Traveling with Sugar. Amy Moran-Thomas

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СКАЧАТЬ and space have no meaning in a canefield,” Jean Toomer wrote in Cane.¹⁰ If efforts to enclose sugar in time and space often seemed to unleash further misrecognitions, I thought from Libertad, then I wanted to try following its wild entwinings instead. Somehow that sugar factory’s feral filing cabinet became a helpful mental image for me as I gathered together the notes for this chapter, a container to temporarily order these bits of sugar’s far-flung histories.

      More intense stories of “sweetness and death”¹¹ elsewhere in time and place shaped how people ended up living where I met them. On Saint Vincent, sugarcane had become especially symbolic of Garifuna people’s struggle to preserve their ancestral homelands at the end of the eighteenth century. As Paul Johnson notes: “Though never laboring as slaves, the Black Caribs lived under the continual threat of enslavement, and very much within the expanding sugar plantation system.”¹² Legendary freedom fighters of what historian Julius Scott illuminates as the “masterless Caribbean,”¹³ Garifuna fighters set fire to sugar fields to combat encroaching British settlers. Sugar’s potent symbolism reached such a point that during one war, Garifuna leaders found it fitting for plantation overseers to meet their end “crushed between the cylinders of a sugar mill, the symbol of British greed for Carib land.”¹⁴

      Nearly two thousand miles away, in the mainland territory that later became Belize, commercial plantations were legally prohibited by the Spanish during the colony’s early history.¹⁵ Kriol people like Sarah descended from the enslaved families in Belize who once worked in logging, but were still caught and sold within a broader regional system founded on sugar markets. Most who ended up in Belize were traded through markets of the sugar islands, primarily Jamaica and Bermuda; some labored on sugar plantations elsewhere in the Caribbean before arriving in Belize City.¹⁶ Creating dependence on economies of imported food became integral to control within the logging camps of Belize, especially rationing sugar.

      Farther north along the border between Belize and the Mexican Yucatán, sugarcane became a key crop that Maya laborers were forced to grow on encomienda plantations¹⁷ and also an instrument of control and even torture. Thomas Gann gives the example of a “well-known merchant” in Bacalar known to punish Maya servants, “for no very serious offense,” by shaving their heads and burying them up to their necks in the island’s hot sand; “their heads were then smeared with molasses and the victims were left to the ants” to be eaten alive.¹⁸

      When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, colonial strategies initially favored capturing Indigenous peoples from the Americas and bringing them east to provide labor on sugar plantations in the Canary Islands. Sugar was used to ply local inhabitants and sow discord, as one chronicler on the third voyage of Columbus recalled when greeting the first Taíno boats: “I gave hawks’ bells and beads and sugar. . . . after they knew the good treatment, all wished to come to the ships.”¹⁹

      While colonial strategies for both labor extraction and cane plantations’ locations shifted dramatically in the face of subsequent epidemics, sugar continued to impact Indigenous populations of the Americas in a more subtle way than the better-known plantation histories of the Caribbean. Though sugar was often less of a key export (outside Brazil), mainland sugar plantations across Latin America provided a central source of funding for Jesuits and other missionaries focused on capturing Indian souls. They financed large-scale conversion enterprises largely by growing and selling sugarcane within what became the countries of Mexico, Peru, and Paraguay, among others.²⁰ Colonial and military projects of all kinds were indispensably funded and amplified by such sugarcane profits, giving rise to the axiom “Without sugar, no colonies.”²¹

      Sugarcane distillation laboratories also became sites for refining racial classifications of the era.²² On conquistador Hernán Cortés’s cane plantation in Mexico, which helped fund his later military expeditions across Central America, efforts to make sugar “emerge perfectly purged and whitened” were key to its market value. Some 90 percent of the sugar emerged in shades of brown, deemed low-value prieta—the same name people with dark skin still get called in that part of Mexico today. After boiled sugar was transferred with a “shoe-like scoop” for settling into sugarloaf molds, darker molasses leaking from the open bottom of the sugar cone was declared “poorly purged sugar [and] removed with a knife.” Once severed, sugar’s “foot form was separated from the rest to be returned to the purging house,” the name of the building where sugar was whitened.²³ The foot of the sugar cone often accumulated heavy metals and other toxicants from the distilling machinery and collected any debris from the vats, at times including (as Edwidge Danticat notes) blood and bodily matter from laborers’ injuries.²⁴ It was fed to enslaved people and horses.²⁵

      The English word “amputate” came from the Latin root amputare, meaning to trim plants or cut off the limbs of trees. Somewhere in the late 1500s or early 1600s, the word began to also mean cutting off human limbs.

      “Sugar was a murderous commodity,” Vincent Brown observes of the patterns of its violence during that era. Plantations functioned through “symbolics of mutilation,” powered by people “who were themselves consumed” by sugar production.²⁶ Many enslaved families were forced to live in houses with roofs of thatched cane tassels.²⁷ “When we work at the sugar-canes, and the mill snatches hold of a finger, they cut off the hand; and when we attempt to run away, they cut off the leg,” an enslaved character from Suriname famously describes in Voltaire’s Candide.²⁸ In Black Jacobins, C. L. R James describes how some enslaved individuals were forced to wear a “tin-plate mask designed to prevent the slave [from] eating the sugarcane” in the fields.²⁹

      Historian Sir Hilary Beckles notes that the disembodiments related to diabetes therefore have especially discomforting resonance in Caribbean and Latin American regions today, as places long known for these trademark injuries of sugar are again called “the amputation capital of the world. It is here that the stress profile of slavery and racial apartheid; dietary disaster and psychological trauma; and addiction to the consumption of sugar and salt, have reached their highest peak. The country is now host to the world’s most virulent diabetes and hypertension epidemic. [The British] parliament owes the people of Barbados an education and health initiative.”³⁰

      Beckles, whose enslaved great-grandparents were owned by the ancestors of actor Benedict Cumberbatch, opens his book with homage to those Garifuna and other Kalinago and Maroon peoples who managed to elude plantation captivity and share sanctuary with others, honoring their “principal contribution to the freedom traditions of the Caribbean.”³¹ But he also wrestles with the legacy of those like his own ancestors in Barbados, who either could not escape to nearby Saint Vincent or tried and were apprehended in their journey.

      Left: Enslaved man who had his leg cut off for running away. Right: Debilitation device meant to prevent slaves from escaping, c. 1697.

      Besides violently cutting off mobility, amputated legs were intended to be a grisly and shame-inducing public spectacle. Colonial-era sugar planters in the Caribbean even invented devices of psychic terror that mimicked amputation—forcing enslaved people to physically experience and imagine something of what it would be like if they were to have a limb cut off in the future.

      “What’s past is prologue,” the old truism from The Tempest goes.

      But what does that mean when it comes to sugar in the Americas?

      “The machinery of the sugar mill, once installed and set in motion, soon becomes almost indestructible, since even when it is partially dismantled, its transformative impact will survive it for many years,” Antonio Benítez-Rojo once wrote. “Its track СКАЧАТЬ