Traveling with Sugar. Amy Moran-Thomas

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СКАЧАТЬ doctors with good medicine that came and went, and the boiled herbs she used in the meantime; raw Clorox she applied for pain when a protruding bone’s edge pushed into the skin. As she narrated the accumulated cuts and recoveries, it seemed like her illness faded into the background, unlike the FM radio she kept that blared theme music from Ghostbusters or a reggae version of the Bryan Adams song Heaven.

      “I would like to know how high it is,” Sarah said of her blood sugar level. “Indeed.” The last time she had been rushed to the closest town’s hospital, it was “five change,” over 500 mg/dL. “I have needles, but no strips,” she said of her unusable Accu-Chek meter, which was quite expensive (seventy U.S. dollars) and designed to require special brand-matched parts (around fifty U.S. dollars for one month’s supply). Sarah used to travel to the Guatemalan border town of Melchor—about five hours away by bus—to purchase discounted blood sugar test strips, but had not been able to lately. Her meter rested next to foil-wrapped pills, which she took tentatively because she had no way to gauge her starting point. Diabetes medications at times can make people feel more sick, if the day’s blood sugar is unusually low or high. I was unsettled to realize that the very objects that could have helped prevent her worsening injuries were both there and not there in the room with us, sitting as if suspended in the glass box.

      “Sugar machine” was Sarah’s name for the broken glucometer. Even in her lilting voice, this hung in the air with an ominous edge. It was one of the ways we were speaking in history, if not about it; getting to Sarah’s village meant passing the remnants of another structure called a sugar machine. We both knew that just down the road rested a steam locomotive from the 1800s, mounted on eroded bricks like a train running nowhere, which had once boiled sugarcane into molasses. It still stands next to the plantation’s evaporating furnace, a hot-air exchanger, a Tredegar engine that pumped water from the river, and the crusher with its flywheel. Their rusted-out pipes and oil tanks were etched with places and names that I could barely make out under the moss: LONDON and RICHMOND, VA covered in lichen.

      That particular sugar machine and its adjacent fields of bourbon cane were established in the 1860s, long before Sarah was born, by a man from Pennsylvania named Samuel McCutchon. He was friends with U.S. president Andrew Jackson, who used to travel on his ship Pocahontas to visit the McCutchon family’s Louisiana sugar plantation. Lists of the enslaved people whom Colonel McCutchon owned in Louisiana fill seven archival folders. He was among the Confederate sugar planters who fled to then British Honduras after losing the U.S. Civil War. By some accounts, more Confederates fled to Belize in the post–Civil War years than any other receiving country.⁶ In Belize, the workers in McCutchon’s cane fields were mostly Garifuna, Kriol, Maya, and Chinese. He founded three sugar estates in southern Belize,⁷ transforming the landscape. Ruins built by Confederate planters after the Civil War, some as far north in Belize as Indian Church, are among many remnants of sugar machines still found across the Caribbean and the Americas. It was said that Belize’s rainfall was so conducive to quick growth that the cane bent over by its own weight and then grew upward again into a field of S-shaped stalks, as if the sugar had started to spell itself out.

      SUGAR ROADS

      One morning in 2010, Sarah told me that she hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. “I just don’t know what it wants,” she sighed. I prodded with a vague follow-up, and she explained she had tried Clorox. The moment passed before I could figure out a delicate way to phrase my real question: But what was it, that had wants?

      I used to think that “sugar” was a popular synonym that meant diabetes. But over time, I came to think that these labels often slipped into each other but were not exactly the same. The effects of sugar routinely exceeded common understandings of diabetes problems. Sugar was alive in the landscape. It named something that escaped from the many containers—biomedical, historical, scientific—of expert accounting. I began to think that any stable account of sugar’s contradictory meanings and excesses would miss the very thing that people like Sarah named as the conditions they were trying to live with.

      Belize is among the less cane-saturated places in the Caribbean. Neither Sarah nor her children worked in the sugar fields. Many people in this book never talked about field labor or would trace their diabetes to sugarcane. Yet they lived in a region not only dotted with its ruins, but also fundamentally shaped by its far-reaching material legacies: where people lived and how their ancestors arrived; the way land was partitioned and used today and what kinds of things could grow there; the system through which they bought foods and what foods those were. Other associations were less literal but more pervasive. When a woman drowned together with her four children after she dove into a shallow pool trying to save them, people made sense of the tragedy by attributing her terrified actions to diabetic sugar: “The sugar made her panic.” A man whose loved one had “gone mad” explained her breakdown in this way: “The sugar went to her brain.” Sometimes sugar was not amenable to intervention, but simply a way of speaking about terrible things one could not change.

      The way people talked in sugar, though rarely about it, brought to mind Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s notion of implicit memories: “Tying a shoe involves memory, but few of us engage in an explicit recall of images every time we routinely tie our shoes,” he wrote. “Remembering is not always a process of summoning representations of what happened.”⁸

      People spoke in sugar so often that I began to hear it as a kind of implicit memory. Trying to understand what hung in its silences, I called someone who worked in curating more explicit memories of sugar: Mr. B, one of Belize’s resident experts in sugarcane history, who suggested a drive north. We met in a pickup truck with seats full of books. As we shook hands hello, Mr. B said that shaking hands with a cane worker can leave your hands itchy all day with the feeling of little fibers under your skin, and I tried not to feel unsettled though that sensation is a common symptom of diabetes. We talked on the road north to Libertad, past Corozal’s British brick pillbox structures with gun windows.

      Cane Cutters, by Pen Cayetano.

      Since sugar has no season, the fields outside the window were not uniform, each property in its own stage: burnt fields, high ratoon, the overgrown dense green known for snakes and bugs. Harvest leaves a field of stumps that have to be scorched to prevent stubble from sprouting from the stalk’s joint-like nodes. Planting new sugar fields entails burying old cane billets in the ground, which sprout regrowth called stands.

      When we got out of the car at Libertad, I thought how that field was the same one that many workers from Stann Creek District had once traveled to reach. Pen Cayetano, a famous impressionist artist in Dangriga, was among the Garifuna men who left home in southern Belize to work in the northern sugar fields of Libertad when he was a teenager. In his studio—fragrant with oil paint and smoked fish and bustling with family at work on art projects of their own—we sat on an overturned canoe, and he recalled how the sugar fields barely felt like vegetation at all: bright but not lush, sticky, known for the blind heat of the two o’clock sun. When I asked if he might want to paint an image of his memories of sugar work in Libertad for this book, he looked startled by my mental image of sugar fields as plantlike bright green. “You think I’d paint the sugar green?” He shook his head. “It felt red.”

      By the time Mr. B and I walked through Libertad on a hot day in 2017, the sprawling cane fields and laboratory buildings were long overgrown. As we passed broken-down conveyor belts towering above stacks of rusting vats, it was not difficult to see why historians like Eric Williams viewed the sugar industry as a pivotal “synthesis of field and factory.”⁹ A single watchman kept an eye on the abandoned estate. He led us past a pumpkin patch he was cultivating near the old office, still hung with the rusted sign FACTORY MANAGER. Inside the derelict office headquarters, the wood desk had rotted and most of the inside walls had collapsed. But a metal filing СКАЧАТЬ