This is the Salvation Army building that remains in Marañon
in Panama City today. It still bears the emblem and logo in Spanish that
reads "Ejercito de la Salvación." The original building, however, was a two
floor structure, the top floor occupied by residents and the entire ground floor, facing
the street, was dedicated to the Church and its activities.
For me 1950 would be the year that my character truly blossomed and, for the first time, I was consciously formulating important decisions for my future. Towards the end of my sixth grade school year, however, I was anticipating the same boring experience I had foreseen from the beginning of the school year. One event would change the course of that year for me, however, once I was appointed assistant to the English teacher who had the task of organizing that year's Fair and Dance.
In fact, it was Miss Ana Sanchez, who was not only our school’s English teacher but my next door neighbor, and who made it a point to seek me out as I sat quietly reading one day. "Mr. Reid you come with me!" she commanded and I immediately responded without exactly knowing what it was all about.
Little did I know that I would end that crucial school year with the most unforgettable memories- memories that would shape me for the rest of my life. At first I felt like I had taken on a tall order since added to my duties assigned to me by Miss Sanchez, I kept up my quasi apprenticeship at the Dental Clinic while staying available for my grandmother and her multitude of errands that usually took me all over the city of Panama.
The other great change in my routine at this time was that my Auntie Berenice, the Zone maid and cook, who was working for a white family, suddenly stopped coming home on the weekends thus ending my usual Sunday School lessons at St. Paul Episcopal Church. It was then that I decided that it was a good time to change to a more “mature” environment by attending the Sunday School in the area of Wachipali's Marañon Salvation Army Sunday School.
It would be at that Salvation Army Sunday School that I would, for the first time, become involved with reading the Holy Bible. The formal study of the Scriptures I had heard read since I’d been a newcomer in my grandmother’s home at one of the various churches established by one of the many powerful spiritualist Westindian lady’s homes suddenly started taking on more meaning. Noticing a marked improvement in my comprehension of Holy writ during those special scriptural readings of Bible verses I was determined not to miss any of my Sunday school classes.
The fact was that I had not had what one would call a Christian conversion as yet and the treks with my grandmother to one church or the other on the outskirts of the city had amounted to just adventures for me until the moment in which I started my Bible reading lessons at the Salvation Army. In reality I never understood the background behind the stories I had been reading in that blessed book while on my previous attempts in Sunday school at learning to read.
Until that year's Easter Movie, a special feature of attendance at the Salvation Army Sunday School, I had never truly pondered the whole concept of Jesus’ crucifixion. As I sat in the dark that Sunday evening in the popularly frequented Capitolio Cinema at the corner of "P" Street and Central Avenue in my barrio, I was suddenly and irreversibly won over to the teachings of Jesus Christ.
For almost a full six months I became a true convert, a zealous student of the Lord’s teachings, who would read scripture with my grandmother and literally force her to listen to what I had been reading. This helped me a great deal, in fact, with my avoidance of the streets, something I had accomplished without compromising my manhood-or so I thought.
At school during the close of that year I also made a friend in someone I really liked this time since I was always kind of picky about friendships. It was a girl who had stood up and defended me at one time, saving me from another situation that could have caused me some embarrassment and even expulsion because of my past “reputation.”
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She visited the old Santana Church on her own this time and when she returned she was absolutely buoyant, radiant in fact. Almost half talking to herself as she entered through the door she continued glorifying God and how she had just seen the most beautiful sight. As usual, Mamí and I were the only ones home and it quickly became apparent that Miss Polly had participated in an ordination ceremony in which several new priests had been confirmed in a special Mass. The look on her face was one of ecstasy and hope and she said, “The service was so beautiful, all those young men sitting there ready to serve God.” Suddenly she looked in my direction and suggested out loud saying, “Juni, why don't you become a priest?” The thought of even becoming a Catholic priest, when the idea hit me, seemed like something far out of my wildest dreams if only because I had never seen a black priest being ordained in the Catholic Church, not in Panama at least. A moment later, however, she would have thought over her wish and said prophetically, “No, you will like women too much;” and with that she smiled at me and released me from any pressure she might have put me under in considering the priesthood for a career.
There were times that summer when, after observing me buzzing around the house cooking and cleaning and helping my grandmother as well as tending to her, Miss Polly would interrupt my activity with a story or two. One day she recalled some of her childhood in what I believe was Bocas. “Juni, you ever eat monkey meat?” she said with a slightly mischievous gleam in her eye. I hesitated and responded, “No, Miss Polly,” remembering that I was always careful about revealing my taste for wild meat around my Aunts and grandmother.
“Well, I had a monkey serve me rice once, you know,” she said having piqued my interest. “When I was a little chile…that was back in them days when people use to eat out of calabash…my muddah cook up some rice and monkey meat and decided to play a trick on me. She say, ‘Polly, look how the monkey grab the rice!’ as she hand me the calabash.” She continued her story with a soft chuckle. “When I look upon my calabash I see a curl up monkey paw on top of de rice, with a handful of rice wrap up tight in his fist,” and then she broke out in ripples of laughter at seeing my look of absolute horror and probably remembering her own shocked innocence.
