main, is not indicated by the small-scale
maps upon which the West Indies are generally drawn” (3).10
Bonsal’s cartographic innovation is easier to accomplish than the
canal excavation, but both attend to matter in the wrong place, first
by clearing away the obstacles to an interocean communicate and
then by shoring up avenues of bad communication.
Conforming more closely to the “larger-scale” map that Bonsal
prescribes, the 1923 Pocket Guide to the West Indies includes chap-
ters on Panama and the Spanish Main. For its section on the canal,
the guide quotes Mahan, well-known US naval officer, historian, and
influential promoter of American sea power. Not surprisingly,
Mahan describes a whole region newly in view, with the Caribbean
Sea, formerly “a terminus and place of local traffic, or at the best a
broken and imperfect line of travel,” now become “one of the great
highways of the world” (qtd. in Aspinall 409). Mahan’s image of a
formerly broken or imperfect line points to a wildly popular media
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stunt as the inaugural for his American Mediterranean. On 10
October 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a button in
Washington, DC, sending an electric signal through over 4,000 miles
of telegraph line and cable connecting the White House to the
Isthmus. This signal ignited the massive dynamite charge that blew
up the Gamboa Dike (the last of Cornish’s “matter in the wrong
place”) and initiated the free flow of water through the canal.
As Woodrow Wilson’s button underscores, this American
Mediterranean extended along the lines of much larger economic
and naval interests. As for how this imagined region functioned as
an integrated spatial unit, one must look to a much smaller terri-
tory, the US-controlled Panama Canal Zone, which stretched 10
miles in width along the length of the Isthmian transit route. The
terminal city of Colon was an unincorporable appendage—on the
transit route, but outside the American Zone. The city was home
to administrative buildings from the French Canal effort, genera-
tions of labor from the French and British Caribbean, and a
service industry that appealed to appetites unsatisfied in the
heavily regulated Canal Zone. Colon was where Walrond lived,
along with many thousands of West Indians who didn’t have work
contracts (like most of the women) or who elected not to live in
the Zone’s government housing.11 Virtually absent from contem-
porary accounts of the canal construction and “characterized as
occupying the most insignificant places in isthmian society,” the
so-called Colon Men were “the most ubiquitous and invisible
people throughout the U.S.-controlled Canal Zone and
Panamanian-controlled cities” (Frederick 35). What better example
of the breaks in the line than this city, which housed the remains
of previous transit projects, and the excesses of this one?
3. Terminal City
An American company town with a history stretching back to
the building of the trans-Isthmian railway in the mid-nineteenth
century, Colon was the last stop for Atlantic-bound passengers, the
first stop for West Indians labor migrants, and a city infamous for
its slums, informal economy, and profligacy. Memory stretches
back farther here than in the Zone; the Colon stories in Tropic
Death pan over French machinery left to rust in a mangrove
swamp and ghettos that trace back not just through two canal proj-
ects but to the first transcontinental railroad. The railroad and its
terminals in Colon and Panama City catered to gold rush traffic
across the Isthmus, mostly heading to or returning from the port of
San Francisco, and as befits a transit zone—by definition less a
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place than a means to a place—Panama remembers this period in
its history as La California. “Platted with a grid like those of the
frontier towns created by Anglo-American settlers in the United
States in the same era,” Colon was an early welcome to the
American West (McGuinness 74). With wry humor, Walrond will
occasionally refer to Colon as Aspinwall, the controversial name
that dates to when the American-owned Panama Railroad
Company built the town in the early 1850s.
Opinion was divided on whether the Atlantic terminal should
be named to commemorate Christopher Columbus (Colon) or
William H. Aspinwall, founder of the Panama Railroad Company.
