“Hard Reading”: US Empire and Black
Modernist Aesthetics in Eric Walrond’s
Tropic Death
Imani D. Owens
University of Pittsburgh
In 1926 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, fiction writer and journalist Eric
Walrond published Tropic Death, a book of short stories set entirely in Central
America and the Caribbean during the United States’ construction of the
Panama Canal. A native of British Guiana, Walrond moved to New York in
1918 and became an active figure on the New York literary scene. Tropic
Death was his highly anticipated book-length debut. In an enthusiastic review,
W. E. B. Du Bois called Tropic Death a human document of deep significance
and great promise and a distinct contribution to Negro literature: “Here is a book
of ten stories of death, which, with impressionistic pen and little plot, show forth
with singular vividness the life of black laborers of the West Indies. There is superstition, unusual dialect, singular economic glimpse; but above all, there is truth and
human sympathy” (152). Du Bois’s review highlights Tropic Death’s twofold contribution. First, the text performs a significant geographical shift by locating its
portrait of black migration and labor in neither Harlem nor the American South
but in the Caribbean basin. Second, the text’s artistic innovations—its “impressionistic pen and little plot”—establish Walrond’s reputation as one of the key
stylists of the movement, a bright new light of Harlem’s avant-garde.
Despite this promising debut, Tropic Death fell into obscurity1 and remained
mostly out of print for decades until recent recuperations by Louis Parascandola,
Carl A. Wade, Arnold Rampersad, and James Davis.2 The problem has not been
one of total critical neglect, as Walrond is often featured in major anthologies and
literary histories of the Harlem Renaissance. Rather, Tropic Death has suffered
from a lack of sustained critical engagement despite scholarly claims to the text’s
significance. Some reasons for this lack of engagement are arguably foreshadowed in Du Bois’s review.3 Tropic Death’s focus on “black laborers of the
West Indies” (Du Bois 152) does not fit neatly into US-bound themes that have
until recently shaped narratives of the Harlem Renaissance.4 Appropriately, then,
efforts to recuperate Walrond have drawn from recent work on the transnational
contours of the New Negro Movement, exemplified by Brent Hayes Edwards’s
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DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlw051
MELUS Volume 41 Number 4 (Winter 2016)
“H a r d R e a d i n g ”
turn to the cultures of black internationalism in The Practice of Diaspora:
Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003). Davis’s
recent biography makes a significant contribution in this vein. As Davis observes,
in light of “a transnational understanding of the Harlem Renaissance and a diaspora approach to Caribbean writing—Walrond’s significance takes on a different
cast” (5).
While the internationalist thrust of diaspora studies offers a useful context for
reading Tropic Death, the book’s specific orientation is the western hemisphere.
To attend to the specificities of Tropic Death’s transnationalism is to note its preoccupation with the specter of US imperialism. Indeed, scholarship on the Harlem
Renaissance, even when informed by a transnational perspective, has just begun
to address the specific question of US imperialism as it emerges from the pens of
black writers. Such a focus illuminates my reading of Tropic Death, in which US
empire emerges as a key framework for understanding the black experience in the
first decades of the twentieth century. Looming at the center of the text is the construction of the Panama Canal, initiated by France in the 1880s and completed by
the United States from 1904 to 1914. Canal construction precipitated one of
the largest mass migrations the region had ever seen as workers from across
the Caribbean flocked to the isthmus in search of the higher pay promised
in the Canal Zone.
Tropic Death revises the dominant narrative of canal construction as exemplary of prosperity and progress, revealing its paradoxical role as both a catalyst
of cultural exchange and a symbol of uncanny modern violence. Death reoccurs
with grim certainty in each of the book’s settings, which move from the Panama
Canal Zone at Colón to the shores of Jamaica and Honduras, and from bustling
industrial worksites to obscure “backwoods” villages. Ominously, if implicitly, the
book also anticipates other manifestations of American expansion, from the
United States’ control of sugar producing regions to various military, economic,
and cultural interventions, small and large, throughout the Caribbean and Central
America. Broadening critical knowledge of the historical contexts of interwar literary production, Tropic Death reminds us that the artistic ferment of the international New Negro Movement took place at a time when, as Barbara Christian
phrases it, “U.S. troops were continually invading one island or another” (56).
If Tropic Death identifies empire, migration, labor, and death as historical conditions of a black hemispheric modernity, such a vision is enabled not only by its
themes but also by its aesthetic innovations. Walrond’s use of fragments and bits
of image (what Du Bois calls his “impressionistic pen” [152]) are key to his rendering of imperialism’s disorienting violence, a geography that literally shifts and
disintegrates. His use of the short story collection reinforces his grim theme with
inexorable repetition but also facilitates his multifaceted and panoramic vision of
Caribbean identity. Significantly, these innovations won praise for Tropic Death
but also earned the book a reputation as difficult. Even Du Bois’s favorable review
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contained this caveat: “The book’s impressionism, together with its dialect, make
it often hard reading and difficult to understand in parts” (152).
Du Bois’s phrase “hard reading” usefully encapsulates both the aesthetic and
epistemological challenges raised by a text such as Tropic Death, which, as
Jennifer Brittan observes, remained “indigestible” even to later critics who chafed
at the “uncomfortable experience of reading this work” (299). Rather than reading this discomfort as incidental to the text’s meaning, I retain a sense of the value
of Tropic Death’s stylistic and thematic difficulty. Tropic Death’s various challenges signal its quest for a form and language to communicate a poetics and
a politics of migration and death in the American century. Re-envisioning the
modernist imperative to “make it new,” Tropic Death’s stylistic experiments seek
to illuminate contemporary forms of violence that were insidious, pervasive, and
often confounding.
