Demotions and Child Abuse

This is a vintage Sears radio console
circa 1941. I can just feel the dial in my hand
as I looked for my favorite radio programs.

As I have noted before, in those early years of my childhood no one in the Westindian community or the inner family actually spoke to children. No one I knew had spoken to me about anything much except for the Scout Master who tried to test me at the time for bravery and intelligence on that unforgettable evening in the Jamaican Society Hall.

As I remember my early childhood, I cannot recall any storytellers, in fact, other than my maternal grandfather who told us stories much as it is said to be done in Africa. For me during that period as a young child the Canal Zone and its workplaces would come rushing in unexpectedly into my life to provide me with many stories to tell.

One incident of unexpected aggression against me would take on special meaning to me even then. It occurred on an ordinary day for me, a day in which I had been, as I’d accustomed myself to do, staying as far away from my home as possible, especially when my father arrived home in the evenings. I had been totally immersed in play when suddenly I heard my father calling me as he always did. “Juni, come here!” he said, and I pried myself away from the joyful oblivion that kids tend to get into with the children of the neighborhood to answer my father’s call.

As I rushed inside our one-room eager to discover why my father was calling, I was met with a sudden, jolting blow to the head. Immediately the blood flowed down my head and then face as a broken plate fell from my father’s hand and I heard him repeat angrily, “Why don’t you come to me when I call you?!”

Upon seeing me bathed in my own blood, my mother jumped up and ran out of the room. She then stood at the window saying, “I have a good mind to call the police and have you locked up right now! Look what you did to the child? Why you vex? The other guys wear the uniform why can’t you?” With that she walked away from the window leaving me in the hands of an obviously repentant Silver Man, who then started to clean the wound and dress it with white bandage tape.

The damage, however, had been done to a child in a rather fragile physical and emotional state of mind. Such was the extent of verbal and physical abuse that it would remain within the archives of my being into my adulthood. I had noticed that I had problems communicating with my parents but that day I thought that at last my mother had seen the extent of my agony and was ready to protect me. That same day I found out, accidentally, the extent to which the feelings of helplessness can carry a man that he would, without thinking, take out his frustrations on his defenseless children.

Such psychological phenomena, in fact, would spread like a virus amongst whole generations of a people that were fast becoming a class of frustrated servants- more like slaves- who had the mistaken notion that their masters owed them nothing.

Much later in my adolescence I would be privy to observing another Westindian family in which the mother would lock her son up in her room just before leaving for work. After she had stripped him of his clothing and put him in an old woman’s dress, just so that he would be too ashamed to go out and play with the neighborhood children, she would lock the door of their room so that he would stay “safe” at home all alone.

These early experiences, born out of living as a Westindian child in the barrios of Calidonia and San Miguel would lead me to want to understand such a phenomenon as human relationships in which advantages of not only class and outright power would be taken as license to dehumanize another human being. Much later some of the assumptions I had been formulating would be born out by interviews with people my father knew from early youth.

It seems that the day of my bloody head my father Cobert Senior had been handed a choice between a demotion in status at work or losing his job altogether. It has been confided to me in interviews with former Silver People that my father had been a highly respected supervisor in the Engineering Division of the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers on Fort Clayton Army Base on the outskirts of Panama City. During those days of demotions or like kind changes of employment in other sections of the department, these practices were a way for the Canal authorities to “offer” Silver employees even less pay than they, as workers, had grown accustomed to.

The threat of being forced off the Canal Zone altogether, an effective method of control that had been used throughout the history of the Zone, was again being used during those years entering the end of the Second World War. During the heat of those war years my father had managed to save his bosses, the U.S. Army brass, a lot of money by manufacturing tents of all kinds destined for the troops. The shop Mr. Reid ran with dozens of industrial powered sewing machines and the best in upholstery tools was, after having served its useful purpose, discontinued. After practically being forced to settle for a demotion and a substantial cut in his already meager pay, he then comes home to find a wife who is not at all sympathetic to his cause.

My father’s frustrations, however, would reach the frail feelings of a little boy who would pay for something he had absolutely no knowledge of. This episode in the life of an impressionable youngster would generate the worst effects as it would also open some avenues for his childhood to be more prone to physical and emotional abuse from even strangers.

The syndrome of the “victimized,” which is a bestial trait, would bring more violent and degrading episodes to us children, as I would later find out in my studies in criminology. I would even arrive at the assumption that such attempts at degrading me on the part of my father were due to his having noticed some spark of intelligence in me- a spark that he would never be able to match in his lifetime.

The next time I would observe some evidence of success or accomplishment in the demeanor of my father would be when he brought home another piece of furniture for our home. It was a big radio receiving set that I would subsequently learn to use. The dials were not very large but I learned to roll the tuner needle up and down on the dial until, pretty soon, I mastered the method of tuning in and listening to the radio shows out of Panama and the Canal Zone Armed Forces Radio station.

This story continues.