The Ghost Apple (23 page)

In the early afternoon, we were served a lunch of cornmeal porridge, and then we returned to the mill and were made to labor in growing discomfort until the early evening, for there was still a great fear that much of the cane would be lost if it were allowed to remain wet in the field.

Late in the day, an accident occurred which helped to establish the dark pattern of our semester abroad. There was a student, called “James,” who was heavier and of a less robust physical condition than some of the others. He wore a T-shirt upon which were printed the words “Tripoli Mathletics,” and on the back, in imitation of a sports jersey, were his name and the imaginary number
5
i. This unfortunate young man, growing more and more tired as he walked upon the treadmill, and calling out that he could not go on, soon lost his footing and hung suspended from the rail. Screaming in pain and calling out to Mr. Hertfordshire and Mr. Drax, who were two of the overseers, he received such a blow or series of blows upon the shin that his leg was quite broken, and he had to be taken back to San Cristobal that very night. Although it seemed in the event like nothing more than bad luck, still I might have observed how tardy were the overseers in stopping the mill and cutting him down from the rail. It did not occur to me, for indeed why should it have done?, that James had been fortunate in his accident, and had been spared much suffering, for he never returned to the plantation, and indeed was soon back at Tripoli.

In the evening, after James had been carried off and the urgency of the situation seemed to have diminished, Mr. Cavendish returned, and was in every way a changed man, laughing and joking, offering reassurances, and saying how happy he was that we had arrived, for there was much here he was proud to show us. He led us back to the longhouse and there he made a kind of speech about the state of the Renardenne economy, the virtue of the Big Anna corporation, and his own commitment to what he called “low-carbon agriculture,” by which was meant agricultural work in which the labor was done entirely by hand, without the use of mechanized transport, large cultivators, &c. &c. Thus he directly contradicted himself, or so it seemed, for not eight hours before he had minimized the importance of this initiative and characterized it as a burdensome requirement of public relations.

Mr. Cavendish was also a great believer in the virtue of sugar, as he explained: “He who attempts to argue against sweets in general takes upon him a very difficult task, for nature seems to have recommended this taste to all sorts of animals. To the influence of sugar may be, in great measure, ascribed the extinction of the scurvy, the plague, and many other diseases formerly epidemical.”

He spoke in this manner for some time longer, describing with the greatest enthusiasm all of the uses to which the sugar was put, and we strove to listen with attention, though stupefied with exhaustion and fully sensible of the fact that he was not telling the whole truth, for we still believed that he might be a friend to us.

Later we were given a meal of plantains and salt fish, which I found myself too tired to eat, so I went to sleep in a state of hunger and great fatigue, only to be awakened in the dark of the morning by a great blast from a conch shell, at which we were turned out into the fields once again.

This time I was among a group sent to the banana grove some miles distant, and it was only now, laboring in a state of great weariness and uncertainty, that the peculiarity of my situation began finally to dawn on me. We were set to work carrying and packing the green bananas, while the islanders undertook the more specialized labor of digging ditches, managing the irrigation water, checking plants for signs of blight, &c. Though we worked side by side with them, still they did not speak to us, for, as I discovered later, Mr. Cavendish had forbidden it.

All day the sun burned most fiercely, and we were driven hard, with little to eat but a breakfast of cornmeal at ten in the morning, and salt fish with plantain later in the day. Twice during that long afternoon, an airplane passed overhead and sprayed the whole field, and those of us laboring in it, with the most noxious and horrible pesticides, bringing tears to our eyes, and causing more than one student to fall to his knees, struggling for breath. And now, reflecting that this operation did not accord with what I understood to be the principles of low-carbon agriculture, I worried again that much of what Mr. Cavendish had told us was untrue, and I wondered at the need for such misrepresentation.

We were so exhausted in the evening, bitten by flies and suffering from a kind of delirium of heat, that none among us could summon the strength to boil porridge for the evening meal, which we were now made to do for ourselves. We would have gone hungry had one of the overseers not taken pity on us and given us some bags of Big Anna plantain chips, adding that he would not be so obliging in the future.

The first sure sign that we were no longer free men and women came on the afternoon of the following day. There was a student among us, very strong and of the most pleasing proportions, who was called “Max.” Having discovered a small stream on the banana lands, and passing by there quite often in the course of that day’s labor, Max decided to refresh himself in the water. Thinking himself unobserved, he repeated the exercise several times before we were summoned from the groves by the conch shell. But upon arriving at the longhouse, we found Mr. Cavendish in a transport of rage, and immediately he began denouncing Max as a malingerer, and making the most absurd threats and insinuations, adding that we were not here to sport about in the water but to contribute to the prosperity of the island, and that Max had done the islanders great harm by taking time to bathe in the pond. In short order he became almost apoplectic, shaking his fist and crying out in an aggrieved voice that he supposed he was the only person on this plantation who cared about low-carbon agriculture. Then, to our great shock and horror, he compelled Max to take up a cowhide whip and actually strike one of the islanders, which, after much protest, with tears running down his face, that baffled young man consented to do, hardly knowing what he was doing and seeming to suffer almost as much as the islander under the lash, who suffered very much indeed. When this was done, Mr. Cavendish explained that each time we bathed in the pond, we did so much harm, and it would always be thus.

At this performance we were greatly shocked, and yet none of us raised a voice or made our objections felt, our exhaustion being so complete, and that special fear, which was the principal condition of our semester abroad, having already established itself in our hearts.

