47 pages • 1 hour read
Cristina HenríquezThe Great Divide
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racism, enslavement, and baby loss.
Somewhere in the Pacific coastal waters of Panama, Francisco Aquino sits alone in his boat. He built the boat with his own hands from one large tree trunk. He has been a fisherman for many years, and in addition to his boatbuilding skills, he is knowledgeable about the ocean and its contents. On this particular morning, he is waiting for the right moment to cast his nets. As he waits patiently, he contemplates the idea of a canal. He has heard talk that there are plans to blast through the mountains that run through central Panama in order to allow ships to pass through from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic. He finds this idea preposterous.
Chapter 2 Summary
The Royal Mail boat eases into the port of Colón on the Atlantic side of Panama. Ada Bunting, a 16-year-old girl from Barbados, snuck aboard the ship dressed in men’s clothing to blend in with the mostly male passengers, all from various ports in the Caribbean. Ada had slipped out of her house before dawn, leaving her mother a note in a spot where she knew it would be seen. Ada manages to sneak away from the ship unseen by the crew and quickly boards a train. After receiving unwanted attention from one of the men standing near her, Ada hastily exits at the next stop and makes a camp in the woods. The next morning, she vows to find work and send a letter to her mother as soon as possible. She’d heard that there was ample work available in Panama and hopes to find a position soon. She uses one of her few coins to buy a piece of fruit from a vendor and sets off in search of a job.
Chapter 3 Summary
This chapter is set eight months before Ada Bunting arrived in Panama. John and Marian Oswald leave their home in Tennessee and board a United Fruit Company steamer in New Orleans, also bound for Panama. Their journey is difficult for Marian in particular. She is seasick for nearly the entire voyage. When the couple arrives on the Panamanian shore, they are greeted by what they think is a dismal sight: The area is largely undeveloped and the humid, fetid air makes her even more nauseated. John was summoned to the country for work. He is to oversee the Board of Health’s laboratories, with the goal of eradicating malaria. John is the youngest son of a wealthy family, and he inherited an important position in the lumber business outside of Knoxville. He is, however, interested in tropical diseases and is keen to study the relationship between mosquitos and malaria. Their marriage, 10 years old already, has been difficult. John has always seemed uninterested in Marian, and the two are not close. Intimacy never came easily to John and Marian, and after months of trying to conceive followed by a miscarriage, the sex stopped entirely. Although John is happy to talk to Marian and is especially interested in her opinions on scientific matters, Marian cannot help but feel that there is no love between the two. Additionally, John struggles socially both at home and in Panama. Marian is not entirely happy in Panama either. She feels stifled by her marriage and is often trapped inside due to weather. John worries that she will be bitten by a disease-carrying mosquito and urges her to stay inside during the rainy season—fully half of each year.
Chapter 4 Summary
Down the hill from the town of Empire where the Oswalds live, work continues on the Panama Canal. Workers have been imported from all over the world, and they work ceaselessly from sunrise to sundown. The labor is backbreaking, and the men are often bruised and battered at day’s end. Omar Aquino, a 17-year-old, is one of the laborers on the canal. Omar’s father, Francisco, a fisherman, had kept his son home from school as a boy so that he could learn how to fish. Francisco had been bitterly disappointed when he’d first taken his son out on his boat, and the boy had been terrified and uncomfortable. When Omar obtained his position on the canal work crew, Francisco had once again been unhappy with his son. He was opposed to the canal and was chagrined that Omar would have chosen to work on the project. There are many Americans employed on the canal project, but like Omar’s foreman, Miller, they are usually the men in charge rather than the men doing the heavy work. On this particular morning, Omar is working diligently and takes a break only to drink the quinine provided to stave off malaria.
Chapter 5 Summary
Ada’s mother, Lucille, is at home in Barbados, trying to write a letter. She grew up on a sugar estate. The estate had been owned by the same white family, and worked by the same Black families, for generations. After enslavement had been abolished, many of the formerly enslaved men and women had chosen to stay on, working small plots of land on their own. Lucille had been able to attend a small school, and because of her sewing skills had been tasked with crafting uniforms for the domestic workers. She’d had a clandestine relationship with Henry, the son of the plantation owners, and her children, Millicent and Ada, were the product of their union. Because of the favoritism that he showed Lucille and her children’s light skin, their relationship was an open secret. Lucille chose to leave the estate and made a life for herself and her children, making sure that they had access to education and teaching them to sew. She’d been upset when Ada had left, and she still was not sure what to write in her letter to her daughter.
Chapter 6 Summary
Ada is walking along the main street in Empire. She recalls her sister Millicent’s recent illness: a bout of pneumonia that left her with fluid on her lungs. Just before Ada left home, her mother had been in the process of arranging for Millicent to undergo surgery. Lost in thought, Ada stumbles into a crowd. A man is lying sick on the street, and no one wants to assist him, because they fear contagion. Ada enlists the help of two nearby men, and together they transport the sick man to a hospital train. Unbeknownst to Ada, she was observed during this encounter by a white man in a linen suit. He approaches her and asks why she hadn’t been afraid of falling ill herself, and she responds that she has faith that the Lord will keep her safe. He asks her why she is in Panama, and when she responds that she is there looking for work, he tells her that he has a job for her.
