Dying to better themselves: West Indians and the building of the Panama Canal

Abstract

Olive Senior, Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2014. 440 pp.over a century ago, my great-uncle Charles Ledgister left Mountainside, Jamaica, for Panama to seek his fortune working on the canal. Unlike the many who died in the quest to better themselves that Olive Senior chronicles, or the Colon men who returned - with or without brass chains and pocket watches - he settled there and his descendants are still there. Reading Senior's account, I can only wonder if it was great-uncle Charles who was the Jamaican worker who had the chutzpah to chat freely with Theodore Roosevelt when the US president visited the canal (198).Senior tells us the story of the West Indians who went to Panama to work on the two canal projects - De Lesseps's abortive French plan in the 1880s and Theodore Roosevelt's successful American enterprise in the early years of the twentieth century - their different fates, and their relationships with their homelands and the great powers that dominated their lives. The vast majority of the West Indian migrants to Panama, Senior points out, were people like my great-uncle from the countryside (340) with little or no experience of the modern world. They were thrust into a wholly new world.What Senior says is that the West Indians who went to Panama shaped that country - Without them, modern Panama would not exist (xvii) - but also shaped the cultures and identities of their homelands. The experience of Panama was to be crucial for the definition of the modern Anglophone Caribbean in a wide variety of ways. Panama-born West Indians back in the West Indies proper included George Headley, born in Colon, who is, as Senior judiciously states, widely regarded as one of the greatest cricketers of all time (274), and Dudley Thompson, whose middle initial she incorrectly gives as H rather than J (his middle name was Joseph), whose distinguished career in law, politics, and diplomacy she briefly mentions.To get to the Headleys and Thompsons - and Thompson's father, a schoolteacher in Panama, moved back to Jamaica in order to have his children grow up in a place where they could live in dignity without constant exposure to American-style racism - we have to consider the facts of life during the construction and operation of the great canal. This involved not only the massive operation with its concomitant wastage of human life, which Senior describes in careful detail, but the imposition, once Theodore Roosevelt established the Canal Zone and the work of building the American canal began, of the Jim Crow system under another name: that is, the classification of people into the categories of Gold (white American) and Silver (non-white, non-American) according to the currency in which they were paid. Gold employees and their families were treated with consideration and humanity. Silver employees - and black West Indians were Silver - had far less.Senior makes clear that the Gold and Silver system discriminated between white Americans on the one hand, and non-Americans on the other, but placed black West Indians at the bottom of the heap. Even when they were doing the same work, black West Indians faced invidious discrimination: More than nine thousand skilled West Indians were employed in 1914, classified as 'artisans' while Americans doing the same work were classified as 'skilled mechanics', reflected in their respective pay (185). …