Tropic Death’s moments of illegibility also pose useful challenges to long
entrenched methods of writing and reading the “folk.” A prominent discourse
of the interwar period, the folk often designated an authentic black culture that
was distant in time and space from the stirrings of modernity yet a vital source
of raw material for the modern artist. Revising this understanding, Tropic Death
resists the notion of a simple folk who yield easily to a voyeuristic gaze—their
language immediately decipherable, their bodies and cultural productions readily
available to the modern reader. Instead, the text’s alternate geographies of
Blackness require a different kind of interpretive labor, demanding “the intense
engagement that reading opaque, formally experimental texts requires of the
modern reader” (Pinto 4).5
An analysis of several of Tropic Death’s stories can help navigate and address
various aspects of the text’s “hardness”: its various stylistic, historical, and even
affective challenges. Above all, these challenges serve a productive, revisionary
purpose, revealing the need for new conceptual tools to navigate the landscape
of black hemispheric modernity. By charting the convergence between Tropic
Death’s themes and aesthetics, this essay not only participates in recent efforts
to recuperate Walrond but also raises questions about the politics of experimentalist prose in interwar literature. In particular, it urges us to reconsider the role of
the experimental text in crafting visions of black modernity that reach beyond the
nation to the hemisphere.
Walrond was no stranger to Harlem literary and social circles. After working
as a reporter at the Panama Star & Herald, Walrond migrated to New York in
1918. In New York, Walrond served as editor of Marcus Garvey’s The Negro
World and later as business manager of Opportunity, the journal of the
National Urban League. During the early 1920s, he began to make a name for
himself in fiction by publishing a variety of short stories in modernist little magazines. In 1925, his work appeared in Alain Locke’s seminal anthology The New
Negro alongside other promising young writers such as Langston Hughes, Zora
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“H a r d R e a d i n g ”
Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer. Trumpeting the arrival of a new generation of
black writers, Locke singles out Walrond’s literary achievements for special
praise: “Walrond has a tropical color and almost volcanic gush that are unique
even after more than a generation of exotic word painting by master artists” (52).
Walrond’s contribution stood out but for reasons that Locke does not name.
Set in a brothel in Colón, Panama, “The Palm Porch” bursts the seams of The New
Negro’s US frame. As James Davis observes, considered alongside works set in the
American South or Harlem, “Walrond’s setting diverges sharply, as does his
entire frame of reference” (121). Locke’s colorful description notwithstanding,
the story’s deadly conclusion was also out of step with Locke’s framing of the
movement’s exuberant themes. Walrond’s book-length debut in 1926 would further develop this grim tone. Tropic Death neither celebrates the flowering of black
folk culture nor makes unqualified claims for its redemptive powers. Instead, the
text offers a relentless catalogue of death, disease, and natural disaster. Moreover,
death is repetitive, and this repetition arguably structures the text. A grisly death
awaits one or more of the characters at the end of each of the ten stories: a hungry
girl dies after stuffing herself with rocks, a rebellious worker is stalked and killed
by a white American marine who oversees the Jim Crow worksite at the Canal
Zone, and a woman is trampled on a ship (an erstwhile symbol of masculine
mobility) as she travels between Honduras and Jamaica. In each case, death is
dealt rapidly and with modern, machine-like precision. Unsurprisingly, the
book’s bleak atmosphere was a shock to readers with a taste for the “tropical”
and the “exotic.” As Mary White Ovington (a founder of the NAACP) remarks
with surprise, “To those of us who know the West Indies as a pleasant winter
resort[,] . . . Eric Walrond’s picture is like a stomping blow” (15).
Refusing the sentimentality of the pastoral mode, Tropic Death’s first story,
“Drought,” opens with the sudden blow of a work whistle, hurling the reader into
a disorienting industrial landscape:
The whistle blew for eleven o’clock. Throats parched, grim, sun-crazed blacks cutting stone on the white burning hillside dropped with a clang the hot, dust-powdered drills and flew up over the rugged edges of the horizon to descent into a
dry, waterless gut. Hunger—pricks at stomachs inured to brackish coffee and cassava pone—pressed on folk, joyful as rabbits in a grassy ravine, wrenching themselves free of the lure of the white earth. Helter-skelter dark, brilliant, black faces of
West Indian peasants moved along, in pain—the stiff tails of blue denim coats, the
hobble of chigger-cracked heels, the rhythm of a stride . . . dissipating into the sunstuffed void the radiant forces of the incline. (21)
Introducing Tropic Death’s theme of labor, these jarring lines demonstrate what
Langston Hughes called Walrond’s “sun-bright hardness” (9), a phrase that usefully articulates a thematic and poetic toughness. As Hughes’s description
implies, Walrond’s prose is full of rich yet abrasive description that is not softened by sentimentalism. The sun is a ubiquitous, oppressive force, burning all
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in its path and precipitating the central crisis of the story. As industrial drills pulverize the land, the men also seem to disintegrate as the work reduces them to
fragments: parched throats, hungry stomachs, chigger-cracked heels. The emphasis on the “white burning hillside” and the “white earth” not only indicate a
scorched landscape but also hint at an oppressive racial presence from which
the workers must “wrench” themselves free. Walrond’s use of fragments signals
a visceral yet fraught relationship between the “sun-crazed” folk, the ravaged
landscape, and the unnatural effects of modernization.
