The power of a few well-chosen words! I learned about Eric Walrond's Tropic Death (1926) in the course of reading a critical study by the scholar Kenneth Ramchand. He described Walrond's book as a "blistering work of the imagination," or something close to this. The term "blistering" stuck in my mind. The word was so striking. Especially because it was paired with the imagination. On the one hand, here was a notion so physical, so closely connected with scorching heat and its bodily effects, and on the other, a word denoting an intangible realm of ideas. I could envision the flames coming right off the pages.

What little biographical information Ramchand gave about Walrond (1898-1966) was even more tantalizing. This book was published when he was 28. Although Walrond lived for another 40 years, he wouldn't fulfill the critical expectations of even better work. In fact this would prove to be his only book.

Tropic Death brings together ten stories, at least one of which had been previously published in small magazines prior to 1926. Its length is slight--less than two hundred pages. He had published other short stories prior to this. I am aware of about a half dozen earlier tales as well as an equal number of essays. To my knowledge none of these other writings have been collected even though one of the essays is held to be an important critique of the major currents in the black political thought of that period.

I have seen Walrond's stories described as "impressionistic." This is fair enough. The style is frequently telegraphic, short sentences, often mere fragments. The events that are narrated frequently lurch forward without transition, for example, this paragraph from "Subjection," that describes a beating that will have ominous consequences:

A ram-shackle body, dark in the ungentle spots exposing it, jogged, reeled and fell at the tip of a white bludgeon. Forced a dent in the crisp caked earth. An isolated ear lay limp and juicy, like some exhausted leaf or flower, half joined to the tree whence it sprang. Only the sticky milk flooding it was crimson, crimsoning the dust and earth.

The lyrical flights of the narrator are sensitive to the surroundings, as well as the action. Scenes and character intersect in a language and grammar that replicates the halting, broken, incomplete lilt of consciousness.

The dialogue between Walrond's characters is written in dialect. He commands a dozen different tongues, conglomerations of racial and national origins, loosely hung on the skeleton of the English language. Virtually every one of these tales employs several dialects because the diverse characters are constantly mixed together in a vision of a Pan-Caribbean Diaspora.

The construction of the Canal is the principal scene for many of the stories. The backbreaking work by the hordes of laborers drawn from throughout the region, the shanty towns thrown up to house the laborers and their families, the merchants, prostitutes, and hangers-on who gravitate to these communities fill Walrond's pages. Some of the stories take place elsewhere in the Caribbean, in Guyana, or Barbados, or Jamaica but even in these locations men who have worked on the Canal will appear like the liquid rings of a reverberation still pushing outward or a storm surf following in the wake of a hurricane.

What other industrial project of this past century could match the sheer scale of resources required for the Canal dig? What an enormous movement of earth and people... The only similar project I can think of is the comparatively disorganized harvest of the Amazon rain forest. The slash burns are reported to be the single visible sign of a human presence witnessed by orbiting astronauts. If the film "Bye Bye Brazil" is any measure, the awesome spectacle of the lumber factory shipped by the Japanese has had an equal impact as an ambiguous symbol of technological transgression or progress. In any event, at least within Central America, there is still no equivalent.

The title of this collection accurately sums up Walrond's fatalism. Almost without exception these stories present doomed people inexorably condemned to death. It may not always be clear who (or what) the victim will be, but the outcome is as certain as the torrid tropical sun. The relentless work on the Canal figures prominently, a world of white colonial overseers--Americans and Britons--parade through these stories, but it's brutality and death that ultimately rules this zone. And that blind fate is dealt by nature just as often as it's parceled out by humanity. Vampire bats, sharks, snakes--a savage animal kingdom lies in wait. What powers can mere mortals command to combat these things? The Book of Books, Obeah, the Plymouth Brethren, Seven Day Ventists, and sorceresses are the frail mediators in this life and death struggle.

A few of the stories are shipboard passages between tropical hell holes. But none of these voyages offer idyllic respites. The ferries, the steamers, are microcosms of misery and fear, vessels carrying the dead between ports like ghost ships.

Rumors

"I'll tell you, we had some beauts," Gerda frowned, examining the photograph.