Not surprisingly, the latter option raised the ire of native
Panamanians, who already viewed the company town, with its
own municipal laws, courts, and a controversial “vigilance
committee” as a breach of their sovereignty.12 Historian Aims
McGuinness argues compellingly that the history of the American
company enclave in Latin America begins in Colon at mid-
century: “The new city the company created on Panama’s Atlantic
coast—Colon, or Aspinwall—became the first of a series of
company enclaves or dense concentrations of U.S. economic and
political power that sprouted up within the borders of nations in
Central and South America in connection with the banana industry
and other forms of export agriculture and resource extraction”
(189). The Colon of Tropic Death looks as much ahead to the rise
of the US as a major economic and naval power as back to the
future imagined by Venezuelan revolutionary Simon Bolıvar, who
saw a Panama long distinguished for its “transit economy”
(McGuinness 20) becoming an “emporium of the world” and a
possible world capital (Bolıvar 119). “How beautiful it would be,”
Bolıvar writes in 1815, “if the Isthmus of Panama could be for us
what the Isthmus of Corinth was for the Greeks!” (118). We can
be certain that advocates of the canal, like Bonsal and Mahan,
didn’t have this particular Mediterraneo americano in mind.
Focusing on the informal canal economy, unofficial labor,
and neighborhoods famed as the very frontier of debauchery,
Walrond highlights the elements of the city that Zone administra-
tors worked tirelessly to expel. While originally Colon was
designed as a refuge for American railroad employees from the
dubious characters, violence, and disease of the transit route, by
1904 this relationship was inverted. When the Canal Zone became
de facto American territory, one of the chief functions of this
imperium in imperio was to keep the transit route’s two terminal
cities at a distance. Historian Julie Greene notes that “the ICC
[Isthmian Canal Commission] officials tried over the years to insu-
late the Zone from what they perceived as the disorder and moral
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disease of Panama City and Colon” (302). This relationship per-
sisted well into the canal’s operation. A visitor to Colon in the
early 1920s contrasts this city with the town of Cristobal, which,
falling within Zone limits, was “consequently far more dignified
and orderly than its cosmopolitan neighbour” (Aspinall 415). The
Zone city is distinguished, he specifies, by “mosquito-proof
houses, screened with copper gauze and looking like glorified
meat safes, in which the ‘gold employees’ on the canal reside”
(Aspinall 415). He details Jim Crow laws operating across all
aspects of Zone life from hospitals and commissaries to housing,
as well as a two-stream pay scale that reserved the local currency
(the Panamanian balboa) for non-US citizens, in turn making
“gold” and “silver” “universal euphemisms for ‘white’ and ‘black’
in Panama and the Canal Zone” (Richardson 155).13 Whereas the
derisive term “silver men” underscores the comparatively meager
income earned by workers categorized as native labor, another
term for West Indians who went to Panama, the “Colon men,”
aligns them with the city where the American canal project suf-
fered all manner of mutations. Although certainly disreputable,
Colon presents a far truer portrait of the canal’s labor supply than
its counterpart in the Zone, and as the center of the canal’s unsanc-
tioned service industry, the cosmopolitan city offered a whole
world of reaction against the Zone’s many prohibitions.
A “shimmering volcano of gluttony and licentiousness” has
serious pull, and never more so than on paydays, when, as
Walrond describes, “the [white American] ‘Gatun Lambs’” came
up from the locks project just south of the city and “over-ran the
district” (“Godless” 166). The pleasures of the moment count most
here, but it’s also in Colon that these insulated Zoners encounter
the material reality of the canal’s prehistory and parallel life in
Panama. What emerges in Walrond’s use of the city is the provo-
cative suggestion that Colon—with its peculiar identity as a place
only partially recognized by Panamanians and Americans alike—
interrupts and refracts the rigid social engineering of the Zone as
well as the new regionalism of the canal project.
4. Communicate and Terminus
It was a suction sea. . . . Old brass staves—junk dumped there by
the retiring French—thick, yawping mud, barrel hoops, tons of
obsolete brass, a wealth of slimy steel.
