Panama Gold by Eric Walrond (1926)
Ella Heath lives alone on a half acre of land in the gap, tending chickens, pigeons, doves, rabbits, hogs, and a cow, and cultivating corn, okras, gunga peas, eddoes, tannias, tomatoes, and other green growth she has coaxed from the earth since coming up from Low'rd, the salty lower side of Barbadoes. One evening, preparing her supper, she realizes she has no salt in the house and sets out to borrow or buy some. She stops first at the Dalrimple cabin, where she complains to Lizzie about Lizzie's daughter Capadosia's rudeness, and Lizzie scolds and beats the girl in front of her. Lizzie has no salt to spare, having just used her last on Christian's coffee, so she directs Ella up the road to a new shop kept by a man named Poyer, a Panama man who lost a leg on the canal. Ella walks up through the gap at dusk, passing Pettit Bruin, the village idiot, smoking his pipe on a barrel outside the shop. Inside, men are talking about compensation paid to an injured worker by the Americans on the Isthmus. Ella buys her salt, baking soda, and senna from Poyer, noting his black skin and his wooden leg, and bristles when he teases her about being afraid of duppies (ghosts). She insists she fears neither the living nor the dead and walks home irritated at the suggestion. Six days pass. Ella sticks a pig, corns the meat, and the sapodillas and shaddocks ripen. One evening Poyer himself comes to her cabin by the well, sweating and visibly taken with her, asking why she no longer comes to buy from his shop and appealing to her for pity and feeling. Ella rebuffs him sharply, telling him his money, fine shirts, gold teeth, and cologne do not impress her, that she is a woman used to taking care of herself with her hogs and fowls and potatoes, and that no one-legged man can frighten or sway her with his finery. Poyer leaves, mopping his brow, while Ella stands by the well defiant. That evening, as the sunset blazes and fades over the gap, Ella smells smoke and at first mistakes it for burning grass or a cane fire, then thinks it might be the church steeple. A Dalrimple child comes running down the gap crying that Poyer's shop is on fire. Ella drops her evening meal, draws a bucket of water from her well, balances it on her head, and runs down the gap and the road toward the blaze. She arrives to find the shop burnt out, a crowd of hill dwellers and a constable gathered, and salvaged items, a valise, an old shirt, sacks of split peas, the money canister, pulled from the wreckage. Ella pushes through the crowd screaming for Poyer, seizing old Bruin and demanding to know where he is. A constable orders the crowd back to let men bring in a stretcher, and Bruin, talking wildly, confirms that Poyer is inside. Ella then understands how useless her bucket of water has been.
By Eric Walrond · First published 1926 · Genre: Literary Fiction, Social Realism, Postcolonial Literature · 3 chapters · 5,582 words
First lines
The sun was slowly dying. Ella, a switch in her hand, rounded up her chicks. Cocks came proudly in, puffed by poise and conquest; hens, agitated, jealous of their young, clucked in -- furious at the disappearance of a one-eyed one caught by the leg and dragged down the hole of a mongoose.
"Yo' go up dere, an' behave yo'self."
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Genres
- Literary Fiction — The work demonstrates sophisticated artistic techniques including lyrical prose, complex character development, modernist narrative structures, and thematic depth examining labor, identity, and agency in a colonial context.
- Social Realism — Depicts the authentic lived experience of working-class rural Barbadian peasants, their subsistence agricultural labor, economic struggles, and social hierarchies with unflinching realism.
- Postcolonial Literature — Centrally concerned with colonial power structures, imperial exploitation (Panama Canal labor, British governance), racial hierarchies, and the resistance and self-determination of colonized West Indian subjects.
- Modernism — Employs experimental narrative techniques including fragmented structure, stream of consciousness, lyrical digression, sensory disruption, and juxtaposition of interior and exterior worlds typical of modernist aesthetics.
Tags
Barbados · West Indian fiction · Rural settings · Peasant communities · Agricultural labor · Early twentieth century · Female independence · Creole dialect · Social outsiders · Disability representation · Unrequited desire · Class conflict
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Panama Gold is listed on Textopian as a short story by Eric Walrond, dated 1926 CE.
This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.
- Work type: Short story
- Author: Eric Walrond
- Date: 1926 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Literary Fiction, Social Realism, Postcolonial Literature, Modernism, Historical Fiction
- Length: 5,582 words
- Structure: 3 chapters, 154 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Easy (6th Grade)
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- Work identity for Panama Gold by Eric Walrond
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