The Sugar Planter's Daughter

by Sharon Maas

  Mama spoke with them all for a few minutes, asking after their families, but then she took her leave and we continued to the bicycle shed and set off for Uncle Jim’s.

  I was curious to see how they would greet one another, former lovers as they were; Mama had insisted that she felt nothing but friendship for him, but would this change when she actually saw him? And what about his lovely wife, Bhoomie? How would she feel? Did she even know? Was it perhaps inappropriate, that Mama should come to visit at his home? But she had insisted, and here we were.

  My concern proved to be unwarranted. Uncle Jim and Mama greeted each other as old acquaintances, with not an unsuitable word, gesture or glance: as dear to each as I and Uncle Jim were, yet with no undercurrent of romance. Bhoomie, too, greeted Mama with warmth and affection, and if she knew of their past liaison, well, she displayed no hint of that knowledge, much less the least trace of jealousy. She welcomed us into her home, and once we were seated in the gallery served us juice and biscuits and insisted we stay for lunch – an invitation we gladly accepted.

  For lunch, Bhoomie served us curry and roti. Mama’s eyes lit up when she saw the soft folded rotis, the steaming dish of chicken curry. ‘Oh my!’ she said to Bhoomie, ‘I’d completely forgotten the food! The best food in the world! How could I!’

  And she tore off a piece of the roti, wrapped it round a chunk of chicken and popped it into her mouth with an expression of utter and complete bliss.

  Later, as we mopped our plates clean with the last of the rotis, Uncle Jim said: ‘Would you like to have a rest now? I have a spare room with a double bed.’

  A full and delicious meal in the hot midday sun is always exhausting. We agreed to a short rest, after which we returned home.

  Yoyo was waiting for us.

  ‘You’ve been away ages!’ she complained. ‘I’ve been waiting for you since lunchtime! Why didn’t you say you wouldn’t be back? I do think it was rude of you, Mama!’

  ‘I told Matilda not to cook for us,’ said Mama mildly. ‘Didn’t she tell you? I prefer just to have a little fruit in the middle of the day.’

  Yoyo frowned and wrinkled her nose. ‘Well – yes, she did. But still! I heard you went out to visit that Mad Jim Booker! I can’t believe it! How could you be hobnobbing with someone like that? Don’t you know he’s a sworn enemy of Promised Land? A communist!’

  Mama only shook her head. ‘You shouldn’t use words you don’t fully understand, Yoyo,’ she replied. ‘Jim is not against us. He is for the workers. He wants to see the workers treated fairly. He believes that is better for all of us.’

  ‘What nonsense!’ cried Yoyo. ‘I don’t believe a word of it. But anyway, I don’t want to discuss it now. Mama, you said yesterday you wanted to see the factory. I thought we could do that now. What about you, Winnie? Won’t you be bored?’

  Mama and I looked at each other. I had little interest in the business of sugar production, and had only visited the factory once before, when it was newly built a few years ago. I really had no need to see it again, loud and ugly as it was. But if Mama was going I didn’t want to be left out, and so of course I nodded too.

  The factory was about two miles away from Promised Land. It sat on the edge of the plantation, and when in operation, as now at harvest time, it would chug and groan all day and night, a great hulking beast devouring the prey the workers fed it. It was too far to walk in the hot post-midday sun, so Yoyo ordered one of the horses to be hitched to a wagon and we all climbed in. The groom took up the reins, flicked them, cried out ‘Giddyap!’ and off we went, the horse trotting along a dusty lane that cut through the cane fields, nude and bristly with the black stubble of cut cane.

  In the old days, that is the days when we were growing up, we had been beholden to Bookers for the grinding of our sugar. As they owned the only processing factories in the colony – one here in the Corentyne, and one in Demerara – we had no choice, and the exorbitant, ever-increasing fees they charged us had been choking the life out of us. This was deliberate. Once we and the other privately owned plantations failed, Bookers could pluck us from the ground for a song and add us to their consortium of businesses. Thus Booker Brothers crawled the colony, scooping up struggling plantations so that they alone should survive, a monopoly.