Alluding to T. S. Eliot’s poetic answer to modern crisis, Michelle Ann Stephens
observes that Tropic Death “literalised the metaphor of the modern wasteland on
Caribbean shores” (“Eric” 173). Stephens’s phrasing captures Tropic Death’s spirit
of modernist disillusionment while also attending to the text’s regional and historical specificity. Although it shares the bleak, disorienting tone of other modernist
texts,6 Tropic Death may instead belong to what Seth Moglen calls “another modernism . . . that emerged alongside the familiar canonical works—and, like them,
developed experimental formal strategies in order to map a process of social transformation so vast that it could be perceived only in fragments” (45). Unlike the
diffuse, generalized anxiety present in these better-known texts, these works
“insist on the historical specificity of the destructive social forces at work in a modernizing America—and, in varied ways, they are committed to resistance” (46).
Moglen does not name Walrond specifically yet suggests a useful frame for understanding the intersection between Tropic Death’s experimentalism and historicity.
Tropic Death expands the existing repertoire of historical themes in modernist
writing by marking, rather ominously, a period of transition in the Caribbean:
the turn from the plantation economy to industrialism, the subsequent waves
of migration to industrial centers, and the changing shape of racial violence
and systematic oppression in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Caribbean and African American intellectuals had explored the role of US
expansion as a major catalyst of hemispheric change since the turn of the century,
perhaps most famously in José Martı́’s 1891 essay, “Our America” (“Nuestra
América”). Writing from New York during his fourteen-year exile from Cuba,
Martı́ predicted that as the “islands of the sea” sought to find their collective voice
in the coming century, they would have to come to terms with the imperial
designs of their formidable neighbor to the north (129). Speaking in more blatant
terms, Charles W. Chesnutt remarked in 1900: “If certain recent tendencies are an
index of the future, it is not safe to fix the boundaries of the future United States
anywhere short of the Arctic Ocean on the north and the Isthmus of Panama on
the south” (49).
Walrond’s generation was poised to witness that expansion firsthand. He was
born in British Guiana in 1898, the year the United States gained control of Cuba,
Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam and would soon intervene in Haiti, the
Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Panama.7 The construction of the Panama
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Canal crucially set the stage for further intervention in the hemisphere.
Symbolically, the project bolstered US imperial identity, signifying “white
Americans’ triumph over tropical disorder” (Colby 87). The racial overtones of
the phrase “tropical disorder” (part of the official US rhetoric) should not be
missed. The term signaled not only an unpredictable tropical landscape but also
the unwieldy notions of racial, cultural, and national identity that converged on
the isthmus.
Tropic Death explores the experiences of a Caribbean migrant workforce that
official narratives of canal construction often render invisible. Through a dynamic
regional lens, Tropic Death traces the contours of this labor migration as it moves
between Panama, Barbados, Honduras, and Jamaica. Walrond himself was a
product of isthmian migration. After living in British Guiana and Barbados,
Walrond and his family moved to Colón in 1911. In Colón, he attended secondary
school and became fluent in Spanish, trained as a stenographer, and became a
clerk in the Health Department of the Canal Commission in Cristóbal. He also
made his start as a journalist, working as a reporter and sportswriter for the
Panama newspaper Star & Herald before migrating to New York 1918.
Walrond’s experiences in Panama shaped his transnational outlook and his views
on imperialism and migration, topics on which he became increasingly vocal in
his later writings.
On one hand, the circum-Caribbean migration depicted by Walrond is compatible with narratives of modern agency and mobility. It exemplifies the pattern
of “movement, transformation and relocation” that Paul Gilroy describes as part
of the condition of black modernity (xi). However, Tropic Death revises Gilroy’s
focus on sites in the North Atlantic by illustrating a range of black migrant experiences at a crucial moment in history for both the Caribbean and the United
States. The text adds to our knowledge of black migration narratives by introducing routes of migration that defy a north-south trajectory. Circum-Caribbean
migration, Tropic Death argues, is as much a part of the modern black experience
as the northbound flight from “cotton, cane, and rice fields” that looms so large in
the African American artistic imagination.8
Remittances from Panama and other industrial sites often paved the way for
later travel to the United States. However, prior experiences in Panama and elsewhere are a reminder that Caribbeans are already transnational citizens by the
time they arrive in Harlem, a fact which, as Lara Putnam argues, “should shift
our sense of the origins of the black internationalist thinking and organizing that
made interwar Harlem ‘new’” (471). It is toward such realities that Tropic Death
directs our gaze, emphasizing a uniquely modern experience of cultural exchange
and flux far from the streets of Harlem.9 Such a meeting of elements imbues the
isthmus with a mysterious, pulsating energy: “As it grew dark the hewers at the
Ditch, exhausted, half-asleep, naked but for wormy singlets, would hum queer
creole tunes, play on guitar or piccolo, and jig to the rhythm of the coombia.
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It was a brujerial chant, for obeah, a heritage of the French colonial, honeycombed
the life of the Negro laboring camps” (Walrond, “Wharf” 67). The hybridity of
the Canal Zone is salient above all in its cultural practices, a “queer creole”
mix that infused the labor camps with a vibrant, transformative power in the face
of impossible conditions.
On the other hand, as the scene above also suggests, Tropic Death troubles an
easy correspondence between migration and agency. Its rejection of triumphant
models of transnationality or diasporic homecoming has perhaps posed another
obstacle to its recuperation. To begin with, Tropic Death challenges triumphant
Caribbean narratives of isthmian migration. The scenes of grueling labor, violence, and poverty in many of Tropic Death’s stories are a drastic departure from
popular narratives that portrayed the “migrant-as-dandy, known for his jewelry,
assumed accent, cosmopolitan air, and North American-styled clothes”
(Frederick 127).10 In Tropic Death, the possibilities of migration are inextricable
from its risks, and often ironically so. For example, in one story, “Panama Gold,”
a worker returns to Jamaica, his experience on the canal marked by his gold
chains, his colognes, and a missing leg.
