Interview With a Panama Canal Zone Silver Roll Survivor

The following is the first part of an interview with Mrs. Fanny Elizabeth McKenly de Reid, conducted in the month of May of 1977, in the corregimiento or district of Rio Abajo in the City of Panama, Republic of Panama. What started out for us in the family as a genealogical study ended up being more a part of our overall Westindian history. In this part of the interview we have excerpted parts that would help us understand the kind of people who appeared in our country at the turn of the twentieth century.

We will continue doing parts of this long interview as our story unfolds.

Q. In what country and year were you born and in what town?

Fanny Elizabeth McKenly Reid- (FEMR.)

FEMR- "I was born on May 31 of the year 1881, in the district of Wraywood Parish, Saint Thomas, Jamaica in the West Indies."

Q. Where did you attend school and for how long? Also what is the name of the teacher you most remember?

FEMR- "Well I remember going to school in a town by the name of Yallahs Bay and I remember going there up to the fifth grade. My first teacher was a Miss Brown, but I still remember a Miss Barrat, Miss Hoffman, Miss Wilson and Teacher Palmer. "

Q. At what age did you arrive in Panama? Also, what were the circumstances that brought you here?

FEMR- "I came to Panama in the month of November of the year 1911; I was then twenty three years old when I came to Panama. The circumstances that brought me here to this country were that I was engaged to Mr. Joshua Reid, and when I got here I found him, and we was married later in January of 1912. This was the time during the construction of the Great Waterway named the Panama Canal. After we married we were living in the town named Paraiso Canal Zone, he was working and living at the Medical Dispensary when I arrived. But I lived at a friend until we were married; he had left that dispensary job because he said the pay was too meager.

After that we married. He got a job with the Severing Gang, and I remember that he had to take time off to go with me and get the married license.

I remember that we had to take a train which at the time ran down into the bottom of that there Canal. At that time that was a gigantic ditch they were digging. I went from Paraiso that day to Empire, where we got the license to be married. So, after that, we got married at the Wesleyan Church in Paraiso on February of 1912. Our wedding was just very simple, no grand affair; just ourselves and the witnesses at the church. Then we went after the ceremonies to be with my close friend at home, and he stayed with me for a day or so.”

This part of the interview has given us a sketch of the times of the arrival of families who would later make up the disappeared town inhabitants of what I got to know as the "Black Zonian" settlements. Those who had survived the hardest part of the labor would be led to believe that they had indeed landed in the privileged class of Negroes with notable perks. Indeed, the times would make them, the Westindian blacks, the envy of the natives who were still living in far off provinces tied to elitist families who owned large tracks of land on which they were forced to labor as virtual slaves.

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Panama's Black Westindian Worker

Historians have reported that the way of life in the country of Panama had not changed since those years of the decade of 1790, when groups of black foreigners speaking English first stepped off ships on to the docks of Panama in the late 1840's. The native Spanish speaking blacks or “alquilones" were just as wage-earner minded as the newcomers were. The difference between the two groups of blacks was, of course, the language, however, the native alquilones sought to hire themselves out as conscripts, taking the place of the rich white Spanish citizens. They were not only paid to replace them in the army but, at the same time, they would receive a change of surname to a European name, more specifically a Spanish surname.

The end of slavery would find blacks on the isthmus virtually free men, for very few Negroes were in fact slaves in Panama at the declared end of the slave system, since the census of 1810 reveals that to have slaves in those years was a very luxurious affair for most of the white Spaniards. By the time the foreign blacks arrived around the early part of the 1840's to work on building the American railroad, the climate, economically speaking, was that money could fix anything. In fact, we find the local blacks engaged in seeking to use any means to wipe the memory of slavery from their person as fast as money could purchase the document that would show them as having white Spanish background.

We would continue giving a small sketch of the barriers that the Jamaican foreigner would have to contend with during all of the XX century with the natives of Panama, who would continue seeing them through rose colored glasses as the slaves of the white gringos that they never were.

Our story, however, could not continue without including part of an interview I had with one of the real survivors of this period in our history. One who became a retired Black Westindian worker after following other young persons venturing to travel and seek employment in the period of time between 1881 and 1914 when the great waterway was inaugurated. My father’s mother, like other young Jamaican women of her time, traveled alone under circumstances that were uncertain. Traveling on hear-say information many of the black women of that generation set out seeking to find relatives or loved ones among the men who had been absent from their lives for many years.

The following excerpts make up an interview I recorded of my grandmother who lived through all those years of trials and tribulations to raise me and the other siblings of my generation into adulthood. Her voice is seen and heard as it survives in what is part of our Panamanian Westindian literature.

You can read our interview in the following edition of this paper. Its intent is to give the reader a glimpse of the character of this individual who was, at the time, just emerging out of a system of government which exacted every volt of energy from their recently declared citizens freed from slavery.

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Enter the Westindians

This post is intended to begin telling the story of Panamanian Westindians. For the Black Spanish speaking people of Panama of the era in which the first Westindians, as we know them here in Panama, appeared on the scene, they seemed to have emerged from depths of the Caribbean Sea overnight. To the Black natives with a history of serving pirates and buccaneers, those Westindian men seemed as foreign as the old buccaneers and the yellow men from Asiatic countries who, like them, had followed what was to become the first railroad project their eyes would ever witness. During those early years of our history, the years entering the middle of the XIX century, the scene would be played out in a virginal jungle forest, a panorama that would soon vanish from the annals of human interaction on this planet earth.

During this time our grandfathers of both groups of African descendants met under very unique conditions. The English speaking Westindians, the newcomers to the isthmus, had for only a little over thirty years enjoyed a modicum of freedom from the fear of being enslaved, since the British had declared war on the slave trade on the high seas between the years 1790 and 1800. The Spanish speaking Blacks, however, had savored freedom from the European slavers for centuries since they had been brought to the isthmian shores in the XVI and XVII centuries. The spirit of the Cimarron was the spirit of liberation brought from Africa, which impelled most able-bodied young blacks to take to the safety and freedom of the deep jungle.

In this English Westindian story, we’ve had to include the early history of what was occurring in the economics of a region like the great Caribbean Ponto. This paradise had become as darkened as the type of commerce that it had been introduced to by world powers that are, even today, still setting the pace for the rest of the people of the planet to stand by and look upon like paid audiences to a great entertaining event.

At this point in history we encounter large groups of young Black men who called themselves Westindians, eager and happy to work anywhere. Since some of them had served as scouts, traveling from island to island working as virtual slaves on sugar plantations, they were overjoyed at the prospect that they would soon be employed. In fact, when news traveled to the Island of Jamaica in the 1840’s describing the possibilities of working on a project that did not involve "sugar cane," that, indeed, the construction of a railroad by the Americans that would join one ocean to another was in the offing, the rush was on. We can, as youth today, only imagine the joy that those young boys felt at the prospect of actually getting paid for the work they would do, and paid often.

The odyssey for these men would begin from the docks of places like Kingston, Jamaica and carry them to a city called Aspinwall, a virtual jungle outpost, on the Caribbean cost of Panama. This railroad project, they were told, would only be the first in several projects for many years to come. So, young and strong men left their homes on the island of Jamaica with ambitions of returning home "like men of means," eager to work on ventures which old mariners could only fantasize about. History, however, would later, after the completion of the Panama Railroad, reveal the failed dreams of the French Government and the only sporadic interaction with the native Black people of Panama that would continue between 1850 and the 1900's.

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