It may have been days or maybe weeks later that Miss Polly stopped staying over at our house. One day she just didn’t show up any more and I was left wondering what had happened to my dear friend. I asked my grandmother but she gave me some kind of evasive answer and left me thinking that she might have found a relative to stay with.
One day my grandmother asked me to accompany her somewhere and as usual I obeyed blindly. Before we stepped out of the door she reminded me to pick up my trusty upholsterer’s hammer and tacks, which my father had left me before leaving Panama for good. We soon wound up at the Santo Tomás Morgue and that is the first time I would see Polly again after what seemed a long time. She was dressed in her Sunday best blue dress with her favorite church going turban placed artfully on her head. She was laid upon one of the morgue tables all cleaned up and dressed as if at any moment she would get up and tell me to go to Beji-Nite service with her. Her face radiated peace as if she was only asleep.
I said nothing about how I felt to my grandmother who proceeded calmly to give me a few orders. “Look son, and take your tools and fix up Miss Polly’s coffin here,” she said. She then placed a bundle of white material on the other empty morgue table in front of me and unfurled the brand new piece of white satin in front of me. “Ok Mamí,” I said, “ready to get to work.” “You see that coffin there? I want you to line it with this material. I hope it is enough to do the job,” she said. “Don’t worry, Mamí, it is enough. I will get the job done,” I said reassuringly and went to work immediately. My grandmother stood around silently observing me work.
There I was in the company of my dear dead friend, Miss Polly, and a plain wooden coffin to spruce up for its eternal occupant. I worked diligently ruffling the satiny material just so to transform a rudimentary wooden box into a fit resting bed for my beloved friend. Strange but, throughout this experience, I still believed she was just asleep, that she would awake at any moment and ask me to fetch her something.
What seemed like a couple of hours later my grandmother showed signs of impatience as I was putting the finishing touches on the now beautified coffin. “I tried my best Mamí but it still needs a little more work,” I confessed to her. “No son, it is jus fine! No need to do anymore. It looks perfect to me,” she said giving me one of her reassuring looks. But I still insisted that it was not enough and hammered and hammered faster and faster. “Come now take up your tools, son, and let’s go home and you have to wait for me there,” she ordered and I obeyed instantly. The ride home was in complete silence as I was thinking to have to take a bath and then she would come back and pick me up later to attend the funeral she seemed to be arranging.
That moment never arrived, however, as I was never allowed to participate in Miss Polly’s funeral. To this day I know not where they had laid her to rest so I have never been able to visit her at her grave site. “My grandmother saw to that!” I have often thought repressing some resentment at their conspiracy, my grandmother’s and my Aunt Berenice, to deny me the duty of putting closure to my feelings of friendship with Miss Polly.
A few days later, however, Miss Polly visited me in a dream in which I caught up with her as she walked up one of the many paths surrounding Santo Tomas Hospital. I ran after her as her pace was quick and determined. She seemed to know exactly where she was headed. “Miss Polly, Miss Polly!” I said trying to catch her attention. “Miss Polly, I want to go with you!” I pleaded. “Juni,” she snapped, “you go on back to your Mamí. She needs you! You cannot go where I am going.” She was so insistent and discouraging, a mood I had never seen in her, that I stopped in my tracks and she disappeared into the distance.
My grandmother told me that my dream signified that Miss Polly did not want me to join her in the land of the dead, and wanted for me to go back to my world. She was saving me from not ever waking up again.
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This image represents the grand celebration
of light that is observed in Presov, Slovakia.
This is how we all should celebrate All Soul's Day
in the Americas in memory of our beloved
ancestors who worked to leave us the best of all
possible worlds. Image is from: www.iarelative.com
It made me sad, however, to pass by the Silver Personnel Office on the Canal Zone and see mostly Blacks standing in long lines. Standing there quietly "like beggars," I would say to myself. Then the doubly depressing thought would haunt me about someday having to seek employment on the Canal Zone. Suddenly I would realize that I was more Spanish Speaking than the Westindian descendant of my grandfathers and I started to feel ashamed at the thought of abandoning the dead I remembered in life.
Memories of my dead grandaunt, Ethel, my Colon grandmother’s sister, whom I always loved and who lived close by where I grew up in Calidonia next to San Miguel Hill, also came to me. She would always live within me as my “Panama” Aunt Ethel, and her daughter, my cousin Viola (Vai). For a long time they had been my mother’s only living relatives living in Panama since they had all arrived in the early 1900’s.
This also triggered my memory of my recently deceased grandfather Seymour Green, whose funeral I had sadly and almost reluctantly attended in Colon. His had been an especially painful event for me to attend and I almost “lost it” on that cold, rainy afternoon in which they planted him in the ground. He had died at the ripe young age of 65.
From Panama to Colon I had traveled and attended funerals of one family member or the other, those hardworking Black Westindians who had passed away, generally at an early age, after a life of working on that Canal Zone; those same immigrants who had traveled on the longest trip of their life at the turn of the 20th century just to arrive in Panama and work themselves to death on the Canal Zone. It seemed to me that death for my people was the “great escape” from hard labor and a life of segregation.