Framing the canal project in terms of danger and death was no imaginative
stretch for Walrond, who cataloged not only beatings and brawls but also a staggering number of deaths while working as a journalist at Colón. Indeed, work on
the canal was a treacherous enterprise.11 Beyond documented threats to life, limb,
and livelihood, however, is the idea that the imperial presence operated as an
unwieldy force whose workings were not fully understood and were made all
the more insidious because of that mystery. Walrond’s vision anticipates the
description of Panama Canal migration that opens Maryse Condé’s 2014 essay
“What is a Caribbean Writer?” in which she describes Canal construction as an
epic tragedy on the stage of modern Caribbean life. The workers who built the
canal would “pay with their lives for this technical feat, this marvel that split
the world in two, and would die buried in the mud of Gatun. Marcus Garvey
. . . saw for himself the immense misery of his fellow countrymen and thought
up the idea of a massive return to the lost continent, Mother Africa” (1). The
image of the canal as a mass grave reverses the narrative of modernity’s triumphant march. In Condé’s account, the material and symbolic consequences of the
event reach far beyond the region, with specific implications for black leadership
and cultural production. To be a Caribbean writer, Condé suggests, is to encounter death as a historical condition of black hemispheric modernity.
Walrond anticipates Condé’s call for attention to the entanglements of migration and death in Caribbean writing, a task that involved, for Walrond, questions
of both form and content. He faced the challenge of depicting forms of violence
and complex historical relationships that were not easily representable.
How might literary language respond to the vast changes transforming the
Caribbean and the hemisphere? Many of these concerns converge in
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“Subjection,” a story that takes place at the Canal Zone, and which also inhabits
the physical center of the book, halfway through the ten stories. “Subjection” may
also be called Tropic Death’s conceptual center, for it is where the brutal enforcement of the color line, the exploitation of people and environment, and the
manipulation of official narratives are shown to constitute the business of industrial imperialism.
In “Subjection,” a migrant worker named Ballet challenges a corrupt
American marine engaged in the brutal beating of another worker. Young and
defiant, Ballet is the only man who manages to “whip up the courage of voice”
in support of his peer (101). He pays for this transgression with his life, and evidence of his murder is promptly erased from the record. In addition to exposing
Ballet’s murder, Walrond takes pains to illustrate the devastating pervasiveness of
the color line, from Jim Crow wages and housing to surveillance and the systematic erasure of diverse migrant identities.
Like the vignette of labor that opens the text, “Subjection” begins with the
image of land being pulverized by black workers: “Toro Point resounded to
the noisy rhythm of picks swung by gnarled black hands. Sunbaked rock stones
flew to dust, to powder” (99). The men sing a work song to the rhythm of the
picks, adding their own voices to the industrial soundscape. However, the song
is suddenly interrupted, or perhaps completed, by the harsh voice of a white
American Marine:
The blows rained. The men sang—blacks, Island blacks—Turks Island, St.
Vincent, the Bahamas—
Diamond gal cook fowl botty giv’ de man
“I’ll show you goddam niggers how to talk back to a white man—.” (99-100)
The marine’s voice induces an ominous silence, stifling the agency of the story’s
opening lines. Moments later, the reader becomes aware of some strange conflict
at the worksite, presented only as a mysterious sequence of images:
“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” (100).
Here we encounter not the beating itself but its shadow. The assailant is invisible.
His presence is indicated only by the phrase “white bludgeon,” and this only after
the moment of impact has occurred. The images highlight the way both body and
earth respond in the immediate aftermath of the violence. On one hand, the land
is indelibly marked by the violence done to the body: as it lands, the nameless,
faceless, “ramshackle-body” forces a dent in “crisp, caked, earth.” On the other
hand, the imagery goes even further to join body and nature: the half-severed ear
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is like an “exhausted leaf or flower,” the body is a “tree,” and the blood is a “sticky
milk” that literally crimsons the dust and earth. By the end of this sequence, body
and earth are indistinguishable from each other. But as Mark Whalan writes of
Jean Toomer’s Georgia soil in Cane (1923), this is not an organic connection.
The land is “crisp” and barren. Like those who work on it, it has been exhausted
by the violence that has occurred there.12 With a force of imagery that anticipates
Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” (1939), this beating scene depicts both body and
land as sites of disorienting violence.13
The passage is often cited as evidence of Walrond’s “impressionistic” style,
although with little accompanying analysis. Such a description, however vague,
provides a clue to the effect of Walrond’s stylistic choices. If Walrond succeeds
in giving an “impression” of a scene rather than representing it with photographic
realism, his point is precisely to capture those connections that the camera cannot
see. As Jesse Matz observes, the use of fragments can often suggest, through its
very abstraction, a fuller and more nuanced version of reality: “If ‘fiction is an
impression’ it mediates opposite perceptual moments. It does not choose surfaces
and fragments over depths and wholes but makes surfaces show depths, make
fragments suggest wholes, and devotes itself to the undoing of such distinctions”
(1). A series of such juxtaposed fragments suggests relationships that would not
otherwise be perceivable. Walrond’s use of image certainly “makes fragments
suggest wholes,” revealing startling historical entanglements of race, violence,
and geography.
The numerous moments where Walrond’s prose erupts into impressionism
are therefore not merely ornamental but designed to deepen the content of his
anti-imperialist critique and, in some cases, mobilize the plot of his stories. In
“Subjection,” for example, the scene cited above serves as a catalyst, a crucial
event that precipitates the rest of the story’s action. As the marine carries out this
brutal beating, another young worker looks on in anger: “Irrefutably, by its ugly
lift, Ballet’s mouth was in on the rising rebellion which thrust a flame of smoke
into the young Negro’s eyes” (99). On the worksite, silence has become the code
of survival, and the other workers are well aware that defiant speech is a form of
resistance for which one pays with one’s life. Yet Ballet nevertheless manages to
“whip up the courage of voice”: “Yo’ gwine kill dat boy,” he ventures, as the
“older heads” of the gang look on in incredulous disapproval. “Yo’ coward
yo’—a big able man lik’ yo’ beatin’ a lil’ boy lik’ dat. Why yo’ don’ hit me?