She has told me. I've heard these stories about her life in Canal Zone many times. The repetition has formed a larger narrative flowing over decades. In my mind these tales have floated through a series of locks, sometimes filled with rising water, sometimes drained. As a child they were fantastic, otherworldly, undecipherable. Panama was a jungle alive with snakes and dangerous tides that swept inland for miles. Mosquitoes and military boats swarmed. It was inconceivable that there was such a place. Its only representative was my mother.

As I grew older my own discoveries in the real world shunted hers aside. What was there to conclude? Gerda was an army nurse. For most of World War II she was stationed in Panama. What of it? And in the face of that gradual dismissal, that inevitable dismantling of myth and art, Gerda had less encouragement to repeat her adventures. She herself forgot how to tell these stories of her girlfriends and all of those sad cases that came and went through the hospital beds. But when I brought out these snapshots...

"Was this taken on a porch? It looks like a porch." In the glass panes behind the hospital bed I could see the reflection of more windows shaded by Venetian blinds.

"There were porches all the way around and all of the beds were up against the inner wall and then there was room to walk at the ends--at the foot. All of those beds... We had two corpsmen to help us."

"What's that you've got in your hand?"

"That's a pitcher of water. Hasn't he got a glass in his hand?"

In the photograph Gerda is standing at the head of a patient's bed. She's wearing a cotton uniform, a nurse's cap perched in her frizzy hair, her arms thin and gangly, smiling to beat the band at the photographer.

"Fitzer," she suddenly recalled. "That was name of one of them. He was something. Once he got those lice. What do you call them?"

"Crabs?"

"Crabs! That's right… I couldn't remember their name. Because he used somebody's towel. Not because he was with somebody or anything. He was so mad. So, he got this spray that they used to kill mosquitoes and sprayed himself. Ha! Well he got a reaction and swelled up and everything. He was a mess. Poor Fitzer." Gerda was laughing so hard she could barely get out more than a sentence before breaking up.

"What about this man in the picture? The patient in the bed drinking water?"

"He was Puerto Rican."

"Really?"

"Sure, there were lots of Puerto Ricans down there. The ones that had gone to the Baptist schools--the black ones--they were great. They'd talk to you just like you and I are talking. They understood English perfect. The others only looked like they had a good tan. They'd always say: 'No savez." They didn't want anything to do with us. But I knew enough Spanish so I knew what was going on. At least to get things done."

"What happened to this guy in the bed?"

"He shot himself in the foot because he thought they were going to ship him overseas."

In the foreground of the photograph the man's leg was swaddled in gauze bandages from his toes to his knee.

Did I write "man"? Maybe he was 19 or 20.

"They all thought that. There were always rumors but they didn't send the Puerto Ricans. They stayed in the Canal as far as I know."

I think Tropic Death is once again out-of-print. The recent publication of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997), edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, has meant that it's possible to read one of the stories from the collection: "Wharf Rats." The introduction that appears in that anthology is the most information I've ever seen about Walrond.

From that thumbnail biography it's clear that the stories are autobiographical. Walrond was born in Guyana. His father, a Barbadian, abandoned his wife several years later. When he was eight Walrond's mother made an unsuccessful effort to reconcile with her husband, moving to Barbados. At ten she took Walrond to Colon. He stayed in Panama for ten years, until leaving for the United States at the age of twenty.

In the years that followed Walrond lived in New York. He studied for a year at Columbia. He bought his own newspaper and associated with some of the most important literary and political figures in the black community, including Charles Johnson and Marcus Garvey.

What's not clear are the nearly forty years that followed the publication of Tropic Death. He received a Guggenheim fellowship and promised certain work. It may be that he believed he had bound himself to something he couldn't measure up to. There was time spent in Europe... but what was he doing? I don't have clue. Nor, apparently, did anyone else. At the time of his death, in Paris, he was said to be working on a book about the Panama Canal.

-August 30, 1997

Editor’s note: Much of Walrond’s work has been restored to print in Louis J. Parascandola, ed., Winds Can Wake Up the Dead: An Eric Walrond Reader, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998.

© Copyright 2003 Eric Metcalf