Susan Proudleigh

Herbert George de Lisser's depiction of Susan Proudleigh highlights the contradictions and range in the canal workers' migration narratives, often inflected by questions of gender. The life and character of Susan is primarily revealed in a series of romantic encounters with three men: Tom Wooley, Samuel Josiah Jones and Mr. Mackenzie. De Lisser's characterization of Susan is ambivalent but we gather that she is a class-conscious, ambitious woman who is both radical and conservative. For Susan, her association with these men give material sustenance and the cultural capital she finds necessary to maintain her superior status as a middle class, fair-skinned woman in urban Jamaica. Susan Proudleigh documents the various ways by which its protagonist negotiates the realities of her class, colour and gender to better advance financially and socially. Migrating to Panama is, for Susan, one such way to acquire status, and immediately she arrives, begins to plan her ascent up the social ladder. As a woman, (legal) marriage is the way forward: Mackenzie was a steady man. If she married him, she could become a member of a church. That would mean a definite rise in the social scale; her respectability would then be beyond challenge, beyond question. The ring on her finger would be the outward and visible sign of her right to respectful treatment on earth below, and also the promise of an uninterrupted passage to heaven in the unfortunate event of death. (192) Whereas there were significant fines for living with a woman on the canal without being legally joined (Fredrick 2005), the men in the novel are also spurred by a variety of reasons, but marriage does not operate as a tool for upward mobility in the same way. Rather, to distinguish themselves in a space where blacks are lumped together into a homogenous group, they assert their status as British subjects. As Jones insists: "But if a black man go ther an' just say he is a British subject, they do anything for him. They love him, y'u know, because he is born under the British flag." Where few would be able to distinguish Bajan from Jamaican, and in the presence of a burgeoning American imperialism, claiming British subjecthood proved strategic. Whereas, as we have seen, there are those who genuinely espoused the British identity, some were becoming aware, as Mackenzie jokes, that West Indians were more of British objects than subjects. The violence inflicted upon Caribbeans during the duration of empire bears out Mackenzie's suggestion (Beckles 1998), and even in Panama, industrial imperialism left its mark physically on the bodies of isthmian workers, as is the case of Poyah in Walrond's story, as well as altered their ways of seeing