Eric Walrond, Tropic Death
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Walrond’s terminal city earns its name in the insalubrious
dark corners of Coolie Town, Bottle Alley, Bolivar Street, Silver
City, Upper and Lower Cash Street, and G Street, populated by
figures for whom “work other than the knuckle-dusting kind was
unknown” (“Godless” 166). If not the future world capital that
Bolıvar envisioned, Colon is one in a long line of Caribbean
Sodoms that reaches back to San Domingue or the so-named
Babylon of the Antilles. Described in the title of one of Walrond’s
earlier stories as “The Godless City,” Upper Cash Street is a
“humming hell” with an international pedigree: “Cabaret singers
danced and sang before the greedy eyes of applauding conquista-
dores. One place was particularly enchanting. It was the notorious
Red Raven. Ask any sailor on any transatlantic liner plying to
South America, and he will name you off-hand the girls who
entertained there. They came from France, Sweden, Germany,
Cuba, Costa Rica, West India. It was hoisted on a roof of ever-
green leaves. Argentine Tango, merengue, ‘shimmy shawabbie,’
the ‘passion glide’—it was the most cosmopolitan cafe in the dis-
trict.” (165). In the Panama of this period, “more cosmopolitan”
means outside the Zone, without racial order, undignified. Other
locations in the Colon stories are decidedly off the shore-leave
circuit, and much as he did in Harlem, Walrond provides access
where an escort is required. Mythologized but deemed best forgot-
ten, this city is the canal’s obscene archive. The terminal opens
onto the Atlantic, while the cabarets and bordellos of the terminal
city offer other gateways to the world.
Colon’s status as one terminal among this collection’s many
returns us to the question of how the terminal serves a structural or
cartographic function here. First, the deaths in this collection mark
the locations where they take place, calling up the map that must
accommodate them. In compelling the collection to cover ground
moreover, deaths are at once this collection’s mode of transit and
its communicative end points, connecting stories while isolating
them. As both a communicate and a terminus, the canal provides a
model for both the individual stories and the collection as a whole.
Walrond’s description of a bordello on the edge of Colon provides
an architectural analogy for the way the deaths in this collection
are linked to one another, and produce the space they inhabit:
“The Palm Porch was not a canteen, it was a house. But it was a
house of lavish self-containment. It was split up in rooms, follow-
ing a style of architecture which was the flair of the Isthmian real-
tors, and each room opened out on the porch. Each had, too, an
armor of leafy laces; shining dust and scarlet. Each had its wine
and decanters, music and song” (TD 88–89). It’s in one of these
rooms that Walrond stages the murder of a British vice-consul, a
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victim of rival imperial interests of the very kind that preoccupy
Bonsal. The lead-up to this murder, with its hyper-masculine
bluster, is of a piece with the scene visible from the porch:
“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” (TD 85). The story is organized
around these twinned plots, with the industrial show of force and
the transaction in the bordello like two rooms with a shared point
of access. As with every room and each story in the collection,
however, the death is also self-contained, communicating with
nothing.
The canal is as important to Walrond’s Caribbean as it is to
Bonsal’s, both as an extraordinary geographical intervention and
as a labor experiment of unprecedented proportions. Far from nos-
talgic, Walrond’s is the Caribbean of oceanic highways, black
migrant workers moving from agricultural into industrial labor, and
a US entering a century of global dominance. Like Bonsal,
Walrond looks to the canal as an answer to regional incoherence,
but Walrond leaves the articulation of the canal’s vision for the
Caribbean to the “briny Babel” that its construction produces (TD
90). The geographical communicate serves in this sense as the
model for the language in Walrond’s collection. As a regional
labor capital, Colon appeals to Walrond’s interest in black vernac-
ulars, both within and across microcultures, languages, and colo-
nial histories. Even in settings less marked by the coming together
of the Caribbean’s black diaspora, Colon is Walrond’s reference
point for a use of dialect that has been lambasted for what is argu-
ably an intentional incomprehensibility. Much of Walrond’s dia-
logue has the physical presence on the page of an obstacle, as
matter in the way of meaning, dialect contra communicate.
