The Terminal: Eric Walrond, the City of Colón, and the Caribbean of the Panama Canal

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: [email protected]

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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

American Literary History 295



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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”

296 Eric Walrond, the City of Colon, and the Caribbean of Panama Canal



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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.

Works Cited

Aspinall, Algernon. The Pocket

Guide to the West Indies: British

Guiana, British Honduras, The

Bermudas, The Spanish Main, and

the Panama Canal. London: Sifton,

1923.

Bolıvar, Simon. “Reply of a South

American to a Gentleman of This

Island.” 1815. Selected Writings of

Bolıvar. Ed. Harold A. Bierck, Jr.

Trans. Lewis Bertrand. New York:

Colonial P, 1951. 103–22.

Bone, Robert. Down Home: A History

of Afro-American Short Fiction from

Its Beginnings to the End of the

Harlem Renaissance. New York:

Capricorn, 1975.

Bonsal, Stephen. The American

Mediterranean. New York: Moffat,

1912.

Chude-Sokei, Louis. The Last Darky:

Bert Williams, Black-on-Black

Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora.

Durham: Duke UP, 2006.

“Communication.” Def. 9c. Oxford

English Dictionary. 2013. Web.

Cornish, Vaughan. “The Panama Canal

in 1908.” The Geographical Journal.

33.2 (1909): 153–77.




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Crook, Tom. “Putting Matter in its

Right Place: Dirt, Time and

Regeneration in Mid-Victorian

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