religion as an opiate or false source of empower-
ment, reveals not only the often autobiographical
emphasis in his work but, perhaps more impor-
tant, his concern, similar to CLAUDE MCKAY’s, with
the working class.
The finest story is “The Wharf Rats,” which
on the surface is about unrequited love, revenge,
and voodoo. The main character, Phillip, despite
his father’s objection, spends his days as a wharf
rat, diving for coins to entertain tourists who toss
them into the ocean from their luxury liners cruis-
ing the Panama Canal. When Maffi, a peasant girl
who frequents his home to assist his mother, falls
in love with Phillip, she wrongfully assumes he is
in love with Marua, whose beauty causes people
to turn and stare. Driven by her sense of rejec-
tion and jealousy, Maffi visits the obeah (Voodoo)
priest to have him perform the proper ritual of re-
venge. The next day, when Phillip dives for coins, a
shark attacks him and takes him to his death at the
depths of the ocean. At the end of the story, Maffi
takes comfort in knowing that at least Phillip is no
longer pursuing Marua rather than her.
“The Wharf Rats” is filled with action, danger,
and suspense. Through Walrond’s vivid descrip-
tive language, readers hold their breath as Phillip
and Ernest dive into the ocean deep, swim “like
a garfish,” and are chased by a shark the first day.
But “The Wharf Rats” is more than a love story,
for Walrond uses the setting to give insights into
the plight of common Latin American workers
whose colonized lives revolve around the Panama
Canal and the European and English cruise ships
that pass through it. Phillip’s family and the other
laborers—blacks, Hindu, Chinese, Maroons—live
in “Silver City” a segregated community in Coco
Té. “At the Atlantic end of the canal, the blacks are
herded in box car huts buried in the jungles of ‘Sil-
ver City’; in the murky tenements.... The ‘Silver
Quarter’ harbored the inky ones, their wives and
pickaninnies” (549). In this labor camp, domi-
nated by race and class stratification, ignorance
and economic oppression, hopeless residents are
also psychologically enslaved by their religious
practices and belief in witchcraft (brujeria), obeah,
and coombia. Their community, like the ocean,
forms a whirlpool of marginalization, alienation,
and inevitable destruction in an almost scientific
naturalistic manner. The story also reflects Wal-
rond’s interest in the gothic.
Generally, Tropic Death was well received.
Waldrond’s efforts and style were often compared
to JEAN TOOMER and Cane, although most crit-
ics conceded that Toomer was the more talented
and gifted of the two writers. Robert Bone writes
that “Tropic Death was a remarkable achievement
for a man of twenty-eight” (202). David Lever-
ing Lewis concludes that in Tropic Death Walrond
“captured the premodern, polyglot culture of
men and women battered by the global backwash
of capitalism, in order to present one of the Re-
naissance’s most haunting allegorical reflections
about vitality and innocence being toyed with and
fatally sucked under by the despoiling forces of
modernity” (548).BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bone, Robert. Down Home: A History of Afro-Ameri-
can Short Fiction from Its Beginnings to the End
of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Capricorn
Books, 1975.
Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Walrond, Eric. “The Wharf Rats.” In The Portable
Harlem Renaissance Reader, edited by David Le-
vering Lewis, 549–568. New York: Penguin Books,
1995.
Wilfred D. SamuelsTroupe, Quincy Thomas, Jr. (1943– )
Troupe has a history as elusive as a line of his
own poetry. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri,
on July 23, 1943, to Thomas Quincy Troupe, Sr.,
and Dorothy Marshall Smith. Troupe attended but
did not graduate from Grambling College (now
Grambling State University). However, he gradu-
ated with an A.A. degree in journalism from Los
Angeles City College (1967). Troupe joined the
army and played on the All-Army basketball team
until he was permanently sidelined by injuries.Troupe, Quincy Thomas, Jr. 507