Walrond’s American readership would have the dialect foreign
and even distasteful, since West Indian vernacular was “neither
familiar nor respectable in upper-crust Harlem” (Lewis 189). One
representative, if distinctly narrow, recent critique of Walrond’s
dialogue supplies the following example from Tropic Death:
“Wha’ Oi doin’? ent um is de troot, ent um?” (qtd. in Murray).14
Matter in the wrong place. This alone could explain the work’s
critical dead-ending. Tropic Death “could find no primary audi-
ence,” suggests Louis Chude-Sokei, “on account of its unapolo-
getically non-American and radically polyphonous, multi-accented
blackness” (221). No doubt, but Walrond’s own characters often
find one another’s speech as indecipherable, off-putting, or open to
mockery as would have his American readership. Yet just as
meaning short circuits, particularly in the linguistic density of
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Colon, Walrond’s vernaculars also confirm the place of each story
within a common geography. A line extends from Colon to all
points in these stories where transcribed speech appears on the
page like a material obstruction, translating the canal’s promise of
direct communication and regional coherence as a garble.
If we are to look for the regionalism of the canal construction
in scaled-down form in Walrond’s work, Colon is his Caribbean in
miniature. Vibrant but fractious, no amount of telegraph line can
ensure unbroken communication, and no vision of a singular larger
region survives. In using the communicate as its central metaphor,
Tropic Death lays the groundwork for Brent Hayes Edwards’s
study of diaspora and translation, focused on collaborations
between Walrond’s contemporaries in New York and their franco-
phone counterparts in Paris. For the link between the many termi-
nals in the stories and the canal, we can turn, much like in
Edwards’s work, to the body. Suggesting that we view diaspora as
a set of connections across gaps akin to a translation from one lan-
guage to another, Edwards draws our attention to articulation as a
“metaphor of the body” (14) and particularly the joint, which func-
tions both as a “point of separation” and as a “point of linkage”
(15). To describe the manner in which diaspora “articulates differ-
ence,” Edwards calls on the French term decalage, meaning
“‘gap,’ ‘discrepancy,’ ‘time-lag,’ or ‘interval’” (13), and more
broadly, “precisely that which cannot be transferred or exchanged”
(14). Tropic Death’s geography of terminals parallels Edwards’s
description of a practice “of linking or connecting across gaps”
(11). The inevitable limit points of translation can be recognized,
writes Edwards, only as the “unidentifiable point that is incessantly
touched and fingered and pressed” (14). The tactility of the com-
municative gap is partly what makes Tropic Death uncomfortable
to read. There is no meaning here without parts left over, material
remains. We circle back to the contents of a stomach, and are com-
pelled to finger and press matter and language at the edge of
narratability.
Edwards’s elegant formulation also has a grotesque correla-
tive in Tropic Death, in which the communicative network of the
transcontinental channel is mirrored in the digestive tract, the ali-
mentary canal. Consistent in their contraction into interiors, these
stories take us finally inside the body proper. Poisonous centipedes
head down the gullets of unsuspecting chickens, and canal dredges
have the “sea groaning and vomiting” as material travels from “the
gutty bosom of the swamp” up “through the throat of the pipes”
and finally to the mouth, which “spat stones” (TD 87). In particu-
lar, Walrond puts us inside the body of bad communication: sites
of attrition, invasion, infection, and blockage. If we’re not in the
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digestive tract, our attention is drawn to sites of leakage and
breach. Blood from a stubbed toe supplies the only note of color
in the first story, “Drought,” and the “chiggah foot,” Walrond’s
catch-all term for the peasantry and urban poor, are the preferred
human hosts of a parasite that uses cracks in the feet as an easy
point of entry.
The necrology of Tropic Death—its collection of deaths—
maps, not memorializes, tracing travel routes from the inter-island
to the digestive tract and the bloodstream. Likewise, the locations
in Tropic Death owe less to memory than to the manner in which
a place can be repelled, expelled and repeated in the body, operat-
ing, as Martiniquan theorist Edouard Glissant describes, as an
“infection of the imaginary” (234, 230). What better representative
of Glissant’s tropical grotesque than the chigger? And with
Glissant’s metaphor, we’re displaced (once again), in this case
from the terminal city of Walrond’s early years to the closer quar-
ters of a corporeal communication network. The twinned systems
we encounter here—the geographical and the biological—intersect
in Colon, the gateway for what travels and the terminus for what
doesn’t. The latter returns us the collection’s first final stop, the
indigestible, a prescient beginning for a work that will itself prove
one of the remainders of the Harlem Renaissance.