Chapter 7 Summary
Omar has not been home in days, which Francisco finds unusual. Although their relationship is strained and the two rarely speak to each other, Omar’s schedule is usually predictable. Francisco brings his catch to the fish market and chats with Joaquín, one of the market workers. He recalls attempting to teach Omar to fish and reflects on how difficult fatherhood has been for him. He’d met Esme, Omar’s mother, when he was 23. He was instantly struck by her dark eyes and brooding beauty, and he’d immediately asked her name. She was initially unresponsive to his advances, but eventually she came around. The two were married, but their relationship was stormy. Esme was prone to mood swings and emotional volatility. She’d been happy during her pregnancy though, and Francisco hoped that the tide had finally turned. After Omar’s birth, however, Esme sank into a deep depression. One morning, she vanished in the boat, leaving Francisco alone with his son.
Chapter 8 Summary
Omar wakes shivering in the hospital, unsure of how or when he’d arrived there. He recalls having been on a walk, seeing a bakery, and then losing consciousness. He feels hot and cold at the same time and cannot move. He thinks back to his childhood, recalling being taught to read by a woman named Doña Ruiz using books of poetry and a bilingual bible. Later, he’d learned English while running errands for Doña Ruiz in town. The doctor on call at the hospital knows Omar has malaria, but there is little that he can do other than give him quinine. He hopes that John Oswald will be able to solve the malaria problem in the same way that yellow fever was eradicated in Havana. From what he has heard of the man, the doctor thinks that Oswald just might be up to the task.
Chapters 1-8 Analysis
This first set of chapters introduces several of the novel’s primary characters and begins to develop its politics of identity and place. Through Francisco, Cristina Henríquez foregrounds the lived experience of everyday Panamanians rather than the powerbrokers of the canal project. Through Ada Bunting, she also begins to explore the complexities of Racism and the Legacy of Enslavement. John and Marian’s marriage highlights both the imperialistic nature of outsider involvement in Panama and the need for women’s empowerment that in some way characterizes each of the text’s female characters. Omar’s story provides insight into the lives of the men and women who actually built the canal. Through the way that each of these figures interacts with various spaces, Henríquez paints a portrait of the various forces that shaped Panamanian history in the 20th century through an anti-imperialist and feminist lens.
Francisco’s story begins the novel. Many histories of the Panama Canal have been written, but most have focused on the geopolitical factors that shaped its construction and on the “important” men who were in charge of various stages of the project. Henríquez set out to write a people’s history, one that highlights various groups of individuals who lived and worked in Panama during the years surrounding the construction of the canal. Francisco, a local fisherman with a keen eye toward the way that both European and American imperialism shaped his country, is therefore the first focal point. Because the story begins with a Panamanian rather than foreign character, it is immediately clear that this novel will approach Panamanian history with an eye toward everyday locals rather than affluent outsiders.
Ada Bunting’s character is significant for the way that she speaks to countless young men and women like her in early 20th-century Central American and Caribbean spaces. She is presented initially through the strength of her will and determination and through her independent spirit. She is perfectly happy to sneak aboard a boat bound for a country she has never visited to help her family. However, Henríquez also constructs Ada to explore Racism and the Legacy of Enslavement. Ada is the biracial daughter of a Black mother and a wealthy, white planter. She thus represents a cultural phenomenon that was common in the Americas during the years of enslavement and the decades that followed. She experiences greater acceptance because her skin is lighter than her mother’s, but she always bears the stigma of being the product of the kind of interracial relationship that, although commonplace, was deeply taboo.
John and Marian are the only characters in the novel who represent the protagonists of white-dominated histories of the Panama Canal. They are white, wealthy, and John holds a position of power within the region. His work in public health is very much in service of the canal project because he is trying to eradicate malaria, a disease that plagues the canal workers. Nevertheless, without the presence of the canal project, the United States would not have had a vested interest in tropical disease management, and so his very presence in the country has imperialist connotations. Furthermore, the town where much of the canal work is being completed is named Empire. The name speaks to the nature of US-Panama relations. The narrator notes that “the town of empire was at the highest point of the canal route, roughly midway between the Pacific ocean and the Atlantic” (27). This position, too, is symbolic: Empire, the town that is a bastion of (white) progress in the region, as at the highest point of the isthmus. John embodies the United States’s imperialist project, but Marian is also an important character with interests of her own. A trained botanist and an unhappy wife, Marian resents her relegation to the space of the home. Each of the female characters in this novel embody strength in some way, and Marian’s politics align with the goals of first-wave feminism. She wants to be defined as something other than a wife and matches her husband in intelligence and education.
Omar is also a key figure, and as the only person in the novel directly employed in the labor-intensive construction on the canal itself, he is a synecdoche for the kind of individual whose story has been largely lost within white-dominated histories of the Panama Canal. He was one of thousands of such workers, and Henríquez notes that “[t]hey poured in on labor trains” and “[f]rom sunrise, to sundown, they opened the earth” (35). She represents this work as brutal, grueling, and exploitive. When portraying this work, she also creates in Omar a complex character. He does not end up on the canal crew out of desperation but rather out of a desire for community. He: “wanted to meet other people. He wanted something meaningful to do every day” (37). Like many of the other figures in the novel, Omar is social and community-oriented. He seeks out meaningful connection among his fellow workers and does not begin to question the goals of the Panama Canal project until much later in the novel when he joins the protest in Gatún.
Through Henríquez’s initial depictions of Panama, it becomes apparent in these chapters that it is being used by outsiders for political and commercial gain, and The Negative Impacts of Imperialism becomes a thematic focal point. Foreigners like John Oswald see the country as a swampy backwater and view it positively only in so far as it has begun to develop from an imperialist, capitalist perspective. They fail to see the beauty and cohesion of Panamanian society and view the land itself solely as a resource. Panama is dear to Panamanians because it is their home, but it is valued by outsiders only for its potential to become a source of profit.
