UNITED STATES—I feel guilty about some of the things we did. All we cared about was dividends. Well, we can’t do business that way today. We have learned that what’s best for the countries we operate in is the best for the company. Maybe we can’t make the people love us, I’d be happy with them putting up with us, and we will make ourselves so useful to them that they will want us to stay. And try to disentangle our good deeds from the bad.
These are the words of a card shark at dawn who realizes that the power has shifted, the pictures on the face cards have lost their meaning. The boss was at the mercy of the will of the people and historical forces, which had barely figured in Sam’s calculations. And it was too late, too late. Even as he had collected affectionate monickers, El Ruso, El Gringo, Black Irish and dearest of all El Amigo.
As a man, Sam was admired, even revered—thanks to his love for Honduras. As the boss of Allied Fruit, he was abhorred, even years after the company he knew ceased to exist, the dictator Héctor Sánchez was still denouncing El Pulpo, the Octopus. Octopus if you cut it up can be quite succulent. Octopupusas.
Many books give short shrift to Sam Delaney, though I was the body and brains of Allied Fruit Corporation for thirty years, a lifetime in the corporate world. He is mentioned in passing as a colorful swashbuckling character who once ruled banana land as Jeroboam once ruled the Kingdom of Israel. And built the first temple. His seal appears on ancient coins buried in the ruins. In the popular imagination, Delaney succeeded in separating his legacy from the toxic residue of Allied Fruit. An amazing feat. It’s as if the company founded by Sturgis, Baker and Keene were a Frankenstein that, once set loose, gobbled up everything in its way, including Sam the Banana Man.
In my final years I liked to walk in Audubon Park, or linger in the cafés in the French Quarter. I was an old man with my buttermilk and Times-Picayune.
”How do you stand drinking that crap, Sam,” his old friend Joey asked.
“It’s what makes me happy.”
“It tastes like horse diarrhea.”
“It’s good for bones, teeth and blood pressure.”
I stood on the wharf watching the Mississippi River as the evening came slowly came, a shade of gray and blue at a time. I stood mesmerized by the mirror surface was scintillated by shiny green curls and blue curls. The lights flickered on in Algiers, where African slaves were once kept in chains. Sam’s Parkinsonism got worse. He was nothing but tremor and way shy of the six-foot-three he once stood. The planet was trying to shake him off. His thoughts were clouded.
He had lived so long and done so much and now he was weary. He had huge hands that became huge fists which he brought down on the table when he was frustrated and frustrated by not being able to get out the words that came into my head. The hands were the thing that remained big and he shrank closer to earth.
The thought was there but he couldn’t dig it out of mushy lips and cloudy brain. Goddarn it, Becky, is this how it’s going to be.
He went to bed early and slept in. He was a burnt-out champion horse. He wore frayed khaki trousers. He tried to keep up with things; he got faint wind that a president had been killed. Shame. Sam would have been amused to know, that because of his dark legacy in the isthmus, and the NOLA wont of conspiracy, that he would one day be credited in one theory with cooking up the death of the young Irish president with whom I felt a kinship via the bond of mutual Irish surname.
It is easy, if you close your eyes in New Orleans as the rains drum on the roof, you feel as if you’re back om the jungle or gliding down the mangrove swamps, boating over lagoons, on the first day of your career, and this time you will do it all right…Sam with his total drive toward health, still thought he could battle it.
In the Times-Picayune he had read that the secret to a robust health avoidance to the long hunt for the lost idea, and traipse right over the pitfall reaction that comes from trying to hold onto the quest for that name or word, instead of glide peacefully into clear empty heaven he was seeing more of, as the clouds of lucidity waned. And it became a muddle, he could use a drink on the isthmus, he could.
And yet Sam didn’t want to meet his maker that way, either.
When Sam Delaney was old, Sam Jr.’s children moved into the house at 2 Audubon Place, where they were raised by a nanny. Sam was always proud that his house was open for friends in need or family that might be passing through. Sam did not know his grandchildren well. One day he banged on the door to Sam III’s room with his cane. The guy who consorted with Machine Gun Kelly and General Smedley Butler, born in the mirror year of 1881.
The boy stood in the threshold, Sam studied him and then asked, “What’s your favorite sport?”
“Lacrosse,” was Sam Delaney III’s reply.
“What religion are you, anyway?”
“Espiscopalian,” said the girl, Becky.
Delaney turned on his heel and went down the stairs, muttering to himself. He realized that the children had been bleached, that they would be prone to commit all the errors of this ethnicity without ethnicity that is whiteness is prone to: they would be free to colonize outer space and ruin it…The Anglos always want more, more, more, Sam didn’t want it, it was just that God himself, Jehovah, simply gave him a good view of where the money was hidden: in plain sight. In the end Sam traded his ancient Jewish heritage for a place in the upper reaches of the establishment.
But Sam wasn’t going to be ungrateful. Ingratitude was a great sin.
To be continued…