5. Dredges and Geographies
Tropic Death calls for a mapping of race relations and dia-
spora distinct from either the conventional national north–south
geography or the more global framework common to Walrond’s
generation of writers in New York. With his work pointing to
New York and Colon as two quite different capitals of the
Caribbean, Walrond is of growing interest to scholars focused on
“the Pan-African element of the Harlem Renaissance”
(Parascandola 25). This includes attention to the ways in which the
politics and aesthetics of black modernism were shaped by and in
sites of US expansion, like Panama.15 As James C. Davis notes,
Walrond “recognized, more clearly than any of his contemporaries,
the centrality of the Panama Canal to the intertwined stories of the
Black diaspora and Western modernity” (78). It’s worth noting as
well that with its long history as a corridor linking the Caribbean
and the Pacific, Panama helped create a Black Atlantic shaped by
routes and markets other than those of the familiar triangle trade.16
Michelle Stephens looks to Walrond as an early proponent of what
has emerged in recent years as a hemispherized American studies,
writing that “Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death, by introducing the
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‘New World’ Negro into the New Negro movement in Harlem,
raised questions of the larger international and hemispheric
context in which both the Harlem Renaissance and American
Modernism emerged” (168). That these disciplinary shifts have
added to Walrond’s incorporability couldn’t be more apt, given
that there is no problem more provocative in Tropic Death than
scale.
Answering Walrond’s call to view the Panama Canal Zone as
a geography of the Harlem Renaissance requires not just an
expanded map but the accommodation of messy overlaps. In the
Jim Crow South of the Zone, for example, the labor category of
the silver men used its apparent distance from racial nomenclature
to make Caribbeans substitute black Americans. The first of
Walrond’s Panama stories describes how this proxy identity com-
plicated compensation claims for what were technically British
body parts damaged or lost on the job. The “Panama Gold” of the
title refers to the recompense awarded a Barbadian brakesman for
a limb lost in a rail accident. This Bajan’s stint in the Canal Zone
has given distinctions of citizenship particular urgency: “I let dem
understand quick enough dat I wuz a Englishman and not a bleddy
American nigger!” (42). As the Bajan tells it, the claims office
narrowly avoids raising up a vigilante army of rampaging imperial
might: “Man, I wuz ready to sick Nelson heself ’pon dem. At a
moment’s notice, me an’ de council wuz gettin’ ready fo’ ramsack
de Isthmus and shoot up de whole blasted locks! Hell wit’ de
Canal! We wuz gwine blow up de dam, cut down de wireless
station an’ breck up de gubment house! If dey didn’t pay me fo’
my foot!” (TD 42). Panama takes the foot, but the Barbadian gap
will take the bigged-up Colon Man in his entirety. One of the
ironies of this Silver King’s short-lived repatriation is that the very
difference he hopes to leverage on the Isthmus is unrecognized at
home. Whether returning from Panama or the US, migrants are
“Americanized,” or as a commentator in Claude McKay’s Banana
Bottom (1933) puts it, “they come back ruder” (35). Going straight
for that telegraph line, Walrond’s John Bull vigilante didn’t
connect with representatives of the New Negro in Harlem, either.
In turn, the Canal Zone didn’t receive the attention of other sites
of US intervention like Cuba and Haiti, which became flashpoints
for African Americans struggling to reconcile race solidarity with
allegiance to nation.
