away . . .
ANITA
STORM
Alone in the forest again,
we’re surrounded by beauty
and danger,
soaring wings,
screeching cries,
whirling wind,
lightning, thunder, a cloudburst,
and howls, our own powerful
voices . . .
THE HOWLER MONKEYS
ALARM
WHEN STRANGERS RUN BELOW US
WE HOWL HOOT WHOOP BOOM
CHASE CHASE CHASE
WITH OUR VOICES
WE LEAP
FROM TREE TO TREE
WE KNOW
OUR VOICES ARE STRONG
CLAWS OF AIR
FANGS OF SOUND
GO
GO
GO
THE SCARLET MACAWS
ALARM
We fly
Screech
Call
To one another
As we fly
Soar
Cry
Flap
Clatter
Chatter
Escape
With our wild
FREEDOM
We fly
THE POISON DART FROGS
ALARM
we love to sing
for mates
but now we sing
from fear
our warning
to one another
unseen
hidden
by leaves
we sing sing sing
climb climb climb
hiding our voices
in trees
THE TREES
ALARM
A wind of voices
the storm of warnings
hot crackles of lightning
explosions of thunder
fierce splinters
of flame
then our whisper
rain
rain.
MATEO AND ANITA TOGETHER
WHEN MOUNTAINS BECOME ISLANDS
Last year, when all the digging finally ended,
this entire forest was flooded—trees drowned,
crate towns vanished, and at least
fifty thousand silver people
had to flee for their lives,
along with native villagers
and all the wildlife, including
desperately swimming jaguars
and flailing, hooting, howling
monkeys . . .
Even the birds
lost their nests.
Only this one mountain peak survived.
It’s an island now—our new home.
We have a stilt hut on a slope
high above the water,
and we’ve built a terrace
we think of as our sky castle,
because it overlooks dangling
air plants
and tiny sky ponds
in soaring treetops.
Squeaks, roars, plumes of scent,
the drumming beaks of toucans,
the waving-leg signals of golden frogs
as they talk to one another in their own
amphibious sign language . . .
so many unique ways
to communicate.
Our only way of speaking
with the forest
is silence.
We watch. We study. We record
all that we see as we peer
into hummingbird nests
and howler eyes.
We listen.
We’ve counted as many as forty species
of rare and common birds
in a single tree when the wild figs
are ripe.
We sketch, paint, and hope to remember
every detail of beauty.
We keep a shared journal
as we gather medicinal herbs
for distant museums that want to include
every plant in the world in their vast
scientific collections.
Sometimes, we feel like strangers,
and at other times, we feel
transformed
into a natural part
of this wild
world.
When Augusto visits, he brings excited
explorers from all the distant cities
where he sells our paintings
and herbs.
The canal has sliced this nation
in half, so when Henry comes visiting—
along with his growing family of lively
children—they have to cross the water
on a ferry, then row a canoe
across the huge man-made lake
called Gatún, a lake that was created
to slow the rapids of the Chagres River
in order to fill enormous
concrete boxes called locks,
which are used as a way
to float huge ships
up from one ocean’s sea level
to another.
Both Augusto and Henry were here
when we got married in a green aisle
of trees, with a singing red macaw
as our best man and a chattering
capuchin monkey
as bridesmaid.
We dream of someday studying
at one of the faraway colleges
on gallery walls,
but for now,
we have only a single goal:
learning to understand
this one mountain-island
of massive roots,
delicate wings,
and huge voices
that croak, squawk, shriek,
chant, whistle, and howl
about hunger,
freedom,
danger,
and love,
always love.
THE HOWLER MONKEYS
AT REST
MIDDAY
NO DANGEROUS
STRANGERS
JUST SILENCE
HEAT
SHADE
SLEEP
DREAMS
OF HOWLING
AT THUNDER
HOWLING
AT WIND
HOWLING
AT RAIN
HOWLING
STRENGTH
HOWLING
HOPE
THE RESPLENDENT QUETZAL
CAMOUFLAGE
Nest in a hole in a tree
Eggs
Then hungry hatchlings
Flight
From below in midair I swoop
And I pluck tasty fruit
My feathers the same shiny green
As leafy branches
Safe from the laughing falcon
High above
Ha ha ha
Safe
Back in the nest
In a hole in a tree
Only my long tail exposed
Leafy green.