  Clarence’s arrival changed all this. He had come with a small fortune, enough for us to build our own factory and thus be free from the grasping claws of Bookers. The price was that Clarence was made Papa’s heir. Thus it had been so important for him to marry one of us. I as the elder of us had been the obvious sacrificial lamb, but I had chosen George. But luckily for Papa, Yoyo, sensing an opportunity for greatness, had willingly stepped into the void. Clarence, and the factory, had saved us from ruin.

  At last we were there. A single navigation canal led up to the factory, and that was crammed with punts all loaded high with cut canes, waiting their turn in the queue.

  Yoyo led the way up to the factory entrance, called out, and the factory manager Mr Piers opened the office door and approached to us, adjusting his tie as he came. Yoyo introduced us.

  ‘They’d like to see the factory,’ she said. ‘Give them the tour, please.’

  ‘My pleasure!’ said Mr Piers. He wore a helmet and he was tall and thin, and white, of course. Nobody in authority on our plantation was anything but white, a detail that I had never noticed before, and which had never bothered me before; but now it did.

  Mr Piers handed helmets to the three of us, and led us forward towards the canal.

  The punts here were all jammed one against the other, waiting their turn at the factory entrance, slowly creeping forward. Behind them more punts, pulled by mules, made their slow way forward; the mules were unhitched and taken away, and Indian labourers pushed the punts forward towards the factory with long poles. As we watched, a huge metal claw descended from above, accompanied by much clanking and rattling of chains. The fingers of the claw closed around the entire bundle of canes on the first punt, and lifted it up, up, up and over to deposit them on to what seemed like a giant scale – which was exactly what it turned out to be.

  ‘This is where we weigh the harvested cane,’ explained Mr Piers. ‘The labourers are paid according to how much they cut – each punt is served by a team of coolies and registered to that team. The more cane they harvest, the better they are paid.’

  We watched as a conveyor belt moved the weighed canes along, shoving them into what seemed a great hungry mouth, and into the belly of the factory.

  ‘Come along,’ said Mr Piers, beckoning us inside.

  ‘This is where the machines separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak,’ he went on, pointing to the enormous clump of black machinery into which the canes disappeared. A rather narrow conveyor belt carried what looked like straw away and up to the top of the factory.

  ‘The bagasse,’ he said, ‘the chaff – the waste from the cane, but not really waste because it’s going off to create steam, and the steam provides all the energy to keep the motors running.’

  ‘How efficient!’ commented Mama. ‘So nothing at all goes to waste?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ said Mr Piers. ‘Now follow me.’

  And that’s what we did. We followed him right into the very gut of that factory, into the bowels of the beast. Every now and then he stopped, to point to some black hulk of rumbling, clanking machinery and explain what it was doing, his voice overpowered by the groaning and rumbling so that I could hear hardly a word. Up narrow metal ladders we climbed, and down again. Along metal grid walkways high above, precariously floating, it seemed, in the air, in the midst of chugging, clanking, moving metal wheels and turning cogs and sliding conveyor belts. We watched as the cane proceeded from one stage to the next, up and down, always accompanied by the deafening din of digestion. The only reasonably quiet place was the laboratory, where workers tested samples of the sugar and deemed it good or bad.

  At the end of it all we stood on a narrow metal balcony and watched
as the final machine poured out the finished product: sugar. It flowed in a constant stream from above into a cone-shaped mountain, pure golden crystals pouring out in a supple band, like an endless belt of cloth. Its fluidity fascinated; it seemed almost liquid as it gushed out, the soft, sweet and yielding end product of all that back-breaking labour.

  For this, men had captured and enslaved other men, sent them chained and beaten across the ocean in the dark hulls of ships and sent them to toil in the broiling sun. For this, my forefathers had left their homeland and torn a new home from virgin territory. For this, innumerable men and women had lost their precious lives. For this, blood had been spilled right here on my father’s land. I shuddered at the thought. I loved the sweetness of sugar; but the aftertaste, the realisation of the high price paid, was bitter indeed.