Betcha yo’ don’ put down yo’ gun and fight me lik’ yo’ got any guts” (101).
The marine, a nameless, khaki-clad white American, turns on him:
“You mind yer own goddam business, Smarty, and go back to work,” said the
marine. He guided an unshaking yellow-spotted finger under the black’s warm,
dilating nostrils. “Or else—”
He grew suddenly deathly pale. It was a pallor which comes to men on the verge
of murder. Mouth, the boy at issue, one of those docile, half-white San Andres
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coons, was a facile affair. Singly, red-bloodedly one handled it. But here, with this
ugly, thick-lipped, broad-chested upstart, there was need for handling of an errorless sort. (101)
Aside from foreshadowing the marine’s act of retaliation against the outspoken
worker, this scene illustrates his attempt to categorize the men in the homogeneous language of US racism, irrespective of their various backgrounds. The victim of the beating, “Mouth,” probably named so because of his penchant for
“talking back” to white men, is called a “half-white coon.” Ballet is labeled a
“thick-lipped upstart” or simply, as the marine adds later, a “black bastard”
(101). Yet the men are by no means a homogenous group. Among them are
migrants from San Andres, Colombia, St. Vincent, and the Bahamas. There are
“Bajan creoles” (100), “black taciturn French colonials” (99), and tempestuous
Jamaicans, as well as Panama men from “Bottle Alley,” Boca Grande, and
Silver City. Walrond’s rendering of the incredible diversity of the Canal Zone provides a vivid contrast to the marine’s homogenizing epithets. The marine’s act of
naming is revealed here as part of an attempt to “handle” the men: to establish the
familiar racial order in this new context and acquaint the West Indian and Central
and South American workers with the rigid workings of the color line.
“Subjection” does in fact explore the possibilities and limitations of resistance.
But if Ballet’s rebellion represents an alternate possibility, the consequences of his
transgression are clearly foreshadowed. The marine “grew suddenly deathly pale.
It was a pallor which comes to men on the verge of murder” (101). From this
moment on, the march toward death is inexorable. The sole provider for an
impoverished household, Ballet is compelled to return to work the following
day. Ballet speeds through Colón on his way to the work site. Assailed by the sun’s
oppressive heat, he flies past “dinky bathhouses . . . grog shops, chink stores and
brothels,” and scores of black men trekking to work. As one group clears a patch
of jungle with cutlasses, they sing a work-song that simultaneously foretells
Ballet’s fate and heralds the relentless march of modernity: “Comin’ Ah tell
yo’! One mo’ mawin,’ buoy” (110).
On Ballet’s arrival, he has his inevitable confrontation with the marine. “Stand
up and take yer medicine, yer goddam skunk,” cries the marine. Afraid, Ballet
flees, taking shelter behind the spokes of a wagon wheel in a toolshed on the edge
of the jungle. His situation now hopeless, he is quickly tracked down. With chilling matter-of-factness, the narrator relates the youth’s final moments:
Behind the wheel, bars dividing the two, Ballet saw the dread khaki—the dirtcaked leggings.
His vision abruptly darkened.
Vap, vap, vap—
Three sure, dead shots.
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In the Canal Record, the Q.M. at Toro Point took occasion to extol the virtues of
the Department which kept the number of casualties in the recent native labor
uprising down to one. (111)
The dry realism of this passage stands in stark contrast to the fragmented prose of
the pivotal beating scene at the beginning of “Subjection.” Serving as bookends,
these two scenes create a violent atmosphere that ranges between the uncanny
and the quotidian. Indeed, the story’s unceremonious ending suggests that the
erasure of black life was a routine occurrence. The true nature of Ballet’s death
goes undocumented in the Canal Commission’s official publication, or rather,
it is incorrectly documented as a consequence of a “native labor uprising.” In
addition to denying his murder, the Canal Record subsumes Ballet’s identity
and entire history under the category of “native,” a term that is misleading at best
in the context of the Canal Zone’s largely migrant labor population. Yet the term
reveals the canal authorities’ attempts to keep a non-US black population “under
de heel o’ de backra” (103). Before the marine kills Ballet, for example, he
exclaims, “I’ll teach you niggers down here how to talk back to a white man”
(111, emphasis added). Moreover, as Frederick observes, the manipulation of
the record enables the “fiction of US benevolence at the Canal Zone to continue”
(161). This unmistakably deliberate erasure constitutes “Subjection’s” final and
perhaps most devastating act of violence.
Importantly, although the canal stands at the literal and conceptual center of
Tropic Death, it also serves as a flashpoint whose effects ripple outward. Several of
the stories establish a link between that large-scale project and the many smaller
industrial projects taking place far from the shores of Panama. This connection is
achieved, in part, through imagery: a ubiquitous white “marl” dust, unleashed by
the drilling at various worksites, quietly pervades many of the book’s ten stories.
Baked and dried by the oppressive heat of the sun, the suffocating industrial waste
takes on a life of its own: “Marl . . . dust” (Walrond, “Drought” 34), “thick adhesive marl” (21), “hot creeping marl” (22).
