Miller Time

Banana Yellow (90)

UNITED STATES—In the jungle pervaded a smell of coconut oil. There were plenty of morenos, many black as starless night. The train, followed by a plume of black smoke. Sometimes there’d be like raindrops from the sky or a hot cinder thrown off from the train’s forward advance. Antonio had seen a man blinded that way. He still had...

Banana Yellow (81)

UNITED STATES—Sam early on discovered one of the secrets of his success. He could not fret over what he could not control. He'd be politely reading, even in advanced age this invisible eminence who was flattered by his friends' indifference to his earthly achievements. He would see a lady with a baby stroller struggling with the door during the...

Banana Yellow (74)

UNITED STATES—When a fatality as final and conflated as that which occurs, a void descends upon a family. A home, a blank wall which gets sealed with a photo of the one who was taken. There will be a wall festooned with many photos from the football fields and the plantation hot springs, and especially those polished studio photographs...

Banana Yellow (65)

UNITED STATES—Graydon Miller rarely came out of the jungle, both imagined and utterly real in its warm, humid embrace. Only for the sake of the work-in progress would Miller take a walk around the block. You know, Finnegan’s Wake was panned when finally published in 1939 and had first appeared in the Little Review as “Fragments of a Work-in-progress”...

Banana Yellow (63)

UNITED STATES—No sooner had the Fiji fungus been retarded than a new plant threat emerged. It was as if creation itself in this bounteous hemisphere along the banana axis could not afford to sit still. It infected the earth, it started with the roots and then went up the elephant stem. All the canopy of elephant ear leaves above...

Banana Yellow (62)

UNITED STATES—Someone managed to sing without a guitar. They sang to deafen their ears to the approaching whirlwind. The access streets to the plaza were blocked. There were warning shots fired though the heads of the leaders. In the cavernous middle of the Great Depression, over 100,000 workers from 30 separate unions declared the Great Banana Strike. Involved were seven...

Banana Yellow (58)

UNITED STATES—It was not the “constitution” per se that got Allied Fruit Co. back up again and going. It was the energy behind the policies. It was a new deal, and the new deal was an old deal, going back to the lean and small Chamelecón Co. format, the minnow that swallowed the whale of Allied; it was a...

Banana Yellow (55)

UNITED STATES—After the Delaney’s second tenure, the company gradually but steadily slid in till the year Richard Nixon ran for president, the new Nixon (thank you Bernard Lukasey, the public relations wiz manipulator extraordinaire) who said there were indeed some people he would not work for, including Hitler, whose people had sought to contract him, but Nixon he didn’t...

Banana Yellow (49)

UNITED STATES—The advertising wiz Bernard Lukasey deftly spurned overtures from Hitler’s people to do work for the Fuhrer. It became a calling card that he had some scruples. On the other hand, Bernie did advise Willy Long, and he later came to rue his undeniable role in the creation of the King of Louisiana. “You have to ditch the bib...

Banana Yellow (47)

UNITED STATES—You to be over 50. By then you know tempus fugit; time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana. Sam Delaney, unlike so many of his corporate peers, always saw himself more in the worker role than in management, more in the striver than the Kingfish. The Kingfish was an entrepreneur and organizer, more outspoken...