e, Colonel Goethals, that "the co

lor line was kindly bu
t firm Click here to Email Paul
ly drawn throughou

The t the work, the negroes being designated as silver employees and the Americans as gold employees." The post office had signs indicating which entrances were for silver employees and which for gold employees. The commissaries had the same provisions, and the railroad company made the general distinction as much as it could by first and second class passenger rates. Very few of the negroes made any protest against this. Once in a while an American negro would go to the post office and be told that he must call at the "silver" window. He would protest for a while, but finding it useless, would acquiesce. In fact the gold/silver distinction was hit upon by the paymaster as a "solution of the troubles growing out of

the intermingling of the races"-not that the distinction lacked poetry, gold and silver, a fantasy-land under the sway of ancient cosmologies of sun and moon. Little wonder that in the heavy irony practiced in the writing of his memoir as a Zone policeman, it came naturally to Harry Franck to register this bureaucratic distinction as a religious, inde system and radar in the RASSed cosmic, one. He expected from the media reports and perceptions of the canal in the United States to find happy white men digging the canal themselves with pick and shovel, "that I might someday solemnly raise my hand and boast, 'I helped dig IT. But that was in the callow days before I . . . learned the awful gulf that separates the sacred whi

te American from the rest of the Canal Zone world." Silence-that "awful gulf"-is as important here as glittery designations of gold and silver, the virtual erasure, as far as the official representations are concerned, of the black work force swarming like ants down in the huge cuttings through the mountain ranges, working in the hotels serving food and drink, on the wharves unloading the boats, cooking and cleaning and looking after the white children, sorting the mail, paint

The ing the houses, carrying the ice, spraying oil on mosquito-infested water, and collecting in a glass vial for the Sanitary Department any stray mosquito that was found in a white household. They exist, yet they don't exist. Invisible Man. Invisible presence-all the more available to score fantastic racial readings of modern history and the human condition. It is difficult to believe that this minutely orchestrated color-line, traced remorselessly throughout everyday life as much as official work rolls and emanating fr

om the overwhelmingly most important ge Site

into the r
acial composition of the Cuna, "miscegenat