  A final conveyor belt, this one smooth and fast-moving, carried the finished sugar out from the factory and straight into the next building, the packaging factory. Here, Mr Piers said, it would be packed into sacks of jute to be sent to Georgetown and out into the wider world.

  ‘Corentyne gold. One day it will overtake Demerara; the best sugar in the world! The very best.’

  Mama, who had not said a word throughout the tour, nodded and finally spoke.

  ‘Very interesting,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  7

  George

  The next day when I came home I found Winnie had been busy in a different way. Again, the house was filled with the aroma of cooking – but today it was a sweet, ambrosial fragrance, something like heaven. Again I followed the scent into the kitchen and there I saw it: a cloth like a hammock hanging from the rafter, bulging at the bottom; beneath it a large pot into which an amber liquid dripped. Winnie’s back was to me, but she must have sensed my presence because she swung round as I stood in the doorway.

  ‘George!’ she cried, and pointed to the cloth. ‘Guava jelly! My first batch! And the second batch is nearly finished!’

  She stepped away from the stove and I saw another pot on the fire.

  I smiled at her and opened my arms, and she rushed in.

  ‘You’ve been busy!’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes! Ma and I went out to the backyard to pick some guavas – George, you have my favourite variety, the white ones! And then I told her how much I loved guava jelly, and she told me she’d show me how to make it so we went to Bourda Market again and bought a whole bag of guavas – mostly the white ones – we got them much cheaper because we bought up Pansy’s whole stock – Pansy is the name of the market lady – and then we came home and Ma showed me how to make the jelly.’

  ‘Wonderful!’ I said. ‘I love guava jelly! But where’s Ma?’

  ‘She went to visit her friend Parvati,’ said Winnie. ‘She’ll be back soon. They’re cooking together and Ma will bring some dinner back – they seem to have some sort of an arrangement.’ Indeed they did. Ma kept chickens and Parvati grew vegetables, and they had an exchange agreement – so that there would be no leftover chicken going to waste, Ma and Parvati would cook for two households and share, chicken one day and cook-up rice with vegetables the next, or fish-and-vegetable stew. Parvati’s husband worked on the wharf at Stabroek Market and got free fish from a friend. This is how the people of Albouystown, the poor of Georgetown, survived. We all helped one another when and where we could.

  As it happened, Pa came home before Ma. Pa’s job, at the post office in Cummingsburg, was quite a long way across town and he had to walk as he did not have a bicycle. He mumbled a hello as he entered, and plonked himself down on the Berbice chair in the gallery.

  ‘Where’s Ma?’ he asked, echoing my own question, but he didn’t wait for an answer. He pulled a copy of the Argosy out of his satchel and opened it. That was Pa all over: not a sociable man. He didn’t like to talk, so his job, in the back room of the post office, suited him well. I don’t think he had exchanged more than three words with his new daughter-in-law. It wasn’t rudeness – he just didn’t know what to say to people. There are people who can chat about anything for hours on end – Pa wasn’t one of them. He was just as taciturn to his two sons-in-law. He preferred stamps to people; and books, and newspapers.

  Winnie had returned to her guava jelly; now she was pouring the steaming-hot boiled guava from its pot into another, which was lined with a muslin cloth.

  ‘Let me help you,’ I said, and held the cloth steady so that it didn’t slip into the pot. Winnie scraped out the last drops of boiled guava from the pot, and then she took the cloth from my hands and knotted the ends together, after which she carefully, with both hands, lifted the bulging bag of fruit out of the pot. She looked at me.

  ‘I’ve cut the string already, George – hand it to me, will you?’

  Indeed, there on the tabletop lay a length of string all ready to tie the bag with, which she did just below the knot. I was impressed by how quickly and efficiently she did this – as if she had been making guava jelly all her life. In fact, I asked her: ‘Have you made guava jelly before?’

  She laughed. ‘No, of course not! We girls at Promised Land were kept out of the kitchen. This is my first time.’

  ‘Well, you look as if you’ve been doing it all your life.’

