To Panama and back

by Henry T. Byford

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.’”