POISON DART TADPOLES
SWIMMING
blue on forest mud
our father wrestles
with other males
blue on forest mud
our father protects us
from fire-bellied snakes
blue on forest mud
our father lifts us onto his back
and carries us one at a time
up a tall tree into a sky pond
blue on forest mud
our mother climbs up
to visit us
swimming.
THE TREES
HOME
Everything lives on us or under us
Everything needs
Wood
Leaves
Flowers
Fruit
Seeds
Even the rain needs our roots
In deep mud
Water absorbed
Lifted
Released
From our green
&nbs
p; Water transformed into mist
Clouds
More rain
New growth
Home
No matter how small home
Has become
Just a mountaintop island
Our home
Steady growth.
Epilogue
HOWL!
Mateo, Anita, Henry—
Greetings from the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Visitors from all over the world are here, touring miniature replicas of the canal’s engineering marvels. The tourists are astonished as they gaze at reproductions of a man-made Wonder of the World that is being called the “kiss of the oceans,” represented by colorful pictures of two mermaids meeting for the first time. Tourists are thrilled by cultural exhibits from continents newly joined by the watery shortcut: Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas, both North and South.
I can hardly understand it, but you must believe me: There is not a single exhibit honoring silver people. No songs or dances from the Caribbean islands where most of us were recruited. Not even one booth showing the daily lives of all the brave laborers who accomplished the impossible task of digging with nothing but shovels and courage. There are no monuments honoring the tens of thousands who died in Serpent Cut mud.
No one cares. No one cares because no one knows. If our history is ever to be told, we must tell it ourselves. Like howlers in the forest, we must lift our voices above the noise of thunder and dynamite.
Dear friends, amigos queridos, write your memories; help me howl our wild truth.
Augusto
California, 1915
Historical Note
I grew up in Los Angeles during the 1960s. My family marched for civil rights, singing “We Shall Overcome,” but when my Cuban mother described the need for equality, she spoke of Panama more often than Mississippi. Like most Latin Americans, she was far more familiar with Canal Zone apartheid than Jim Crow laws. Many years later, as a botanist collecting wild plants in Central America’s rainforests, I had the chance to meet descendants of “silver people” from Jamaica. This book is a small gesture of thanks for their friendliness and hospitality.
Silver People is a work of historical fiction, set in factual situations, in real places. There really was an inn called La Cubana María. The Culebra (Serpent) Cut became known as the Gaillard Cut. The mountain that became an island is Barro Colorado, maintained by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute as one of the world’s most thoroughly studied remnants of rainforest. Mateo, Henry, Anita, Old María, and Augusto are imaginary characters. John Stevens, Theodore Roosevelt, George Goethals, Jackson Smith, Gertrude Beeks, and Harry Franck are historical figures. Poems in the voices of historical figures are based on their own documented statements.
The importation of laborers from the Caribbean islands to Panama began during the California gold rush, when a railroad was built by Americans as an alternative to mule trains. A Cuban American engineer named Aniceto Menocal surveyed possible routes for a U.S. canal project, but France was the first nation to actually try digging. The disastrous French attempt lasted throughout the 1880s, shattered France’s economy, and sacrificed the lives of more than twenty-two thousand laborers. In 1903, the United States backed a military coup that separated the province of Panama from the nation of Colombia. In exchange, Panama granted permission for a project that lasted ten years. Beginning in 1904, laborers were once again imported, and another fifty-six hundred lives were lost to yellow fever, malaria, and landslides. The canal was completed by a conglomerate of U.S. government and business interests called the Isthmian Canal Commission. Workers from more than one hundred countries participated, but the vast majority were Caribbean islanders, primarily English-speaking Jamaicans and Barbadians. On the island of Cuba, American recruiters specifically hired American military nurses and “semi-white” Spaniards, many of whom turned out to be active members of an anarchist movement.
