TWO MONTHS INTO LOSING both of my parents, I felt an urgency to leave. I needed to be in a place that still felt like theirs. I left my home in Compton, California, and traveled to their home country, Panama. It was my first trip there without either of them in the world to guide me, to make sure I arrived safe. My uncle, my father’s brother, now the eldest living sibling, explained that I was running to a familiar place to deal with an unfamiliar grief.
For the first time, I visited the Museo Afroantillano de Panamá, or West Indian Museum of Panama. Established in 1980, almost 70 years after the completion of the Panama Canal, and supported by the community’s Sociedad de Amigos del Museo Afroantillano de Panamá, the museum formally honored the West Indian labor force that made the construction of the canal possible. Housed in a former single-room church, it held artifacts, books and display boards that corrected the historically underreported numbers of workers and deaths and grounded them with first-hand accounts. The rear of the museum was divided into three spaces — a bedroom, lavatory and dining area — set up to mirror the typical homes of the workers and their families, adorned with reminders that they were more than the labor that brought them there. I recognized the furnishings and decorative items, washboard and oil-wicked
