A crocodile skull with empty eye sockets and dagger teeth grins ghoulishly at us amidst flip flops, plastic sprite bottles and styrofoam peanuts. I drag my nine year old son away from the dead crabs and dried coconut husks towards the penitentiary on Isla Coiba off the Pacific coast of Panamá which once housed murderers, rapists, and my uncle, Tío Javier.

She’s come for me. My soul, in the body of a firefly, hovers above the prison graves watching my niece, Lucrecita Irene, climb the hill towards the dilapidated prison cell where I survived for two years from 1968-1970. What does she want? We used to be close when she was a child. Then she turned into one of those hippie Americans and refused to listen to my advice about how to be a proper Panamanian woman. She has a child with her, not the older one, who I met many years before, but another one who tugs her shirt begging her to help him split open a coconut. 

I lived in the Panama Canal Zone until I was nearly twelve, where I was entrenched in U.S. history and told by subtle and obvious means by my Panamanian mami, my American father, the American schools that I attended, and the media that my Panamanian history was irrelevant. And I believed this until I was sixteen, when I met Marina, a green eyed Argentinian exchange student at my Wisconsin high school who gifted me The House of the Spirits/ La Casa de Los Espiritus by Isabel Allende.

Clara, the clairvoyant matriarch, Esteban Trueba, the violent landowning master and senator, Rosa with green hair and scaly skin who turned into a mermaid upon death, Barrabas, the mangy beast who arrived by the sea in a cage, and Alba, the lucky grandchild who was born feet first inhabited my world. They were ghosts from an unnamed Latin American country that felt tangible, magical, and familiar. And if their stories were important and entertaining, then the stories of my Panamanian family might be as well.

At the prison cemetery, she scribbles in a black and white composition book as the National Park guard describes the history of the prison built in 1919. I flutter above her trying to get her attention. But she’s busy taking notes about how the prisoners who died on the island were never released, even in death, until they fulfilled their sentence. We prisoners never dared to escape. Sharks, crocodiles, and venomous snakes were our wardens.

At nineteen, I questioned my mami about our family’s history. She had often told me stories about her magical childhood at the base of a volcano shrouded in mist. She told me about the tortillas they fried, the Salsa songs they sang on the porch at night, and about the dresses her mother sewed. But until that day she had never told me about the years when her brothers were arrested for their political beliefs. Nor had she ever told me that the CIA intervened in Panamanian politics again and again, putting military dictators in power. They weren’t stories for a child. Yet the ghosts of our past lingered over her and seeped into me.

  Tears roll down her face as she stands in the concrete cell the size of her living room. The National Park Guard recounts that twenty of us slept packed together, dripping sweat on one another. We often woke up screaming in terror from our nightmares, our illnesses, and our infections. When the police arrested me they shot me in the foot and one of their dogs bit me. At least they didn’t throw me out of a helicopter into the ocean for the sharks to eat like they did to one of my cousins. Then there were the unseen scars: cigarette burns on my chest and nightmares of being dunked in ice water baths again and again, while the prison guards taunted me to reveal secrets about the resistance party. I never shared these stories with Lucrecita Irene. She learned all this from her cousins—the Panamanian ones who lived nearby.

Like Alba, from The House of the Spirits, Tío Javier was UN DESAPARECIDO— A DISAPPEARED ONE. He was picked up by the Panamamian dictator’s henchmen and jailed for his beliefs. At sixteen, no one had told me about my Tío Javier’s history. But I must have sensed it while reading The House of the Spirits, for the book made a home inside me.

  When the prison tour has finished, her son, convinces the National Park guards to split  his coconuts open with a machete. They eat monkey fruit beside the house where the dictator, Noriega used to stay. Then they wade through the waves back to the boat. Before she climbs the ladder, she stares at the island and whispers to herself or maybe it is me that she is speaking to? “I will tell your story—our story. I will tell your story. I will tell your story—our story.” Her promise reverberates inside me and my firefly form shines bright as I flutter and flash signaling to her that I see her. I hear her. I miss her as much as she misses me. She waves a hand. Then climbs into the boat back to the land of the living. But she will be back.    

My own ghosts who had been whispering to me my whole life began rattling around insisting that I tell their stories. And with their help, I found beauty and magic amidst the ugly and the brutal. Like Clara the Clairvoyant and her granddaughter Alba, the fortunate one, who began their story like this “Barrabas came to us by sea,” my story begins with: A crocodile skull with empty eye sockets and dagger teeth grins ghoulishly at us.

Pages on the Tongue-Episode 4: “The Yellow Diamond Is Not the Gem” with Michelle Murray on Pages on the Tongue Podcast Episode 4 (December 2024)

“The Panamanian Pollera” Legacies: Whatcom Writes 2024 Anthology of Stories and Poems. Borderline Press (2024)

“Elephant’s Head” https://amazon.com/Science-Imagination-stories-Falconer-Museum/dp/1916572995 Science and Imagination: True Stories from the Falconer Museum. Christaine H. Friauf. Friends of the Falconer Museum. (July 11, 2024)

“Chocolate, Coffee, and Banana” Interconnectedness: An anthology of stories and poetry in honor of Greenwood by Michael Christie. Borderline Press. (2020)