The Westindian Business of Food and Me

My favorite sesame seed buns.

Even today I enjoy eating
home made baked goods.

Throughout my sixth grade experience I kept up my regular appearances over at my father’s friend Clyde’s dental shop more out of a secret aversion to something that had irked me from time immemorial- going into the domestic service on the Canal Zone. I had attached myself to the clinic as a way of learning something useful that might leave me a worthy option in my adult life and save me from the indignities and hardships of domestic service.

It wasn’t that I resented becoming the butler my Aunt Bernice had visions about. She would look upon me admiringly as if sizing me up to become the best manservant in the Canal Zone. In fact, it was her way of encouraging me into the food business from her perspective as a maid and cook who had been employed in one of the Canal Zone’s governor’s mansion during her time.

I was also still grieving the death of my friend, Miss Polly, the old maid who had been discarded by her employers like a used up old shoe after she had fallen ill and I was bound and determined not to wind up like her. Her death had haunted me as much as anything I had felt in my entire life.

Miss Polly had spent most of her life without a family- she had little time for cultivating personal relationships- and had ended up in the home of my father’s mother claiming to be a friend of my Aunt, who also had been a maid since the times of her early adolescence.

All that I seemed to remember was how she had been turned out on the street by her white women bosses to be on her own in a time of life that she most needed help after having cooked, cleaned and cared for their homes all her life. They had worked her right up until her demise without a thought for this woman who had been their domestic support for many years. She died, apparently, without a pension, death benefits, or any medical benefits to speak of, left to fend for herself at a very vulnerable stage of her life.

I’d nonetheless grown up really interested in baking and cooking only as a way to assure myself of a ready supply of sweets during the week, as well as learning to cook just enough to take advantage of the available supply of food and condiments I regularly shopped for at the Silver commissaries of Ancon and Curundu close to home for my grandmother.

At any rate, Gladys’ little one room restaurant would become for me that alternative to limiting myself to Clyde’s prosthesis worktable hungry and thirsty most of the time with no money or snacks in sight for long hours. Over by Gladys’s place I, at least, had plenty to eat and Gladys would buy me stuff I needed from time to time like school supplies and a pair of pants or something.

To my way of thinking I had reached an age where I should have been making some money and not be forced to ask my grandmother for an allowance to enable me to sit down at Clyde’s dental clinic to do his bench work making money for him while I went without the basics. I began to consider Clyde as avaricious as a white slave driver.

So, for a while I would disappear and end up at Gladys’ Fonda work two days and then disappear to be back again at work with the miser at the prosthesis worktable. When I wasn’t lighting my little alcohol lamp at my bench at the dental lab I would be at the tiny restaurant mopping floors, doing errands and washing dishes. The place, in fact, became a second home to me while I learned about the restaurant business.

In actuality, I had come to love Gladys’ spunk as a small businesswoman since she was the only Westindian entrepreneur I had ever known at the time. She was one of the few people who did not rely on the Canal Zone or its commissary books for her sustenance. Whenever she needed something she would just send me to the Big Market in Santana with cash money to purchase everything she needed and the few things she would miss out on at the Big Market she would get at the local Chinese Shop.

I always felt a sense of exhilaration and freedom, in fact, when I was helping Gladys for this very reason. I didn’t have to think about anything but just going to purchase, outright, her stuff; no thought for commissary book, store “gumshoe,” being scrutinized by anybody, crossing into the Zone, etc. That was quite admirable and Gladys never seemed to want for anything including her self respect. This, in essence, summed up my experience with the Westindian food business in Panama in my youth.

This story continues.