Physical Directors of PCZ, ca. 1940s, including Coach Stanley Loney (seated third from right) and Coach Aston Parchment (standing third from left). Courtesy of the Aston M. Parchment Scrapbook, Museo Afrocaribeño de Panama, Ministerio de Cultura (Panamá).
“They used the same things that prohibited their Panamanian citizenship—Blackness, migrancy, and language—to forge diasporic connections.”
“We would play tennis even after they turned off the lights on the courts,” my father told me, as he reflected on his days in the Panama Canal Zone (PCZ). Tennis became their sport; my father, his sister, and his brother perfected their craft and became so good that they and other neighborhood youth all received athletic scholarships to study and compete at HBCUs throughout the South. But more so, those lessons-turned-victories from the tennis courts of Rainbow City allowed my father “to become somebody.” Motivated by his parents and family members like his Uncle Georgie, who “used to cut grass in the Zone and told us that they did those hard jobs so that we did not have to,” my father took his tennis skills from the Canal Zone to Huston-Tillotson College (now University) in Austin, Texas.