In addition to crafting a black modernism not headquartered
in recognized culture capitals like Harlem and Paris, Walrond
offers Colon as a vantage point from which to view contemporary
nationally oriented discussions of race as well as black internation-
alist formations, from the black anthology to Marcus Garvey’s
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black empire.17 Tropic Death shares the anthology’s interest in the
book as a form capable of representing black experience across
and beyond insular localisms and national identifications.18 But
with its emphasis on race and the writerly, the black anthology is
tied to the culture capital, not the labor hub. Working from Colon,
Walrond takes as a starting place less the capacity of the black
anthology to frame a modern black identity than modernity as
itself defined through the framing of race. Herein also lies the dif-
ference between Walrond and Garvey. The two men had a lifelong,
though often contentious, association, and the Jim Crow labor
practices of the canal construction were a lightning rod for
Garvey’s vision of a united black proletariat.19 The problem for
Walrond was that Garvey’s black collectivity depended on figures
like the cork-legged former brakesman, newly untethered from
what Garvey termed “provincial feelings” (31) and, in Walrond’s
words, “leaping to the contemplation of boundless continents”
(“Imperator” 124). Moving consistently in the opposite direction,
Walrond begins on the global scale of a project conceived in
superlatives (the canal), but for every macro-optic and historical
long view in Tropic Death, there is an obscure inward-turning end
point. As for “boundless continents,” they appear only in the com-
pensatory visions of black evangelists. The former brakesman
proves an unlikely member of this cohort, broadcasting to all
within earshot the rewards to be claimed for sacrifice of the flesh
in the Canal Zone. The canal construction provides the frame for
Walrond’s Caribbean, but Tropic Death is acutely aware of the
problematics of scale in working so large; even the cosmopolitan
Colon has its rapidly improvised nativisms. For Walrond, the real-
ities and promise of the canal center on this city, where a creol-
ized, heterogeneous, and multi-lingual black population mixes
with native Panamanians and migrants from the Pacific Rim. We
must look here for the canal’s regional imaginary, Walrond
suggests. Scaling up takes us to the collection’s geography of
terminals, where we find a “Caribbean American regionalism”
characterized by what Sean X. Goudie terms a “more usable, and
interdynamic, poetics, politics, and economics” (322).
The modern Caribbean of Walrond’s Tropic Death carries the
dark promise of a US increasingly oriented toward the region and
the hemisphere at large. However, while the American Canal gives
the stories in the collection their shared geography, Colon marks
the canal’s crucial communicative gap and offers grounds for new
models of diaspora, regional politics, and scaled geographies of
even greater relevance in our time perhaps than in Walrond’s own.
Colon was Walrond’s training ground as a writer, and nowhere is
miscommunication more palpable than here. In the most pointed of
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Walrond’s canal stories, a worksite altercation between a Bajan
creole and an American marine sets a fatal machinery in motion. In
the final hours of the creole’s life, a string of place names marks off
the morning arrival of men from the Colon tenderloin. What
follows are two curiously twinned acts of violence. Fleeing the
armed marine and the three bullets that will end the story, the Bajan
is pummeled and lacerated in a preliminary fusillade of words: the
creole “flew. He scaled hurdles. He bumped into men. Ugly French
colonial words, epithets deserving of a dog, were hurled at him.
Impatient, contemptuous Jamaican, colored by a highly British
accent, caught at him like shreds” (Walrond, TD 111).
The collection’s final word is of this kind, both vital and
potentially lethal, as the title story describes a young boy’s move
from Barbados to Colon. It seems appropriate that the story so
clearly a window on the writer’s early beginnings would end not
with the customary body but rather with a death sentence. Here we
follow a woman driven by desperate financial straits to track down
her son’s father on the Isthmus. The reunion is cut short when
the diseased profligate is quarantined on the screened back porch
of a hospital, confined to a “gauze-encased” box, and slated for
removal to the leper colony of Palo Seco (TD 190). In between is
an introduction to the terminal city. The prospects for these arri-
vants are summed up in advice that both dismisses and provokes:
“Winds can wake up the dead. Go try—bawl it to the winds!” (TD
178). The full significance of this injunction becomes clear when a
sampling of Colon life rushes past the young writer in a “hurricane
of words” (TD 186). It’s in this briny Babel that Walrond looks
for his audience and interlocutors, and he hears in this hurricane
his own life sentence, not a terminal disease but an incurable
infection.20
Notes
1. The latter figure includes 30,000 cubic yards excavated by the French.
2. Much of the recruitment for the canal project’s international labor force was
concentrated on the West Indies, and Barbados in particular. The government
census for 1912 counts the total labor population of the American Canal Zone as
62,000, among those 4,800 US male citizens and over 30,000 men from the
Caribbean (Greene 126, 80, 126). Some of the latter would have been culled from
a population of almost 2,000 Jamaicans already living in Panama, left over from
the French canal effort. For labor agents and recruitment in the Caribbean, see
Greene, Richardson, Michael L. Conniff’s Black Labor on a White Canal: 1904–
1981 (1985), and Velma Newton’s The Silver Men: West Indian Labor Migration
to Panama, 1850–1914 (1984).
