The Most Caribbean of Stories

Two men harvest bananas at a United Fruit Company plantation, Tiquisate, Guatemala, 1945. Photograph from Frank Scherschel/The LIFE Picture Collection, Getty Images.

But plantation gets stuck on my tongue. What did a Central American plantation owned and operated by white men from the United States look, sound, and feel like? Because Ganny was born but not raised on United Fruit, I wonder about the conditions of birth there; about midwives, or about the possibility of friends come to help with the baby. The photos I’ve seen of the plantations from company archives do not tell me much about these conditions. They mostly document labor, though with little attention to laborers: dense rows of banana trees abundant with fruit, wholly cleared dirt pathways dividing those rows, thatched-roof buildings that mark “engineers’ quarters” or “overseer’s quarters.” Even when workers are present in these photos, the captions begin with verbs, not people: “planting banana bits” and “bringing fruit to loading platform.”²

When Black workers’ faces are caught by the camera, it seems almost accidental, like the result of a last-second glance at the photographer. Looking at these photos, I crave a return to the intimate, those small glimpses of a life that might give my memory a place to land. That might restore someone like these workers, or like Ganny, as the primary subject of an imperial archive. I also think about the US South, and what it meant that, across national borders, slavery was over and yet Black people continued to live and labor on plantations.

From Limón and Santiago de Cuba to Mississippi and the Carolinas, Black families had experienced just a generation’s respite from the wide reach of plantation work before racial capitalism created new iterations of itself. Indeed, the boundaries of the Global South have often, in practice, been drawn not so much around national lines, but around the “everywhere that Black people [call] home.” Everywhere the Global North has extracted air to supply its own breath.³

And I am captured by Ganny’s birth, or rather, the place in which it happened, because of the degree to which it predicts successive migrations, and inhabits a nexus between historical process and singular life. Perhaps a more honest way to phrase what I mean is that I am astounded to find my own family located so precisely within this particular and somewhat under-accounted-for period of Caribbean migration, neocolonial violence, and diaspora. As Christina Sharpe writes in In the Wake, Ganny’s patterns of migration linger in my mind as I attempt to “connect the social forces on a specific, particular family’s being in the wake to those of all Black people in the wake.” Like Sharpe, I too suspect that the geographical narrative of Ganny’s life might tell us something about national and racial identities within the afterlives of slavery and colonialism.⁴

These relationships—between family biography, migration, imperialism, land theft, and labor—seem to form something both nonlinear and repeating, though not bound by the enclosure of a circle. To me, they represent the most American of stories. And also the Blackest of stories. The most Caribbean of stories. That is, American anti-Blackness has always been a hemispheric project, and so too have expressions of Black survival and regeneration. Those “small [paths we clear] through the wake.”⁵

Ganny’s life, and its bearing on my own—its arrangement of the planets under which I was born in Brooklyn, New York—asks that I think about Blackness in global terms. Indeed, just a couple of years after arriving on United Fruit in Costa Rica, Ganny’s family migrated once again, this time to Bocas del Toro, an island off the western coast of Panama. In three years, they had crossed through and inhabited at least three nations—four, if we might count corporate-owned land—without ever leaving the Caribbean Sea.

Building of the Panama Canal, Panama. Photograph from Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images.

In Panama, as in Costa Rica, the United States made its nationhood anew via the repeating acts of geographic expansion, displacement, and “ingenuity” produced largely by Black and Indigenous exploited labor. Although Ganny’s family did not live on a banana plantation once in Panama, the United Fruit Company owned many of the plantations in Bocas as well, dispossessing the Indigenous Ngäbe of their land in order to grow and export monocrops. In Panama City, the US government followed France’s earlier attempts, operating at an even greater scale, to construct a canal connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and in 1904 claimed the Panama Canal project, and the territory in which it would be built, for itself.

Ganny’s family, and others like them, though essential to nationalist projects of various empires, were themselves not so much making nations. As West Indian colonial subjects who had migrated to primarily Spanish-speaking countries, they were, in fact, routinely excluded from the concept. Instead, their communities were worldmaking: forming diasporic subjectivities through movement across multiple Souths, and through reliance on each other in navigating these spaces. Ganny did not spend her childhood in Limón, but in what we might consider its kin. Bocas del Toro was about two hundred miles away, and a similar site on that Caribbean circuit traveled by Black folks pulled toward or coerced into manual work.⁶

If West Indian migrants were participants in and architects of diaspora, then they directed many of their engineering efforts toward transnational political thought and struggle. In the early twentieth century, Panama was a center of Garveyism, the pan-African Black internationalist movement led by Marcus Garvey. By the time Ganny reached adulthood and left Bocas for Colón, the bustling, majority-Black port city on the Atlantic side of the US Canal Zone, there were forty-seven chapters of the United Negro Improvement Association (unia) in the country. Back in Bocas, West Indian laborers working on United Fruit plantations avidly consumed Garvey’s Negro World newspaper, which was based in Harlem, as well as other periodicals from African American presses in the United States.⁷

Such cross-border exchanges suggest that we understand Black cultural and social movements not as tied exclusively, or even mostly, to the nation-states or colonies in which they form, but to each other. Those understandings of history that insist on ethnic, linguistic, and national distinction in the formation of Black movements belie the extent to which those movements have found nourishment in hemispheric (and global) contexts.⁸

Indeed, in the Panama Canal Zone, where Ganny found work after moving to Colón, evidence of both transnational anti-Blackness and Black diasporic interdependence was especially clear. Ganny had originally relocated to Colón with her younger brother and a childhood friend, whom my father calls her “hermana de crianza.” Through this hermana’s connections, Ganny found a place to live—a house made of concrete rather than wood—that granted her a level of privilege relative to many of her peers. But like many other West Indian women, Ganny also worked as a laundress in the Canal Zone washing clothes for white American families. By her midtwenties, she was a single mother of three, recently left by a Jamaican husband fifteen years her senior who had immigrated to Panama and then quickly returned home.

