CHAPTER VI
Panama
Origin of the Name Panama—Suggestions for Change of Name—Enlightening a Cab Driver—Scalping in the United States—A Cure for Obesity—Shirking—Description of Road from the Railroad Station to the Hotel Centrál—Plaza Centrál—Tips—The Negro in the North and South—Dr. Frank’s Opinion—How the Tropical Negro’s Wants Are Satisfied—Opportunities for Negroes and Mulattoes in the Tropics—Solution of the Race Problem.
We are told that Panama is the Indian name for good fishing place, or place abounding in fish. Judging from the hotel fare this might be so, for when we did not have canned fish, we had fresh. But this explanation is regarded by archæologists as a fish story and lacks anthropologic evidence. As to etymology, the name sounds and looks more like Greek, Latin or Spanish than Indian. Panamahaha would sound more like an Indian name and would express more.
One enthusiastic writer says the name Panama was given to the city because it is the oldest city on the continent, the Pa and Ma of American cities. The simplicity of the explanation gives it weight. Simplicity and truth are twins, and simplicity was born first.
A Spanish scientist asserts that the original name was Panima from Pa ni Ma, which means neither father nor mother. He claims that as the first city of America, it had neither father nor mother. This is simpler still.
A Scandinavian historian thinks that the original name was Panamerica, which is Swedish. Eric was cut out later, and Panama was left.
A celebrated English captain, whose name has been forgotten, thinks that the real name was Panamaniac, because the inhabitants were unlike the English, and refers to the capture of Panama by Morgan the pirate as proof. The inhabitants who went forth to fight insanely allowed themselves to be scattered and driven back by their own horses and cows. He says that the English do not fear these animals.
Sportsmen say that the name is Indian and that it refers to the method of fishing formerly in vogue by the natives. The fisherman leans over the water and agitates it with his beard and lips, whereupon the fish, who can not distinguish a dark colored face above the surface of the water from a tree trunk, takes the agitation of the water for that made by bugs, darts at the place and lands between the Indian’s teeth, and is caught.
I myself am inclined to cut the Gordian knot by proposing a new name. With a temperature of 90 to 100 degrees F. in the shade on Christmas and New Year’s days, the town should be called Infero in Esperanto, Inferno in Italian, Enfer in French, Hoelle in German, Lugar Endiablado in Spanish and Vamick in Volapuk. I suggested this explanation to our Englishman of the S. S. Limón as we were parting at the Panama railroad station, and he said, “Go to Panama.”
I chartered a ten-cent cab at the station and entered into conversation with the driver, who, with his vast fund of knowledge concerning Spanish words and Panama city geography, taught me many things. He was one of the few Panama cabmen who spoke English.
In order to give him some information in return, I told him that I came from one of the youngest and largest cities in the United States, a city in which we had a river whose water ran backward toward its source, that the city had also built a canal that carried the waters from Lake Michigan uphill on its way down to the Gulf of Mexico, and had constructed a pump that would have pumped the Niagara Falls into the Mississippi River had not the rest of the country objected and interfered. I told him that some of us remembered when Chicago was the center of the greatest Indian scalping district of the world.
He stared at me with the whites of his eyes while I was talking, and then wanted to know if I had ever seen any one scalped. I told him that I had myself been scalped five times and was now growing my sixth head of hair; that the hair of many of our women turned golden yellow instead of gray as they grew older; that hairgrowing was one of our industries, and our horticulturists made it grow on wax figures faster than it grows on babies’ heads, just as our builders put roofs on houses before building the walls, and in his hot country would leave off the walls altogether.
“Do they ever begin at the roof and build downward?” he asked, dryly.
“Not as a rule, but we often begin the new building before the old one is torn down, and put in the new foundation and supports while the old building is still inhabited.”
He did not seem to know that I was telling the truth, for he began to lose interest and whipped up his emaciated horse to keep it from falling down, and apart. So I changed the subject.
“Your horse seems to be getting very thin from your efforts. Or perhaps it is from its own efforts. It is tired carrying its age, which, of course, is growing greater and heavier every day. It ought to be wired and connected with a power-house. In my country we put up better frameworks and run them by gasoline vapor. How do you feed it?”
“I don’t feed him.”
“I beg pardon. I meant to ask how you diet him?”
“He works and fasts until six in the evening, when I then turn him loose and let him nibble. I lay off once a week to spend my week’s earnings, and turn him out to grass for the day, when he fills up.”
“I have it at last,” I exclaimed so suddenly that he gave a little start. “I have been seeking a cure for obesity for years, and you have found it and demonstrated it. I’ll make my fat patients fast and work all day, let them nibble after 6 P. M. and once a week turn them out to golf, which includes both the grass and the filling up.”
“What a queer country yours is,” he said, “I should think that people would make fun of each other all of the time.”
“They do. Scheming for each other’s money and then making fun of the losers, keep them busy and happy. But why do you tire yourself beating your horse?”
“I’m working, or being worked, I hardly know which.”
“And what is the horse doing? If he could only take the whip!”
“He’s shirking, sir. I’m giving him the whip.”
