It was then and there,
though it still lacked an hour of noon, that I ceased to be a
census enumerator. With slow and deliberate step I climbed out of
the canal and across a pathed field to Bas Obispo and, sitting
down in the shade of her station, patiently awaited the train that
would carry me back to Empire.
Four thousand, six hundred and seventy-seven Zone residents had I
enrolled during those six weeks. Something over half of these were
Jamaicans. Of the states Pennsylvania was best represented.
Martinique negroes, Greeks, Spaniards, and Panamanians were some
eighty per cent illiterate; of some three hundred of the first
only a half dozen even claimed to read and write; and non-wedlock
was virtually universal among them.
Rumor has it that there are seventy-two separate states and
dependencies represented on the Isthmus. My own cards showed a few
less. Most conspicuous absences, besides American negroes, were
natives of Honduras, of four countries of South America, of most
of Africa, and of entire Australia. That this was largely due to
chance was shown by the fact that my fellow-enumerators found
persons from all these countries.
I had enrolled persons born in the following places: All the
United States except three or four states in the far northwest;
Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica,
Panama, Canal Zone, Colombia, Venezuela, British Guiana
(Demarara), French and Dutch Guiana, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and
Chile, Cuba, Hayti and Santo Domingo, Jamaica, Barbados, St.
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