Except for seeing Miss Polly’s body at the Santo Tomas Hospital Morgue, I only fleetingly remembered visiting the Canal Zone Silver Roll cemeteries. I knew even less about the regular or municipal cemeteries in Panama.
"To be dug up!" I had heard my grandmother, Fanny Elizabeth, say to herself, referring to Panamanian burial grounds where, until just a few months ago, I discovered that my beloved grandfather, Joshua, had been buried. "Dug up and disappeared," she would muse fatalistically and I recalled that in that same year of 1950 my Aunt Marie, Fanny’s second oldest daughter, announced that she had purchased a burial plot at the Jardin de Paz Cemetery, somewhere in the growing Panama City suburbs to secure a burial plot that would insure her and her family against being disturbed after their bones were laid to rest for the final time.
This brings me back to the circumstances surrounding Polly’s death which, in a significant way, I was intimately involved.
Just when Miss Polly’s health seemed to rally that summer after I invested a lot of my precious vacation time nursing her she began seeking out churches to go to. I, myself, took her to check out Mother Lindo’s Beji-Nite Church in San Francisco a couple of times and she was absolutely delighted with what she experienced. Especially the going into trance, the speaking in tongues and spiritual singing was right up her alley.
Many times while I would be nursing Miss Polly, massaging her legs and knees which seemed to bring her great relief from the constant pain she suffered in her limbs, she would bless me so many times I was sure I was going to heaven on Polly’s word alone. Anyhow, this seemed to spark her vitality back up and, momentarily released from pain, she would be ready to go out and visit one of her favorite churches again. This time she went out by herself to visit the Catholic Church in Santana.
* We invite you to visit our dear ancestors at the links below and leave virtual flower offerings. Take a few moments and show our Silver People that they are departed but not "gone and forgotten."
Ethel Francis, Seymour Green, Fanny Elizabeth Reid, Berenice (Reid) Charles, Erick J. Reid.
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The image is of an exquisite
pot of Rundon, or rundown, as
it is variously called- Jamaican style.
Image.
Suddenly, I began hearing a faint almost imperceptible call from a female voice. Someone was calling my name in a kind of urgent but barely audible manner. But my interest in the book I had open in front of me found me more engrossed in it and succeeded in helping me ignore the female voice I thought I was hearing.
It was definitely not the voice of my Miss Polly, the sickly former Canal Zone maid my grandmother had taken in, I thought with concern, since I was sure I had seen her body recently at the Santo Tomás morgue.
I reassured myself, in fact, that I had worked on lining her coffin with my own two hands that day as she lay dressed up on another large morgue table. In that moment the thought of her brought back memories as I could see her again laid out in her usual “Sunday best” outfit. It had been a dress and turban I recognized that she enjoyed wearing when she felt well enough to announce she was going out seeking "a two day job."
The memories of my frail charge all came rushing back to me. Although she never talked much about her past life or family I was almost sure she was from Bocas del Toro Province, but it had been hard to tell since she spoke English like all of the Westindians from the big cities of Panama and Colon. I have always been good at detecting accents in people, especially the Westindian diaspora in Panama and I could pick up a Bocas accent anywhere. At any rate, Miss Polly had great stories about her experiences in Bocas and she found an attentive listener in me- a captive and willing audience.
Recalling the days I had cared for her it seemed as though I had been attending to her all year long, but actually it had only been up to the end of my school year vacation.
In between her bouts with her failing health I had managed to accompany her on her last futile attempts at being employed on the Zone on what she used to refer to as a “one” or “two day” stint in some Canal Zone white lady’s home. Eventually, though, her aches and pains would get the better of her and she would stop looking since we would have to walk long distances to get to those Zone interviews.
Then there were her crazy stories about her exploits as a maid. Like the time she heard another younger maid tell her about how she lost a job as a cook in some white woman’s house when she cooked up a pot of rundon. The white woman came to check what her newly hired girl had cooked up for that evening’s supper and when she peered into the pot and saw what it was she asked the girl, “Now, what is that you just cooked up?”
“It rundon, Ma’am,” replied the girl feeling real proud of her handy work and expecting an encouraging word. Polly then pointed into the imaginary distance and said, “That white woman say, ‘Well you just take yourself out of here and run down the road and don’t come back!’” Miss Polly then let out an enormous peal of laughter finding the whole scene from her past life very funny, but I remained silent. I didn’t see the humor in that whole incident; in fact, I thought it very cruel of the white woman. Furthermore, she had blown a good chance to sample one of the best Westindian dishes anyone can imagine. I did, however, manage a faint smile, if only for Polly’s sake.
But, that was how Polly evidently coped with her precarious status as a domestic. She had a healthy sense of humor, I must say, when most of us, including myself, would have fallen apart or, worse yet, have resorted to hatred and resentment.
The distant and insistent woman’s voice calling me, however, snapped me back to the present.
(For the recipe to really good rundon, click here and experience culinary magic.)
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This is the Salvation Army building that remains in Marañon
