the stonecutting industry and opens with gripping
scenes of overworked laborers. “Black men be-
hind wheelbarrows slowly ascended a rising made
of spliced boards and emptied the sand rock into
the maw of a mixing machine,” observes the nar-
rator. “More black men,” he notes, “a peg down,
behind wheelbarrows, formed a line which caught
the mortar pouring into the rear organ of the om-
nivorous monster” (85). The protagonist of the
story is Miss Buckner, a mysterious mulatto
woman who presides, with her five daughters,
over a salon that hosts men. There is intense cu-
riosity about the madam who prevails over the
Palm Porch: “[W]hether she was the result of a
union of white and black, French and Spanish,
English and Maroon—no one knew. Of an
equally mystical heritage were her daughters,
creatures of a rich and shining beauty. Of their fa-
ther the less said the better” (91). The pathos of
this story emerges through Miss Buckner’s im-
pressive ability to prevail even as her “home” is
overtaken by drunken sailors and their captains.
It is clear that she has not got complete control
over her daughters; some of them embark on rela-
tionships of which she does approve, while others
have children out of wedlock. Yet, in the chaos of
the overwhelmingly male environment in which
she lives and plies her trade, Miss Buckner seems
to be untouched.
The title story, and the last in the collection,
“Tropic Death” is a moving account of life that
draws heavily from Walrond’s own experiences.
The semiautobiographical tale chronicles the mi-
grations of Gerald Bright, whose sea voyage to
Panama constitutes an awful, contemporary ver-
sion of the Middle Passage. The opening scene of
the story focuses on a “dainty little boy, about
eight years of age” who wears “a white stiff
jumper jacket, the starch on it so hard and shiny
it was ready to squeak; shiny blue-velvet pants,
very tight and very short—a little above his care-
fully oiled knees, a brownish green bow tie, bright
as a cluster of dewy crotons; an Eton collar, an
English sailor hat, with an elastic band so tight it
threatened to dig a gutter in the lad’s bright
brown cheeks.” The child is “overwhelmed” by
the “fluid activity” that is underway as he
watches “a police launch carry a load of Negro
country folk out to a British packet smoking
blackly in the bay.” The narrator is deliberately
opaque about the circumstances involved here,
and it is unclear whether the transport is for legal
reasons. Eventually it is revealed that the young
boy Gerald and his mother are part of the exodus,
and that they, too, must take the police launch in
order to begin their journey to Panama and a re-
union with Gerald’s father. In Panama, Bright is
reunited with his unsavory father, a man whom
he struggles to love in the face of degradation and
sickness. The collection ends with this alienating
scene of domesticity denied and yet another ex-
ample of the relentless type of social death that
can and does occur in the tropics.
Additional stories such as “The Wharf Rats,”
“Panama Gold,” “Subjection,” and “The Yellow
One” explore the chaos and unpredictability of is-
landers striving to preserve themselves and to
prevail against challenges of poverty, migration,
and taxing environmental realities. Written dur-
ing Walrond’s tenure at OPPORTUNITY,the vol-
ume received critical acclaim. W. E. B. DUBOIS
praised it as a “human document of deep signifi-
cance,” and the noted critic Benjamin Brawley
mused that the book was “the most important
contribution made by a Negro to American let-
ters since the appearance of Dunbar’s Lyrics of
Lowly Life.”Bibliography
Parascandola, Louis, ed. Winds Can Wake Up the Dead:
An Eric Walrond Reader.Detroit: Wayne State Uni-
versity Press, 1998.
Walrond, Eric. Tropic Death.New York: Boni & Liv-
eright, 1926; reprint, New York: Collier Books,
1972.Trotter, William Monroe(1872–1934)
The first African-American student to be elected
to PHI BETA KAPPA at HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
Trotter was a purposeful social critic, an intrepid
race activist, and the visionary editor of The
Guardian,one of BOSTON’s most outspoken news-
papers.
Born in Chillicothe, Ohio, Trotter was the son
of James and Virginia Isaacs Trotter. His father, who
became the recorder of deeds in WASHINGTON,
D.C., a post formerly held by Frederick Douglass,528 Trotter, William Monroe