A New Meaning to the Story of Moses

One Sunday during our Sunday School lesson at the Salvation Army the theme was the story of Moses, the Jew turned Egyptian. Although I had heard the story at my grandmother’s side since I could remember, this time it took on a new meaning for me. Throughout the lesson, as usual, I went into daydreaming mode trying to determine how Moses felt at the time.

That Salvation Army Sunday School would never be the same for me either. I suddenly looked closely at the Sunday School teacher who was obviously of Barbadian extraction- her accent betrayed her- as she tried to speak American English.

The week would pass quickly as I pretended to concentrate on my classes in Spanish school all the while picturing how the Jews of Moses’ time witnessed how they themselves turned into lower class Egyptians. In Panama I compared it to living as a Black Jew, an exile in an ungrateful country. As Moses and other young Egyptian Jews had done in antiquity, I witnessed how the aristocratic monster ran the country into destitution. Our national “Pharaohs” seemed bent on extricating us, the Westindians, and throwing us out of this tropical paradise completely forgetting who really built up the country.

My forefathers before me had been vilified and maligned by the same people, both gringos and Panamanian Spanish, which we had buoyed up on the Zone as well as in the Barrio neighborhoods. But, the worse of the lot, in my opinion, were the poorer Pañas since we the Westindians had never ceased to labor sharing spaces and knowledge of urban life with them, the dirt poor families from the interior of the country.

It was our miserly wages- miserly by all international standards- our nickels and dimes, that had helped amass fortunes for many Panamanian nationals and immigrants from Europe and plant them squarely on solid financial footing. From the standpoint of the Westindian people, however, our “vecinos” still had much to be desired in learning the social and economic skills of life in the big city, particularly where we, the Westindians, were concerned. The way had been prepared for them by our people before they got there from the Interior.

Nevertheless, I did find that some did understand and strove to cooperate to make life livable. I even witnessed intermarriages between Westindians and the Spanish whom they called Pañas, and they seemed to work out about as well as anybody else. There were more Westindian kids around like my sister and me who had been bilingual ever since we had left the City of Colon for good after the Great Fire of 1940. More importantly, however, I found that I could speak Spanish as fluently as any of the neighborhood native speakers and felt quite confident in my written expression also.

Here I was in sixth grade finally and the year of 1950 was quickly advancing. Although my education had seen some set backs, delayed because of mean spirited teachers, I’d finally made it through the gamut to the end of my primary education.

I had achieved my status, in fact, by keeping as low key as possible- as simple and common as any of the other boys, but I wished I had more challenges in my education than the ones I had been received since the first grade in 1945.

The few occasions I had broken out of the humdrum to bring a spark of interest into the dullness of school routine I had been labeled a troublemaker and exposed to attacks from the bigger boys. They all knew that if I defended myself I would get sanctioned by the school authorities as the troublemaker they all thought I was. They were ever ready to brand me as no good and just another black kid who would wind up in the streets. I wasn’t exactly a coward but I had learned to avoid trouble like that by staying as far away from the streets and street kids as much as possible.

In my search for more intellectual challenges and venues to stay off the mean streets I tried to sneak away from home during the evening to find a night class somewhere, ending up in Arte y Oficio vocational secondary school one night hoping to learn a trade.

This story will continue.