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3. Tropic Death’s distance from the genre of the travel narrative is particularly
intriguing, given that the project was conceived while Walrond was traveling in
the Caribbean. He left New York in 1922 for a stint as a cook’s mate on the
Caribbean-bound SS Turrialba, and in letters to Alain Locke he describes this
voyage as the foundation for his next body of work (Davis 71).
4. Michael Conniff notes in Black Labor on a White Canal that for most years
of the canal construction, the Isthmian Canal Commission had around 20,000
West Indians on the payroll (29). Velma Newton notes in The Silver Men that the
ICC discharged 30,000 workers in the final years of the project, and an additional
13,400 by 1921 (157–58).
5. For Harlem as a race capital and “an original twentieth-century topos,” see
James De Jongh’s Vicious Modernism (1990): 209, as well as John Lowney’s
“Haiti and Black Transnationalism: Remapping the Migrant Geography of Home
to Harlem,” African American Review, 34:3 (2000): 413–29.
6. Reflecting on the impact of Tropic Death, historian David Levering Lewis
remarks that “the book was one of the truly avant-garde literary experiments of
the Harlem Renaissance, a prism so strange and many-sided that even Professor
Benjamin Brawley, Afro-America’s fatuous literary critic, saw its iridescence: ‘It
is hardly too much to say that 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’” (189). Lewis goes on to quote from a favorable
review by W. E. B. Du Bois, and to note that through the latter half of the twen-
ties, Eric Walrond was Charles Johnson’s “prize candidate for greatness” (189).
For reviews by Langston Hughes, Robert Herrick, J. A. Rogers, Waldo Frank,
Sterling Brown, and others, see Davis’s “There Has Been an Inward Change,”
72–73, 80.
7. In 1928, Walrond was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for research on
several long fictional works on the Panama Canal, but despite a period of exten-
sive travel and research, these works were unfinished and never materialized, with
the exception of a run of serial installments from 1955–56 in The Roundway
Review, a journal of the Roundway Psychiatric Hospital in Wiltshire, England,
where Walrond lived from 1952 to 1957.
8. Louis J. Parascandola is an important exception in this regard, and as the
only anthologies of their kind, his “Winds Can Wake Up the Dead”: An Eric
Walrond Reader (1998) and In Search of Asylum: The Later Writings of Eric
Walrond (2011), ed. Louis J. Parascandola and Carl A. Wade, were invaluable
resources for this project. Other significant exceptions include James C. Davis’s
“There Has Been an Inward Change: In Search of Eric Walrond,” Modernist Star
Maps: Celebrity, Modernity, Culture (2010), ed. Aaron Jaffe and Jonathan
Goldman, 71–80; Michelle Stephens’s “Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death and the
Discontents of American Modernity,” Prospero’s Isles: The Presence of the
Caribbean in the American Imaginary (2004), ed. Diane Accaria-Zavala and
Rodolfo Popelnik, 167–78; Michael Niblett’s “The Arc of the ‘Other America’:
Landscape, Nature, and Region in Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death,” Perspectives on
the “Other America”: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin
American Culture (2009), ed. Michael Niblett and Kerstin Oloff, 51–72; and
Sean X. Goudie’s “New Regionalisms: US-Caribbean Literary Relations,” A
Companion to American Literary Studies (2011), ed. Caroline F. Levander and
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Robert S. Levine, 310–24. Two forthcoming books suggest new interest in
Walrond: James Davis’s “Quite to Himself: Eric Walrond, the Harlem
Renaissance, and the Caribbean Diaspora” and a reissue of Tropic Death.
9. For timely comparative work on New World Mediterraneans, see Susan
Gillman’s forthcoming book, “Incomparably Yours: Translation, Adaptation,
Americas Studies.”