“Well, it’s about time for him to shirk. He probably wants to do it once more, and has no time to lose. If the poor brute could only talk, as we do.”
“That’s one bad quality he doesn’t share with us, sir.”
IN PANAMA CITY
Store and Residence of the Poorer Quarter
After we had thus driven about a mile, the houses, which near the station were dilapidated one and two-story frame structures, teeming with Chinese and negroes, began to improve in quality, and we came to the Plaza and Church of Santa Ana. Here we found ourselves to all appearances in an old Spanish town, as full of medieval inconveniences as New York or Chicago of modern improvements. Spanish houses, churches, streets, plazas and people—everything quaint, curious and comfortless—dirty, diseased and dead. We passed many hotels, but the buildings were small, old, dingy and uninviting in appearance. They looked more like homes for microbes and macrobes rather than doñas and hidalgos.
The next half or three-quarter mile was through the best business part of the city where whites predominated. The houses were Spanish in style, two or three stories high, nearly all having stores on the ground floor and living apartments above. They formed a solid front of masonry, slightly varied, and were built in little blocks that measured about 100 by 200 feet. The cross streets were too narrow for two persons to walk abreast, so that the only way for pedestrians to pass one another was to step off into the street, and the only way for vehicles to pass one another was to make use of the sidewalks. However, that didn’t matter. Vehicles did not frequent the side streets, although plenty of cabs were rattling back and forth on the main thoroughfare which led us from the railroad station to Plaza Centrál, the principal public square and park of the town. It was square in shape and about 250 feet in diameter, and was occupied by the Parque de la Catedrál (Cathedral Park), all except a twenty-foot strip of street extending around the outer edges. The street was also paved with those sounding cobble-stones for carriages and horses to rattle upon and murder sleep. The foliage in the park was thick but, as the dry season had already set in, it had not the luxuriance and brilliancy of that on the other side of the isthmus. The garden of the hotel at Limón, Costa Rica, was still the most gorgeous bit of vegetation I had seen.
THE CATHEDRAL OF PANAMA AND CORNER OF
THE PARK
On the west side of the square stood the Cathedral. Its high square Spanish towers were crusted over with pearly shells, and adorned with delicate, tree-like shrubs which grew upon their venerable walls. On the same side of the square was a small department store. On the north side were, besides the business houses, the Pacific Steam Navigation Company and the Panama Lottery, the latter being the lower floor of the bishop’s house. On the south side was a book store and the United States government official building. On the east side flourished a German saloon, a money changer, two business houses and Hotel Centrál. In the hotel building, and flanking the main entrance or corridor on either side, were an immense barroom and a small barber shop, each apparently doing a rushing business. Next to the hotel on the second floor, over a store, was a Spanish club where cards were played after dark and before dawn.
I tipped the cabman with a nickel, equal to fifty per cent. of his pay for the ride, and received a polite bow and “Gracias, Señor.”
I was told afterward that the tipping of cabmen was not customary. The cabmen of Panama are so honest and disinterested that a pleasant word is as good as a tip. If only our American negroes, who believe that one good tip deserves another, would all go to Panama and do as the Panama negroes do, they would learn to be tolerant of the whites, who wish only to be served and left alone.
I do not suppose that all of my Northern readers take enough interest in their negro brothers to study the race question. Some think they do not have to. For the enlightenment of such as do not study, I will quote from a recent popular novel that was being printed in this country while I was in Panama, and has since been dramatized. The quotation represents a Southern physician, Doctor Cameron, telling a statesman named Stoneman how the negroes maltreated the whites in South Carolina after having voted themselves into complete political control of the state.
“‘The negro is the master of our state, county, city and town governments. Every school, college, hospital, asylum and poorhouse is his prey. What you have seen is but a sample. Negro insolence grows beyond endurance. Their women are taught to insult their old mistresses and mock their poverty as they pass in their old, faded dresses. Yesterday a black driver struck a white child of six with his whip, and when the mother protested, she was arrested by a negro policeman, taken before a negro magistrate, and fined ten dollars for ”insulting a freedman.’”
“Stoneman frowned: ‘Such things must be very exceptional.’
“‘They are everyday occurrences and cease to excite comment.... Our school commissioner is a negro who can neither read nor write. The black grand jury last week discharged a negro for stealing cattle and indicted the owner for false imprisonment. No such rate of taxation was ever imposed on a civilized people. A tithe of it cost Great Britain her colonies. There are 5,000 homes in this country—2,900 of them are advertised for sale by the sheriff to meet his tax bills.... Congress, in addition to the desolation of the war and the ruin of black rule, has wrung from the cotton farmers of the South a tax of $67,000,000. Every dollar of this money bears the stain of the blood of starving people. They are ready to give up, or to spring some desperate scheme of resistance——’
“The old man lifted his massive head and his great jaws came together with a snap:
“‘Resistance to the authority of the national government?’
