Box 25 is a history of the West Indian workers who built the Panama Canal, by the author of the magisterial 2010 book, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal. This more focused account centers the viewpoints of 112 Caribbean canal workers—mostly from Barbados and Jamaica—who wrote brief essays on their lives and work for a 1963 competition run by the Isthmian Historical Society. These essays ended up in the Library of Congress box alluded to in the book’s title. They provide rare, firsthand narratives by Afro-Caribbean canal builders that illuminate hardship, danger, racism, resistance, and accommodation.
Greene has pulled vivid and moving stories from Box 25. Take that of Constantine Parkinson, who began working for the United States at age fifteen. His contest essay recounts snakes, avalanches, accidents, torrential rains, and the threat of malaria. It also discusses his moves from job to job in search of better conditions, higher pay, and a kinder foreman. In his first four years as a canal worker, Parkinson worked as a flagman, waterboy, chainman, foreman, and brakeman. At age nineteen, Parkinson lost his right leg and part of his left foot while working. He wrote that after coming out of the operation in the Colón hospital, he saw “all kinds of cripples around my bed … telling me to cheer up not to fret we all good soldiers” (16). Parkinson went on to describe his fight to be rehired—which yielded a series of jobs as a telephone attendant, switch tender, tool issuer, watchman, and interpreter—and decades of demands for new and improved artificial legs.
Parkinson’s story fits with the larger patterns of employment and self-assertion that emerge from Box 25. Greene finds that the essay writers were “distinctly not the diggers and dynamiters many people conjure when imagining Afro-Caribbean workers in the Canal Zone” (68). Only ten of the essayists listed their occupation as laborer. Most of the authors began humbly but moved into better-paying jobs such as carpenter’s helper, carpenter, brakeman, fireman, switchman, and conductor.
The Box 25 essays make the challenges of building the canal visceral. Poor health is a common theme. The essayists reported that bosses expected even sick and dying West Indian men to show up for work, which caused men to attempt to work through malaria and other illnesses. Even as the essays reveal a fear of death and reliance on faith, they also reveal critical appraisals of the white bosses who manifested little concern for the daily toll of injury and death among Black workers. They also convey a sense of the pervasive racism that Black workers faced. One author, Jeremiah Waisome, recalled telling his new boss that he had recorded his name incorrectly. His boss responded with a racist epithet and the command to “never try to dictate to a white man” (80).
As Greene recognizes, there are limits to Box 25 as a source base. She acknowledges that the authors of the essays filed in this box were atypical in having worked their way into positions of skill and responsibility, in continuing to work on the canal after the completion of construction in 1914, and in making Panama their permanent home. Only two of the essays in the box were written by women, and so men’s perspectives predominate. As entries in a prize competition, these essays need to be read as calculating efforts to net the prize money being dispensed by the U.S. contest sponsors.
Greene counters these limits by consulting other sources, most notably the personnel records of U.S. government employees kept in the National Personnel Records Center, a U.S. National Archives branch located in St. Louis, Missouri. In addition to deriving general conclusions about Afro-Caribbean canal workers from these records, Greene was able to track down the records of dozens of the men who wrote testimonies for the Isthmian Historical Society competition. She sensitively reads these files for insights into the pain of working-class life, registered as lost teeth, missing fingers and limbs, burns, scars, and smallpox marks. Though created for labor management purposes, these records also yield stories of intimate relationships (and the roles of U.S. officials in mediating these relationships), fights for better pay and conditions, demands for assistance for disabilities, and efforts to locate lost family members.
The final chapter of Box 25 steps back from the canal era to consider memory, which encompasses prior scholarship, film depictions of canal workers, and ongoing efforts by archivists, community activists, and descendants to shape understanding of West Indian canal workers. This chapter situates the voices of Box 25 in the larger context of efforts to expand on and counter the documents produced by U.S. government officials and the other authors—mostly white—who have left more voluminous records.
Although the comparative gap in records remains a challenge to understanding the work and lives of West Indian canal builders, Box 25 helps us understand both the limits of the archives and workers’ perspectives, including toward the end of their lives. Wrestling with declining eyesight, sickness, and other infirmities, the essayists looked back on significant time in their lives, knowing full well their contributions to world history, hoping for prize money, and evincing a palpable desire to be heard.