10. An ominous optimism accompanies Bonsal’s assurance that “trade follows
the flag” (27), and much could be said concerning Bonsal’s American
Mediterranean as the geoconceptual correlative of the Monroe Doctrine. As a
regionalism tied to free market economics, Bonsal’s American Mediterranean
forecloses on West Indian Federation, the proposed alternative economic bloc
linked to the rival political geography of the British Empire and its successor, the
Commonwealth.
11. As of the 1911 census, only just over 6,000 West Indians were living in offi-
cial Zone housing (Greene 153).
12. Justification for this semi-autonomy invoked the 1846 Bidlack–Mallarino
Treaty, which assigned the US the responsibility of overseeing the operation and
defense of the transit route. As Aims McGuinness points out, this treaty would
be invoked in 1903 to validate the American involvement in, and immediate
recognition of, Panama’s independence from Columbia.
13. For wages and Jim Crow labor policy on the Canal, see Conniff; Newton;
Greene; Richardson; and Lancelot Lewis, The West Indian in Panama: Black
Labor in Panama, 1850–1914 (1980).
14. Stephen Murray, “Tropical Rot.” This harsh critique measures Walrond
against other writers’ “Black English Vernacular.” Walrond is assessed as “more
difficult to decode” than “writings by [Rudolph] Fisher or Zora Neale Hurston,”
both of whom were African American—a point this commentator would seem
not to consider significant.
15. See, for example, Sean X. Goudie’s “Toward a Definition of Caribbean
American Regionalism: Contesting Anglo-America’s Caribbean Designs in Mary
Seacole and Sui Sin Far,” American Literature, 80.2 (2008): 293–322, and his
discussion of Eric Walrond in “New Regionalisms: US–Caribbean Literary
Relations.”
16. My thanks to the anonymous reader who noted that Tropic Death compli-
cates the “old triangle trade model” of the “Black Atlantic.”
17. For the literary and cultural foundations of the Harlem-based black transna-
tionalism in the 1910s and 1920s and the emergence of the “masculine global
imaginary” of Caribbean intellectuals, see Michelle Stephens’s Black Empire
(2005). It’s hard not to look for Garvey in Walrond’s work, given that they were
such close associates through Walrond’s early years in New York. Walrond began
writing for Garvey’s publication The Weekly Review shortly after arriving from
Panama in 1918, and was an editor, and then associate editor of Garvey’s Negro
World between 1921 and 1923, when the paper had a readership of 200,000. As
Louis J. Parascandola notes, “Walrond, in fact, published more in The Black Man
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than anyone other than Garvey himself” (33). Walrond had broken with Garvey
by 1926 when he published Tropic Death, and was involved with the Urban
League, including working as the business manager for Charles S. Johnson’s
Opportunity. In an article published in The Independent in 1925 titled “Imperator
Africanus,” Walrond offers a standard critique of Garvey’s role as the Moses of
the working class. Walrond wouldn’t reconcile with Garvey until the mid-1930s,
when, living in England, he contributed to his periodical The Black Man. For a
comprehensive and insightful overview of Walrond’s relationship with Garvey
and Garveyism, see Robert A. Bone and Louis J. Parascandola’s “An Ellis Island
of the Soul: Eric Walrond and the Turbulent Passage from Garveyite to New
Negro,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 34 (July 2010): 34–53.
18. Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro included a version of Walrond’s
“The Palm Porch,” but inevitably in this context the story covers different
ground. Leaving off the kind of introductory frame that would collect his stories
into a comestible whole, Walrond replaces a single discursive field in which texts
can be plotted and traversed with a collection of terminals, from the rooms in
“The Palm Porch,” to each story’s microgeography.
19. Garvey witnessed labor conditions in the Canal Zone first-hand during his
travels in Central and South America from 1910 to 1914, and uses the failure of
British consuls to protect migrant laborers as an argument for West Indian
Federation.
20. I am indebted to Susan Gillman and Alice Brittan for the many ways this
article was enriched by their careful reading and commentary. Sincere thanks as
well to Gordon Hutner and the manuscript’s anonymous readers, whose incisive
and insightful responses were invaluable in shaping the article into its present
form. Thanks also to Louis Parascandola for his correspondence and his generos-
ity in providing me with information on Eric Walrond’s unpublished work.
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