“‘No; resistance to the travesty of government and the mockery of civilization under which we are being throttled! The bayonet is now in the hands of a brutal negro militia. The tyranny of military martinets was child’s play to this.... Eighty thousand armed negro troops, answerable to no authority save the savage instincts of their officers, terrorize the state. Every white company has been disbanded and disarmed by our scalawag governor. I tell you, sir, we are walking on the crust of a volcano!... Black hordes of former slaves, with the intelligence of children and the instincts of savages, armed with modern rifles, parade daily in front of their unarmed former masters. A white man has no right a negro need respect. The children of the breed of men who speak the tongue of Burns and Shakespeare, Drake and Raleigh, have been disarmed and made subject to the black spawn of an African jungle! Can human flesh endure it? When Goth and Vandal barbarians overran Rome, the negro was the slave of the Roman empire. The savages of the North blew out the light of ancient civilization, but in all the dark ages which followed they never dreamed the leprous infamy of raising a black slave to rule over his former master! No people in the history of the world have ever before been so basely betrayed, so wantonly humiliated and degraded!’
“Stoneman lifted his head in amazement at the burst of passionate intensity with which the Southerner poured out his protest.
“‘For a Russian to rule a Pole,’ he went on, ‘a Turk to rule a Greek, or an Austrian to dominate an Italian, is hard enough, but for a thick-lipped, flat-nosed, spindle-shanked negro, exuding his nauseating animal odor, to shout in derision over the hearths and homes of white men and women is an atrocity too monstrous for belief. Our people are yet dazed by its horror. My God! when they realize its meaning, whose arm will be strong enough to hold them?’
“‘I should think the South was sufficiently amused with resistance to authority,’ interrupted Stoneman.
“‘Even so. Yet there is a moral force at the bottom of every living race of men. The sense of right, the feeling of racial destiny—these are unconquered and unconquerable forces. Every man in South Carolina to-day is glad that slavery is dead. The war was not too great a price for us to pay for the lifting of its curse. And now to ask a Southerner to be the slave of a slave——’”
That such a terrible description should be taken seriously, even in frenzied fiction, is an indication that the ambitious negro is out of place in the United States, where he is as a man without a country. In the North he can not compete with the whites; in the South he is a dissatisfied servant. He is too ambitious for his opportunities here. Let him go to the tropics where the whites can not compete with him.
On our way home from Panama, Doctor Frank, who had been seasick during the whole of the voyage down, said:
“They can say what they please about the tropics, I am never going there again. Zur Hoelle with the tropics! They were made for negroes; let the negroes have them. I have said it.”
I confess that for the time being I agreed with him. The full-blooded negro improves and thrives and finds his wants satisfied in the tropics, and will never thrive elsewhere. When the tropical negro wants a rest he takes a siesta, and is rested. When he wants food he plucks a banana, a pineapple or a mango, and is nourished. When he is thirsty he climbs a tree, cuts open a cocoanut, drinks the juice, and is refreshed. When he craves riches he stays away from work to spend a week’s earnings, and is rich. When he wishes to rise in the social scale, he marries above him, and is stuck-up. When he needs an education he learns to come in out of the sun, and is wise. He does not hanker after social and literary distinction, and is satisfied. He does not seek office, and is not disappointed. He does not ask for tips, and they are not thrust upon him, except by the Yankee-errant. When he comes to die he gets sick or is killed and is restored to the impartial dust of his Mother Earth and, having accumulated neither wealth nor cultivated tastes that he cannot take with him, remains forever after contented. His life is a bit of time, his death a bite of dust. The world has been benefited, but not disturbed by him. He has been true to his race and has accomplished his destiny; he has peopled the tropics.
Look at Doctor Cameron’s picture and then at mine. Who would not choose mine for the negro? If he can not solve his race problem in the United States, he can go to the tropics, and the tropics will solve him. The Romans told each other to see Naples and die. The negroes have not Naples, but they have the equator. It is theirs. Sooner or later they will have possession.
As to the mulatto, he is more sinned against than sinning. He is the product of man’s interference with the divine will as evidenced in God’s work. Extremes, whether of race or rhetoric, do not blend; they antagonize and distress. This new race mixture is neither white nor negro. God made the negro, man made the mulatto. As the blonde race thrives best in the north temperate climate and the negro in the tropical, the mulatto would thrive best in the semi-tropical. In Cuba the lighter colored ones would find an appropriate climate and congenial surroundings. In Cuba there is no color line or race prejudice. The mulattoes could mingle with the whites until in time they would form a part of a dusky white, intelligent mixed race. They would be dissolved and their problem solved. But they must hurry up or the race problem will get there first.
The darker mulattoes might go to Hayti and make use of their intelligence in reforming society and running the government, and thus render a real service to mankind. It would be a missionary service in which the missionaries would save themselves also. This would be easier than to win high station and respect in a white man’s country. In Hayti they would in time become assimilated with the native black race and become a part of a lighter colored, more intelligent race than exists there to-day. Nothing could be more simple.
If our negro will not do this (and who said he would?) he must be diluted or spread out, for the white man must rule in a white man’s country. His only hope for toleration and assistance is by being in the minority. If white immigration will accomplish this in the Southern states then the negro will be saved; if not he must save himself by spreading himself.