The ship had been eleven days out of Bridgetown. By the sixth day, Ida Broome had stopped counting the ones who were sick over the rail and started counting the ones who weren't. There were fewer of those every morning. She kept the number in her head the way she'd been taught to keep a fever chart: quietly, exactly, without comment to anyone who hadn't asked.
Steerage held perhaps three hundred people, by her own rough count, packed into a hold that had been built, she suspected, for cargo rather than passengers and only lightly amended to hold both. The smell down there settled into her clothes within the first two days and never fully left them again. Coal smoke from somewhere below the waterline, salt, and unwashed bodies packed too close together, in heat that did not break even after dark. Beneath all of it, persistent, the specific sour note of seasickness that no amount of swabbing could lift from the boards.
She had brought, in her canvas satchel, a small bottle of ginger tincture her mother had pressed on her at the dock. She rationed it out in careful spoonfuls to the children nearest her berth. No one had asked her to nurse them. Her hands simply did not know how to sit idle in the presence of suffering she had the training to ease, even a little.
At night the hold filled with sound in a way the daylight hours never matched. A baby crying itself hoarse, three berths down. An old man coughing in a rhythm Ida had begun, by the fourth night, to time against her own pulse, out of pure professional habit. Under all of it, the low, constant conversation of people rehearsing, out loud and to no one in particular, what they expected to find at the other end of the crossing. Some of them had brothers already established on the Isthmus, sending back money and letters full of careful, edited optimism. Some of them had nothing waiting for them at all, beyond a contract number and a promise of wages that sounded, repeated aloud in the dark, both enormous and suspiciously vague.
She had imagined, crossing, that the hard part would be the crossing.
Colón came up out of the haze looking less like a harbor than like a wound the land hadn't finished healing. Ships stood at anchor for a mile in every direction. Smoke stood over the town in a color she didn't have a word for yet. Beyond the wharves, a green so thick and so close it seemed to be leaning down to look at the new arrivals.
Two hundred and eleven of them off this one boat alone, she'd heard the purser say. Mostly men. Mostly headed to the works. A scatter of women had come as wives, or as cooks, or, like her, with a nursing certificate from the General Hospital in Bridgetown; hers was folded into a canvas satchel, along with two changes of clothes and a small tin box that had belonged to her mother.
The gangway, when it finally lowered, discharged the ship's passengers into a heat that struck her as a physical event rather than a mere temperature. A wet weight settled immediately across her shoulders, and it made the eleven days below decks feel, in retrospect, almost merciful by comparison. Around her, men who had crossed with nothing more than a bundle of clothes and a Bible shouldered their belongings. They fell into a ragged line, moving toward a low building at the head of the wharf. Ida followed the same current, because there was nowhere else obvious to go, and found herself swept along with them before she had fully decided to move.
The hiring shed disabused her of any remaining notion that the hard part was behind her. It was a long, low building, roofed in corrugated iron that caught the morning sun and threw it back doubled. It was divided, she understood before anyone told her so, by a rope strung waist-high down the center of the room. On one side of the rope stood perhaps thirty people, white, mostly men in linen suits gone soft with the heat. They were being processed at a counter with two clerks and a ceiling fan turning overhead. On the other side of the rope stood everyone who had come off Ida's ship, and the ship before it, and the one docking now behind them. Three hundred deep, in a line that did not move so much as accumulate, under no fan at all.
"Gold Roll," said the woman ahead of her, not turning around, when she saw Ida looking at the rope. "That's the gold side. We're silver." She said it the way a person explains a fact of weather, not injustice, only the shape of the day.
"Silver," Ida repeated, testing it.
"Silver pay, silver houses, silver hospital if you're sick enough to need one," the woman said. "Same work. Different words for it." She had a Barbadian accent thickened by something Ida couldn't place yet, a woman who had perhaps already done one contract here and come back for a second. "You'll learn the words fast enough. Everybody does."
"How many words are there to learn?"
"More than you'd think, for two colors," the woman said, and something in her mouth twitched, short of a smile. "Silver commissary. Silver church pew, if the priest's from home and knows to keep it separate without being told." She shifted her weight. "Silver line at the paymaster's window. Silver line for the doctor, too, if you're fortunate enough that the fever waits its turn behind the line." She shifted her own bundle to her other hip. The line ahead of them had advanced perhaps four feet in the time they'd been speaking. "You'll have all of it memorized inside a month, and you'll stop hearing it as strange inside two. That's the part nobody warns you about. Not the rope. Getting used to the rope."