  She laughed again. ‘I was thinking, George – we’re going to have so many jars of guava jelly after this, we could sell the extra jars in the shop!’

  We had a family shop in Albouystown, which Ma had managed until recently and where we, the children, had all helped out now and again. Just last year, though, my sister Magda’s husband John had taken over the running of the shop. It sold everything, in small quantities, from soap and matches and various other provisions – and maybe, in the future, guava jelly.

  ‘That way I won’t be a burden on you,’ said Winnie.

  ‘You’re not a burden,’ I said, ‘you’re my wife.’

  ‘Still – I’m an extra mouth to feed. This way I can contribute.’

  And I knew that was exactly what she would do. My Winnie was the most resourceful white woman I had ever met. Not that I knew many white women – in fact, only two, Winnie and her sister Yoyo – but I had always heard that they were lazy and self-indulgent and only liked to be served. Ma had told me so many stories about the white ladies she had once worked for, all in the run-up to my wedding, trying to dissuade me from an inappropriate alliance. I was happy to see Winnie proving her wrong. But that was Winnie all over. She had taught herself Morse code and learned it so well that she’d been the fastest telegraph operator in Barbados when she was exiled there last year. I was so proud of her.

  Watching her now, as she tied the bundle of guava jelly to the rafter, I knew, for the first time, really, that just as she had taught herself Morse code and how to pluck a chicken and how to make guava jelly, Winnie would learn how to live in Albouystown.

  8

  Yoyo

  ‘So Mama, it’s just me and you now, running the estate.’

  It was the day after the wedding; Mama and I had spent the night in the Park Hotel, and then Poole drove us to Promised Land. Tom, the new houseboy, came down to fetch our bags and Mama and I walked up the stairs, she before me. She had not been long in the colony, and was still getting used to it all after her time in Europe.

  Mama, of course, had never felt at home here: not on the plantation, not in the colony. Her real home is among the snow-capped mountains of Austria. She tried to make a marriage and failed; her deep melancholia drove her back to Salzburg. Now here she is again, at her second attempt; this time as a mother more than as a wife. It is just us: two women, now that Winnie has gone. We both know that Clarence is just a figurehead; in fact we all know that, Clarence included.

  ‘We can do it,’ Mama said that day. ‘You’re young, but I’m so impressed, Yoyo, with your business sense.’

  ‘You can thank Miss Yorke for that!’ I said.

  Winnie and I had both attended Miss Yorke’s Institute for Womanly Arts. Business, of course, did not count as a
Womanly Art, but I had been able to live there while attending classes in economics, accounting and business at Government College. I was the only girl in the whole place.

  It turned out that I had a certain skill for accounting; I enjoy looking over the books and making sure the figures are in order. What I don’t like is dealing with people. Mr McInnes in particular.

  How can I, a girl of only seventeen, control a man who considers himself the de facto head of operations, now that Papa is removed from us?

  ‘He leers at me so!’ I told Mama later that day, as we sat down on the verandah to relax after the long journey. Miranda, the housegirl, bustled in and set a coffee pot and a plate of ginger biscuits down on the table, curtsied and took her leave. It seemed to me that Miranda had put on a little weight recently – she had been a slim little thing when we first engaged her six months ago, and now her uniform was bulging at the seams.

  ‘Mr McInnes is at the root of all our problems,’ said Mama. ‘I saw it immediately when I first came here as a bride – he had already caught your father in his snare by then. I did try to free him, but you know what your father is like. “Women have no idea,” and all that nonsense. But I know what you mean about the leering. He did it to me too.’

  ‘It makes me hesitant to confront him. He looks at me as if I were a piece of meat, with no brain whatsoever.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t encountered him yet since I’ve been back. But we have to replace him. Immediately.’

  ‘We can’t, Mama. I’ve been looking for a replacement for months. There isn’t anyone in BG, and until we can find someone on one of the islands and get him to come over we’ll have to put up with him.’

  Mama was silent then for a few minutes. She turned her face from me and gazed off into the distance – I thought she had simply accepted my last words and was thinking of something else, when suddenly she said, ‘I know of someone.’