In the American-ruled Canal Zone, laborers from all over the world were subjected to a system that resembled South Africa’s apartheid. Dark-skinned islanders and olive-skinned southern Europeans were paid in silver. Light-skinned Americans and northern Europeans received gold. Housing, meals, recreation, and hospitals were also strictly segregated.
Of the estimated quarter-million Caribbean islanders who worked in Panama between 1850 and 1914, at least one-third never returned to their homelands but fanned out across Central America, becoming an integral part of the region’s rich cultural heritage.
The canal was intended as a link between continents, as well as a way to shorten shipping routes. The Panama Canal’s opening ceremony was planned as a festive celebration of worldwide prosperity and peace, but the month was August 1914. With the outbreak of World War I, the first ship to pass through the canal was a U.S. military vessel, on its way to Europe’s battlefields.
The discriminatory silver/gold payroll system continued until 1955. Possession of the Canal Zone was ceded to Panama in 1979, but operation of the canal was not transferred from the United States to Panama until the eve of the year 2000.
Eventual opening of wider modern shipping lanes will be linked to the expansion of key U.S. ports, allowing continued passage of increasingly enormous container ships from China. This time, the digging is being accomplished by heavy equipment, rather than imported labor.
Strange as it seems, the “globalization” of international trade did not begin with the Internet but was launched a century ago, when a new waterway suddenly made the world seem small.
Margarita Engle
California, 2014
Selected References
Maps of Panama can be found on this site: ian.macky.net/pat/map/pa/pa.html
Franck, Harry A. Zone Policeman 88. New York: Century, 1920.
Greene, Julie. The Canal Builders. New York: Penguin, 2009.
James, Winifred. The Mulberry Tree. London: Chapman, 1913.
Keller, Ulrich. The Building of the Panama Canal in Historic Photographs. New York: Dover, 1983.
Mabrey, Gerardo. El Canal de Panamá y los trabajadores antillanos. Panama City: Universidad de Panamá, 1989.
McGuinness, Aims. Path of Empire. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Newton, Velma. The Silver Men. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, 1984.
Parker, Matthew. Panama Fever. New York: Anchor, 2009.
Rivas Reyes, Marcela Eyra. El trabajo de las mujeres en la historia de la construcción del Canal de Panamá (1881–1914). Panama City: Universidad de Panamá, 2002.
Russell, Carlos E. An Old Woman Remembers: The Recollected History of West Indians in Panama, 1855–1955. Brooklyn: Caribbean Diaspora Press, 1995.
Seacole, Mary. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Serra, Yolanda Marco. Los obreros españoles en la construcción del Canal de Panamá. Portobelo, Panamá: 1907.
Acknowledgments
I thank God for tropical rainforests.
The following resources were helpful:
Isthmian Historical Society
Panama Collection of the Canal Zone
Library-Museum
Silver People Heritage Foundation
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
United States National Archives
Central California Caribbean Association
For a thrilling wildlife tour of Barro Colorado Island, gracias a Vilma y los monos aulladores (the howlers).
Special thanks to nonfiction wizard Angelica Carpenter for advice about the mysteries of research and to Ragina Shearer for suggesting that I give trees a voice. For visions of bird art and sky castles, I am indebted to the paintings of Louis A. Fuertes and the expedition diaries of Frank M. Chapman.
For encouragement and companionship, joyful hugs to my family. Special thanks to Victor, Kristan, and Jacob for dog-sitting.
Deep gratitude to my wonderful editor, Reka Simonsen. At ti
mes, this book seemed impossible. Without your insight, it would have been a muddy mess at best. I am also grateful to Lisa DiSarro, Elizabeth Tardiff, Susan Buckheit, and everyone else at HMH for true teamwork.
About the Author
MARGARITA ENGLE is a Cuban-American poet and novelist whose work has been published in many countries. Her books include The Surrender Tree, a Newbery Honor book and winner of the Pura Belpré Author Award, the Américas Award, and the Claudia Lewis Award; The Poet Slave of Cuba, winner of the Pura Belpré Author Award and the Américas Award; Tropical Secrets; The Firefly Letters; Hurricane Dancers; The Wild Book; and The Lightning Dreamer. She lives with her husband in Northern California. Visit her at www.margaritaengle.com.