“Clean Up” Work and the New Arrivals

The first years of the renewed digs called for the clearing, excavating and dynamiting in the areas of the Cuts- work that other humans either avoided or were simply not capable of performing. Also, the massive and very unpleasant “clean up” task would have to be undertaken right alongside the extremely heavy work of excavation. The frequent funerals in both terminal cities and the funeral trains can attest to the existence and demise of men whose loyalty to their God and to their work would make them seem invincible at times.

As conditions of hygiene and dilapidation had not improved in the city of Panama by 1904, when the Yankee officials and technicians arrived on the isthmus in the cities of Panama and Colon, able now to take over the former areas where the French had stopped operations since 1889, they encountered a bleak and devastating scenario, not to mention an imminently dangerous one. “Colon was unspeakably dirty, swarming with naked children, ugly, dilapidated and terribly depressing,” was the opinion of a very distinguished American of the times who seemed to be describing what we see of Colon and some sections of the country of Panama even today. The City of Panama was not much better. This would also be the scene encountered by the new Black arrivals- a scene they would soon be directly and largely responsible for changing.

The West Indians, although not exclusively, would make up the fumigation, trench digging, forest and grass clearing, swamp filling, street cleaning, and mosquito netting brigades. These absolutely vital tasks would not be even minimally appreciated as the months and years passed and the “Canal Zone” gradually became a safe and hospitable place to live for White as well as Black workers and residents of both the Canal Zone and the cities of Panama and Colon.

However, the mental as well as the physical tensions caused by shouldering these awesome tasks and the prevailing concern in the heads of every able bodied West Indian laborer with possibly waking up ill with fever, the chills and the incipient stages of malaria or yellow fever placed untold strains on just being a human being and working with often inhuman bosses, under inhuman conditions. In addition, the mental pressure of racial discrimination would make these laborers, which we must remember, included contracted Chinese and Hindu coolie laborers, seem callous at times, as they responded on a daily basis to all the calamities in their working midst.

We must also remember that the newly arriving contracted workers would soon, in their majority, be unskilled laborers from the Island of Barbados. The Barbadians, who in the common vernacular would become known as the “Bayjans” amongst the other West Indians, would be the other readily identifiable group of West Indians arriving during this crucial era of construction. Unlike the Jamaicans, however, who were usually hired locally as the Yankee recruiters had been barred from recruiting them in Jamaica since the disastrous French bankruptcy period, the Barbadians were being offered guaranteed free repatriation once their contracts were up.

This story continues.