Southern Cultures

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i was in college when I first learned that my great-grandmother, Lydia Andrews, who my father and his siblings and cousins called Ganny, was born on the United Fruit Plantation in Puerto Limón, Costa Rica. Before Papi shared this fact with me, I knew Ganny only in small glimpses of family memory that seemed to contract the world in which she existed, such that she existed only in ours—that is, she belonged specifically to my family, and not to history.

We had briefly shared this world—between 1994, when I was born, and 1998, when she died—though we never met, because she lived in Panama and I in Brooklyn. But I had seen photos of her: mostly sepia-toned images of a dark-skinned, white-haired woman with glasses, a nose like my father's, and a graceful neck that made her the center of each picture. There was one photo in vivid color taken just a few years before her passing, in Coronado, Panama. She sat on a chair surrounded by our family, wearing a red dress patterned with white flowers, her hands folded on her lap.

When Ganny died, my grandmother went to Panama for the funeral, and on her return to New York, brought me back a purple stuffed beaver named Benny that she said Ganny had gotten for me. And though it wasn't possible—though Ganny and I no longer occupied the same world—I believed her, and treasured the beaver like an intimate conversation between me and my great-grandmother.

As I've gotten older, however, the new details I learn of Ganny's life seem to place her, and our family, into larger orbits of history. Ganny was born in 1900 on a wide swath of US territory, a banana plantation, on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. Its proprietor, the United Fruit Company, had been officially founded just a year earlier in 1899, through a company merger [End Page 13]

in Boston. United Fruit owned massive expanses of land stretching across several countries in Central America and the Caribbean, and Ganny's parents had migrated to one of them from St. Lucia as part of a wave of West Indians gone to work for, as Gabriel García Márquez called it, the Banana Company. Ganny's father was a carpenter whose labor was likely tied to the Church, and particularly to a white St. Lucian priest who ministered to the West Indian migrants. Ganny's father, we believe, followed the priest from island to isthmus to island—St. Lucia to Puerto Limón to Bocas del Toro, Panama. Our family doesn't know for sure; what record we have of these migrations lived in Ganny's memory, not on paper.¹

But plantation gets stuck on my tongue. What did a Central American plantation owned and operated by white men from the United States look, sound, and feel like? Because Ganny was born but not raised on United Fruit, I wonder about the conditions of birth there; about [End Page 14]

midwives, or about the possibility of friends come to help with the baby. The photos I've seen of the plantations from company archives do not tell me much about these conditions. They mostly document labor, though with little attention to laborers: dense rows of banana trees abundant with fruit, wholly cleared dirt pathways dividing those rows, thatched-roof buildings that mark "engineers' quarters" or "overseer's quarters." Even when workers are present...