Banana loaders unload the first shipment of bananas at the United Fruit Company docks for transfer to a waiting ship in Puerto Cortés, Honduras, September 3, 1954. In over two months, about thirty-four thousand bunches made up the first shipment. In the foreground are bunches of bananas rejected for shipment because of over-ripeness. These were given to workers for their consumption. Photograph from Associated Press.

The Zone was organized by its own articulation of de jure racial segregation, the Gold and Silver Roll. The West Indian workers contracted to perform the bulk of labor in constructing the canal were paid less than their white, US citizen counterparts, and in silver. Silver and gold designated which houses employees could live in, what parts of a hospital they could access, which water fountains they could use. This apartheid was gendered too, shaping the nature of Ganny’s labor. Most Black women in the Zone worked in either laundry or as domestics in the homes of white Zonians, and interacted most often with white American women who held complex and varying degrees of power in relation to them.⁹

It’s a kind of segregation familiar to many of us in the United States. But this system was not merely a translated version of Jim Crow; established by the same government, the two systems developed almost simultaneously. And in the 1960s, when the Civil Rights Movement gained ground in the United States, the wins were felt in the Canal Zone too.

Our diaspora is linked in part by a history of slavery, but also by all of the ways slavery’s underlying logics have formed the conditions in which we have lived since. Sigue la memoria de la esclavitud, sigue la memoria de sus restos. We find it in the racial hierarchies that continue to structure our lives. In the push and pull of labor opportunities that lead to dangerous and unfairly compensated work on transcontinental railroads, canals, and fruit plantations. In what documentation exists of the past, and of our ancestors—in who gets remembered, and how. In the Souths made around us, and the Souths we make; shared experiences of subjugation shape our identities, which in turn facilitate the ways in which we share our resistance.

This story is both hers and not hers, mine and not mine. My father made these discoveries about Ganny in 1988 one afternoon in Panama during the rainy season, while he and my pregnant mother visited her at the house she had finally bought for her daughters and her to live in. Papi had asked to interview Ganny about her life, and the two of them sat down together at the table facing her yard, where she grew both bananas and their cousin, plantains. Five months later, when my older brother was born, my parents made André his middle name, after Ganny.

In these details alone, we find an abundance of both memory and its absence—how is it that my great-grandmother didn’t know where she was born? Didn’t know she wasn’t a citizen of the country in which she lived? These threads pull us back to contested empire, to lifetimes of successive migration—the “exodus” of Bob Marley’s Exodus people—to family silence, and to the precarious citizenship that marks the experiences of so many migrants (and certainly of West Indian migrants in Panama). Family history allows us to peek in through the windows to see how larger forces enact themselves in small ways. What does empire look like on our skin? How does slavery’s afterlife sound in our names? What homes do these make in us?¹⁵

We might navigate these questions by approaching our family history alongside and within the archive, observing the points of tension at which we—descendants and archive—make competing claims for what we might call our own. Here our work must rest on that stretch of space between the private and the public, those intimate annunciations where we witness the public stake its power. In attempting to track Ganny’s migrations, in trying to recover her relationship to the place in which she was born, I attempt to make a “reckoning of movement,” understanding that although, as Hazel V. Carby writes in Imperial Intimacies, “the story of imperial relations is as restless as the Atlantic … it is also anchored, temporarily, in the particular places in which people in my family lived and died.”¹⁶

Ganny seated outdoors, surrounded by multiple generations of her family—some of her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and their spouses, and great-great-grandchildren, 1990.

This process of intimate retrieval and return—where we recognize singular life within historical sweep, and simultaneously reopen space for the sweep, for what doesn’t feel so familiar—helps us to make sense of scale. Because the nature of diaspora, the nature of our Souths, seems necessarily to rely on and collapse distance: geographic, affective, familial. But when we regard that distance with restraint, we can, even just for a few moments, hold on to the specificity of the people and places we come from. Such specificity is part of how we trace our “small paths through the wake,” part of how we document our living, as Christina Sharpe writes.¹⁷

I think of Ganny’s red and white patterned dress in that photo. Of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren at her side. I think of the light there, a soft afternoon light I associate only with summer, but that in Panama’s countryside may have also been winter. I think of the street where Ganny lived, for some years, in Brooklyn. In a neighborhood that for a few decades remade its landscape in the image of West Indian and Puerto Rican immigrants. These folks rented rooms, not apartments, and spoke several languages. The colonial ones—English, Spanish, French—and the remixed creations that narrated other kinds of survival through the former: Haitian Kreyol, several kinds of Caribbean Patois, Nuyorican Spanglish.

I think of that brownstone on Lincoln Street where Ganny had a room, and how close it was, just a short walk, to the street on which I was born, a few blocks shy of Flatbush Avenue, nearly half a century later. I think of the elasticity of time between the lives she and I both lived in that place. We belong to history, yes, but mostly to each other.

This essay first appeared in the Imaginary South issue (vol. 26, no. 4: Winter 2020).

Maya Doig-Acuña is a Brooklyn-born-and-raised writer, scholar, and doula-in-training. She has been published in Remezcla, Latino Rebels, Guernica, and elsewhere. She is currently a doctoral student at Harvard University, researching and writing about Afro-Panamanian migration, community, and memory within a context of Black diaspora.

Header image: Photo detail from the United Fruit Company plantation near La Lima, Honduras, August 31, 1954. Photograph from Associated Press.