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.”
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.