The marl’s sinister presence is illustrated best in Tropic Death’s opening story,
“Drought,” in which a ravaged landscape is produced by a combination of natural
disaster and industrial drilling at a rock quarry. The story follows a protagonist,
Coggins Rum, a worker at the site. On his daily trek home from work quarry,
Coggins gasps at the “consequences of the sun’s wretched fury”: “The sun had
robbed the land of its juice, squeezed it dry. Star apples, sugar apples, husks,
transparent on the dry sleepy trees. . . . Undug, stemless—peanuts, carrots—
seeking balm, relief, the caress of a passing wind, shot dead unlustered eyes
up through the sun-etched cracks in the hard, brittle soil” (26). The people are
equally robbed of their vitality. In the face of this “dizzy spectacle” (27), they sink
to their knees and pray for rain. With the crops dead, and with Coggins’s meager
wages barely sustaining the family Coggins’s wife Sissie is “running a house on a
dry-rot herring bone, a pint of stale, yellowless cornmeal, a few spuds” (28). But
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the focus soon shifts to Coggins’s daughter, Beryl, standing in the marl road: “Six
years old; possessing a one-piece frock, no hat, no shoes. . . . Victim of the sun—a
bright spot under its singeing mask—Beryl hesitated at Coggins’ approach. Her
little brown hands flew behind her back” (27). In light of the all-around scarcity,
the girl has adopted the habit of eating the only thing that the landscape provides
in abundance— marl rocks. Coggins frequently admonishes her behavior, to
their mutual distress: “A gulping sensation came to Coggins when he saw
Beryl crying. When Beryl cried, he felt like crying, too [,] . . . [b]ut he sternly
heaped invective upon her. ‘Marl’ll make yo’ sick . . . tie up yo’ guts, too. Tie
up yo’ guts like green guavas. Don’t eat it, yo’ hear, don’t eat no mo’ marl’”
(28). These warnings quickly grow ominous, painfully highlighting the family’s
inability to provide any alternative. In the face of poverty, the physical environment has become deadly.
This foreshadowing nevertheless fails to prepare us for the story’s startling climax. Approaching the family’s empty rainwater keg, Coggins encounters Beryl’s
motionless body: “Beryl, little naked brown legs apart, was flat upon the hard,
bare earth. The dog, perhaps, or the echo of some fugitive wind had blown up
her little crocus bag dress. It lay like a cocoanut flap-jack on her stomach”
(32). The tone here is one of almost clinical understatement; the flat description
belies the horror of the girl’s demise. Here the lifelessness of land and body merge
with disturbing clarity. Soon, the narrative abruptly shifts to the girl’s autopsy, a
scene revealed only in fragments:
“Marl . . . marl . . . dust. . . .”
It came to Coggins in swirls. Autopsy. Noise comes in swirls. Pounding, pounding—dry Indian corn pounding. Ginger. Ginger being pounded in a mortar with a
bright, new pestle. Pound, pound. And. Sawing. Butcher shop. Cow foot is sawed
that way. Stew—or tough hard steak. Then the drilling—drilling—drilling to a
stone cutter’s ears!
“Too bad, Coggins,” the doctor said, “‘too bad, to lose yo’ dawtah.” (34)
The precise moment of death eludes us. Afterward, the reality of the girl’s demise
slips in and out of consciousness only in “swirls” of sound and image. Yet it is
precisely in this moment of fragmentation that the link between the family’s
impoverishment, the exploitative labor, and the disintegration of the landscape
becomes remarkably vivid. Ironically, the “noise” of the autopsy mimics the preparation of the food items that the girl’s family lacks: “dry Indian corn,” “[g]inger,”
“[c]ow foot,” and “[s]tew.” The incessant pounding and sawing, which elevate at
the final moment to drilling, are reminiscent of the backbreaking industrial labor
that fails to provide sustenance for the workers and their families. Here, as elsewhere in the text, Walrond’s use of the fragment actually brings into focus a harsh
and disorienting reality. Although the connections are not spelled out for us, we
are forced to confront the stark reality of it all: death.
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The story’s matter-of-fact, unsentimental examination of the cause of death
performs its own kind of autopsy. The text goes beyond realistic documentation
to uncover a visceral relationship—a malevolent one— between the people, the
land, and the work that is done there. Tropic Death enacts a poetics of labor that
emphasizes the fraught relationship between black bodies and the modernity they
help to facilitate, even as they are deprived of its promises. We might imagine, for
example, that the harvested rock is shipped elsewhere and turned into building
materials for modern cities.
In this way, Walrond’s text approaches an almost Marxist theory of uneven
development, hinting at the more explicit critique of empire and capital that
emerges in his essays:
If the Negro is to be free he must rid himself of whatever illusions he may still
have about the social and economic system that has grown up under capitalism
and imperialism. A system that fattens off the labouring masses—black, yellow
and white—and that enriches the privileged few is one which he can never be reconciled to” (Walrond, “Negro” 288).
What is distinct about Tropic Death, however, is that it situates this critique in the
realm of the literary, painting with not only the broad strokes of history but also
allowing us to see, for instance, the historical contingency of a little girl’s death in
a backwoods village. This critique is enabled by the aesthetic of the text—its
descriptions of a disabling physical environment and use of language that mirrors
the disintegration of black life.
To return to Tropic Death’s experimental prose is to attend to the text’s imperative to grapple with the elusive effects of imperial violence that resist mimetic representation. It is also to reevaluate Walrond’s persistent, yet vague, designation as
an avant-garde writer. As Louis Chude-Sokei observes, Tropic Death’s “linguistic
excesses,” were not uniformly praised or understood (76). If Tropic Death’s reception is any clue, the book stretched existing vocabularies for talking about black
experimental writing. For example, Ovington’s impression of Tropic Death as a
“stomping blow” was as much a commentary on style as it was on theme: “Mr.
