Word: cottone
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...what Cornell and Minnie Wolf thought 34 years ago when they boarded the "Southern Comfort Special" in Albany, Ga., bound for Newark and a better life. Cornell, a hulking, powerful man who never got past the third grade, had toiled on the "bossman's" plantation picking beans, peanuts and cotton from can't-see in the morning until can't-see at night. Like thousands of Southern blacks, he had heard stories about those high-paying Northern jobs, those red brick Northern houses, and at 22 decided to take his 19-year-old wife and their three children...
...reflected lights of Panama City dance impishly on the waters of the bay as Lucho Azcarraga and his band play Auld Lang Syne at Fred Cotton's farewell party on the grounds of the Amador Officer's Club. There are more than 250 guests, nearly all of them middle-aged and conspicuously American, wearing colorful shirts and dresses, Hawaiian leis draped around their necks. Azcarraga's pudgy fingers are surprisingly agile on the organ keyboard as he pumps out the Scottish farewell. But then they should be. Although he is over 70, he plays this tune quite often. Most...
Farewells are perhaps hardest of all for people like Cotton, whose ties go back to the beginning, when the canal was still an American dream. His greatgrandparents were railroad folks from New Jersey who came to Panama in 1905, the year after the U.S. under President Theodore Roosevelt began digging. Cotton's grandparents married in Panama, and his mother was born in a construction town...
...Cotton himself was born 51 years ago in Colon, at the northern end of the 51-mile-long canal. "Born and raised here, right alongside the canal, and so were my kids," he says. "It is tough to say goodbye when you are fourth generation...
...joined the original Panama Canal Company in 1962 and later served as civil affairs director, a kind of mayor for the whole zone. Anti-Americanism occasionally turned ugly in the years leading up to the signing of the historic agreement. Cotton was a leading opponent of the treaties, earning him the enmity of many Panamanians and the respect of large numbers of his fellow Americans. "It was a period of great trauma," he now says simply. "When people lost their jobs, they lost their way of life. Emotions ran pretty high...