Walrond’s style . . . is at times trying. . . . He has the modern method of making
sentences out of words. . . . He does not seem to realize that his milieu is unusual
and that if he wishes us really to see the pictures that flood his mind he must take a
little more pains in presenting them to us” (15). Similarly, Benjamin Brawley’s otherwise glowing review contained the observation that “certainly a writer of Mr.
Walrond’s ability can now dispense altogether with hectic writing in gaining his
effects” (234). Significantly, such stylistic critiques of Tropic Death were echoed
by modernist writers. In an Opportunity review titled “In Our American
Language” (1926), Waldo Frank (a staunch advocate of his friend Jean
Toomer’s experimental prose) regards Walrond’s language as a distraction from
its subject matter: “The reader . . . finds himself thinking of Mr. Walrond’s
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language: finds himself seeing (and often being moved by) Mr. Walrond’s words;
rather than by the pictures and the dramas they are supposed to flesh” (352).
More than signaling mere stylistic quibbles, these reviews reflect a desire for
the accessibility and verisimilitude that many readers had come to expect in literary representations of the folk. Tropic Death’s form—a short story collection—
was a typical vehicle for the regional local color tale, yet Walrond’s prose was a
departure from the simple description and pastoral imagery normally associated
with that mode. Ovington’s and Frank’s reviews may also exemplify the presumption that the literary tricks of high modernism were out of place in the hands of
black writers. This expectation was especially pronounced for Walrond as a writer
of the West Indies, a milieu that was considered foreign and unusual even to some
of his African American readers. By suggesting that Tropic Death’s stylistic innovations came at the expense of content, Walrond’s contemporaries hint at something more: his failure as a translator and interpreter. In other words, the book’s
presumed shortcoming lay not merely in its lack of clarity but more precisely in
its “failure” to provide a document of Caribbean folk life that could be translated
into existing paradigms.
Tropic Death’s reception exposes ongoing difficulties with contextualizing
experimental prose in black writing. Édouard Glissant later observed the pervasive demand for accessibility in black experimental texts: “Western thought has
led us to believe that a work must always put itself constantly at our disposal, and I
know a number of our folktales, the power of whose impact on their audience has
nothing to do with the clarity of their meaning” (Caribbean 107). Insofar as Tropic
Death “fails” to put itself at the disposal of its readers, this failure might be understood as an intentional part of the text’s experimental project.14 Anticipating
Glissant’s focus on the “right to opacity” (“For” 194), Tropic Death deliberately
tests the limits of translatability, experimenting with what may or may not translate across regional boundaries in terms of language, culture, and historical
vision. This notion of failure is at work internally between characters from different shores who frequently misapprehend each other. But such failures also herald
the text’s commitment to incommensurability, difference, and an experimental
relationship to literary language and discourse.
More specifically, Tropic Death might be said to have a translational relationship to the discourse of Southern folk culture that was prominent in the Harlem
Renaissance. Within the first few pages, the book announces this relationship outright: “It wasn’t Sepia, Georgia, but a backwoods village in Barbados” (Walrond,
“Drought” 22).15 This phrase insists on the specificity of place, yet Walrond’s orientation is also comparative. In defining that setting in terms of what it is not, he
leaves behind the trace of that alternative, that Southern elsewhere. Resonating
with literary depictions of the US South, Tropic Death’s opening vignette is not
unlike the image of black labor that sets the tone for Jean Toomer’s Cane
(1923).16 Like Toomer’s Georgia, the Caribbean landscape is no pastoral space.
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It is also linked to a haunting past of plantation slavery. In both texts, the cane
field, that age-old symbol of labor, violence, and resistance in the literature of
the Americas, is a reminder of modernity’s insufficient break with an oppressive
past.
In Tropic Death, however, the reader returns to the cane field at dusk but finds
that the perspective has changed. From the vantage point of that backwoods village, the cane field embodies not only the haunting legacy of slavery but also the
modern violence of an emerging US empire. Walrond attempts to map new historical themes and a new poetic language onto a critical terrain not yet receptive
to black literary critiques of US empire. Its moments of translational failure serve
to expose these interpretive gaps. To recuperate Tropic Death is to restore depictions of Caribbean labor, migration, and death to the literary landscape of the
Harlem Renaissance and American modernism. It is also to reassert Walrond’s
importance to the Caribbean intellectual tradition as an anti-colonialist and theorist of circum-Caribbean regional identity, anticipating thinkers such as
Glissant, Condé, and others.
Equally important is Walrond’s intervention in discourses of folk culture.
Walrond’s experimental vision, however bleak, offers a different way of reading
literary representations of the folk and the “small places” they inhabit, to borrow
a phrase from the title of Jamaica Kincaid’s novel, A Small Place (1988). Going a
step further than Toomer’s sepia-toned elegy to a once vital folk culture,
Walrond’s focus on dying and impoverished bodies—his concern with the material circumstances of folk life—serves to place his folk more firmly in the present.
Their tragic deaths are a marker of their contemporaneity: their paradoxical, yet
distinct experience of modernity. Above all, Tropic Death challenges the United
States’ racialized premise of “triumph over tropical disorder” by unveiling the
vast geographies of Blackness that imperial power struggles to contain (Colby
87). In addition to critiquing the unwieldy and disorienting violence of imperialism, Walrond points toward another potentially generative kind of disorder: the
instability of Black identities and the messy exchanges of culture, nation, and language that define black diasporic experience and are epitomized by canal migration and resettlement. Revising the celebration of black culture and identity often
performed by his peers, Walrond paints a picture of modernity in which death
and transformation are fundamentally intertwined.
Notes
1. Shortly after Tropic Death’s publication (1926), critic Benjamin Brawley named
the text “the most important contribution made by a Negro to American letters
since the appearance of [Paul Laurence] Dunbar’s ‘Lyrics of Lowly Life’”
(“Renaissance” 234). For an account of Walrond’s literary rise and subsequent
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2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
fall into obscurity, see Kenneth Ramchand, “The Writer Who Ran Away: Eric
Walrond and Tropic Death” (1970).
See Louis J. Parascandola, ed., “Winds Can Wake up the Dead”: An Eric Walrond
Reader (1998); Parascandola and Carl A. Wade, eds., Eric Walrond: The Critical
Heritage (2012); Arnold Rampersad’s introduction to Tropic Death (2013); and
James Davis, Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the
Transatlantic Caribbean (2015).
While Tropic Death has rarely been the focus of sustained critical attention, it
would be inaccurate to say the text has been forgotten. Walrond is included in
most major anthologies of African American and Caribbean literature, and he
is mentioned (albeit in passing) in major literary histories of the Harlem
Renaissance. Given the sizable number of critical observations about the text’s
significance, the lack of sustained engagement with his work is noteworthy.
Building on the earlier work of Robert Bone (1975), a recent edited volume
(Parascandola and Wade) and a biography (Davis) have addressed this gap
and opened the door for renewed critical engagement with Walrond.
Furthermore, Walrond’s liminality—is he a writer of Harlem, British Guiana, or
Panama?—has made his categorization a challenge. His presumed elusiveness is
compounded by his departure to London in 1931, after which he did not return to
the United States for any extended period of time. Nor can Walrond be defined
strictly through his alliances, as demonstrated by his involvement with two ideologically distinct publications: Marcus Garvey’s Negro World and Charles S.
Johnson’s Opportunity. Although Walrond’s life and work pose a challenge on
the level of literary history and aesthetics, I follow Davis’s assertion
that Walrond’s “restless itinerary is an inducement to inquiry rather than an
obstacle” (5).
My argument is informed here by Samantha Pinto’s understanding of “difficulty”
as requiring a kind of “challenging literacy” that reframes the way we read difference in diasporic texts. While Pinto is mainly concerned with how feminist
aesthetics “reimagine diaspora as a site of disorder,” her approach is also broadly
suggestive of ways of reading experimental works at the margins of diaspora
studies more generally (4-5).
In The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (1995), David Levering Lewis somewhat vaguely characterizes Tropic Death as “one of the Renaissance’s most haunting allegorical reflections about vitality and innocence being toyed with and fatally
sickened under the despoiling forces of modernity” (548). Such a description
aligns Walrond with his modernist peers but tends to elide Tropic Death’s insistence on a regionally specific understanding of black modernity. Lewis gives a
more balanced treatment of Walrond in When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981).
As Michelle Ann Stephens observes, US expansion had enormous material and
symbolic consequences for Caribbean life and identity:
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From the beginning of the twentieth century, when Garvey first observed the
segregated conditions of black Caribbean workers employed by the United
States in the construction of the Panama Canal or when Briggs reported on
the military force of the United Sates in the invasion of Haiti, American racial
and national doctrine has shaped the development of Caribbean identity.
(Black 255)
8. See Walrond’s essay, “From Cotton, Cane, and Rice Fields” (1926).
9. For more on Caribbean migration to Harlem and other US sites, see Irma
Watkins-Owens’s Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem
Community 1900-1930 (1996) and Winston James’s Holding Aloft the Banner
of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (1998).
10. This image was so familiar, Rhonda Frederick writes,
that it came to represent the Panama returnee. . . . A close study of literature,
songs and poetry that features the Colón man-as-dandy . . . uncovers specific
demands for isthmian migration because of its size, financial, and personal
benefit.” Tales of material prosperity were often pervasive enough to withstand
“rumors” of back-breaking labor, disease and death at the Canal Zone. (127)
11. As Watkins-Owens notes, “During the decade of canal construction, thousands of
black men died or sustained permanent physical injury through premature or
delayed explosions of dynamite, asphyxiation in pits, falls from high places, train
wrecks, landslides, and cascading rocks in the canal cut” (14).
12. Mark Whalan observes that Jean Toomer made a distinction “between the wish
to return to nature, and the desire to touch the soil. Nature . . . is a virginal tract
of land. The soil is tilled land, saturate with the life of those who have worked it”
(qtd. in Whalan 74). As Whalan notes, “the subtext of Cane [1923] is the brutal
and enslaved nature of that ‘saturation’” (74).
13. “Strange Fruit” was written by Abel Meeropol, pseudonym Lewis Allan, in 1937.
14. As Édouard Glissant powerfully notes, “it can happen that the work is not written
for someone, but to dismantle the complex mechanism of frustration and the infinite forms of oppression” (Caribbean 107).
15. The phrase immediately follows a description of a “buckra” driver at the worksite—an “English white” who eats a meal of “cookoo” (a traditional Bajan dish)
served to him by his black mistress (Walrond, “Drought” 22). A familiar scene,
perhaps, but rendered with a signal difference.
16. Toomer and Walrond were frequently named together by their contemporaries as
two of the Harlem Renaissance’s most promising experimental writers. Sterling
Brown calls Cane and Tropic Death “two striking books of the movement,” noting
that “these authors were alike in being masters of their craft and, unfortunately,
in falling silent after the publication of one book each” (85). Such sentiments are
echoed by later critics such as Ramchand who asserts that “the two stylists of the
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movement were Jean Toomer, strange author of a single work, a neglected masterpiece Cane, and Eric Walrond” (68). More recently, seeking to contextualize
Walrond’s work within the context of American modernism, Stephens observes
that “in a manner remarkably similar to that of Jean Toomer in his descriptions
of the Southern United States in Cane[,] . . . Walrond literalised the metaphor of
the modern ‘wasteland’ on Caribbean shores” (“Eric” 173).
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