I will not say that we grew accustomed to our situation, but rather that we became so disheartened that life quickly lost its savor, and the spirit of rebellion was crushed within our breasts. We had little to eat, and our fare was of the very poorest, consisting of no more than salt fish, cornmeal, plantains, and, very seldom, the rejected or inferior products of the nearby Big Anna factory, such as
Bananaless Nut Muffins or Coffee Crisps
, which were hardly preferable. It was only the smallest consolation that I quickly became slim and lean on such a diet, for many was the afternoon when I saw Mr. Cavendish beating one of the local laborers himself, with a whip or scourge of tamarind rods, nor was it hard to imagine that he might do the same to us. Add to that fear the torments of insomnia, the agony of the prickly heat, the great danger of the sugar mill and the boiling house, and the degradations of our communal bathroom, and you will have some impression of the misery in which we lived.

Once I realized that I was a victim of the very evil from which Professor Kabaka had pledged to liberate the island, I felt certain that he would soon come to my rescue, and this hope sustained me for the first several weeks of the semester. As time passed, and still he did not come, I thought of sending him a message, but I could think of no method of doing so, for I did not know where he was, and we had no access to writing materials, nor could we trust those islanders privileged to travel on errands between the plantation and the city of San Cristobal. No doubt the reader will ask why I did not flee in the night, for indeed I soon realized that this was my only recourse, but the reason is that I did not know the road, nor was I certain that I could survive for long in the tropical jungle, and I had also a great fear that Mr. Cavendish would deal me some brutal punishment in the event I was recaptured. In short, it was terror that kept me rooted to the spot.

Our only solace was the knowledge that our term of indenture could not be greater than one semester, for afterward our loving parents would expect to hear from us, and one supposes that Big Anna could not hope to hold us over longer than that period of time. This, I think, is what preserved us from that despair which must be the true evil of such a life, for indeed our condition was but a temporary one, and not, as it was for the local labor force, eternal.

At first, we seldom found opportunities to speak to these islanders, for they were forbidden from addressing us, and we were mostly segregated from them. This precaution was no doubt intended to prevent an alliance between our two groups, and indeed to keep us in a state of mutual suspicion, for our captors lived in daily apprehension of a revolt, and no doubt they were afraid that we might incite the islanders to rise up and claim their rights as free people. This fear was increased by another circumstance, namely that there were at this time several groups of “maroons,” or escaped laborers, encamped in the mountains. We heard wild stories of the maroons raiding other plantations and carrying off arms and provisions, and I often heard Mr. Cavendish and Mr. Drax speak the names of their leaders, among whom were Cudjoe, Mackandal, and Lubolo. And indeed, Professor Kabaka was among them, for once or twice I heard his name as well.

It was true that on those few occasions when I did speak to them, I found the islanders restive and discontented, but I believe that Mr. Cavendish need not have had much fear on our account, for most of the islanders suspected the students of colluding with Big Anna in exchange for the preferential treatment which they felt we received, and for that reason they would not have been inclined to listen to us.

As the semester wore on, however, and our captors grew more fearful of a general uprising, something seemed to give way in their hearts, and the subtle restraint they had exercised in their treatment of us was replaced with scorn and violence. Again it was Max, that most innocent and well-intentioned of students, who was the first to feel the bite of the tyrant’s lash. One day he was working in the boiling house, a most infernal and abominable chore, and growing faint with exhaustion, he staggered out into the yard to catch his breath and steel himself for what remained of his eight-hour shift. Seeing him there, dizzy and gasping in the shade of a mango tree, Mr. Akins grew enraged and ordered several of the islanders to take hold of him, and there, without a word, he struck him several times with a tamarind scourge, and indeed laid his back open in several places, whereupon he ordered him bound to a molasses cask in the sun. There Max remained, blood running down his back, for another half or three quarters of an hour, before he quite fainted away and was carried off to the sick house.

I had myself largely escaped such treatment, being strong enough to do my work without calling undue attention to myself, and being careful to manifest an obliging disposition to begin with. And yet I will now relate those abuses which inspired me to fly, for fly I would have done, not content to wait for the end of the semester, even had circumstances not decided the issue for me.

But before I proceed to the events that led to my deliverance, I cannot forbear to pause a moment for reflection. How, one may ask, could the Big Anna corporation have hoped to make such a system profitable, and how could it have operated in this way without redress? I cannot answer the latter question, except by suggesting that it had not always been thus, and that I believe the slavery system, for that is what it was, had only just been reintroduced. On the one occasion when a Tripoli student, called “Mark,” dared suggest to Mr. Cavendish that he intended to take legal action upon his return home, that evil man began screaming about the release forms we had signed prior to embarkation, at the same time begging Mark to reconsider, insisting that a student’s testimony could not be admitted as evidence in a court on St. Renard, and finally pretending ignorance of the abuses that were the subject of his complaint. In short, it seems that Mr. Cavendish had a great fear of redress.

As for the profitability of the system, it is not easy to say what the truth was. Everything on the Big Anna plantation was done as rapidly as possible, and as cheaply. Because they did not have to pay for labor, the inefficiency of what the company called “Human Power Technology” was perhaps no disadvantage, as they were accordingly able to save themselves the cost of farm machinery and other equipment. I also know that Big Anna collected the substantial fees that our parents were made to pay as a condition of our admission to the Field Studies Program, and this no doubt was the principal reason we were suffered to remain on the plantation, for otherwise I am afraid we were a great burden, being so much less hardy and skilled than the islanders.

Moreover, I have heard the company praised for its “green” agricultural practices, the reason being that the operation of the plantation was said to require so little in the way of fossil fuels. On this basis, Big Anna claimed to be justified in charging high prices for its inferior snack products, which were supposed to be the result of sustainable agricultural practices. Never mind that the true cost of production was paid in human sweat and tears and blood, or that these products were so sweet as to be inimical to human life, for this claim, as I have already shown, was fraudulent even according to the most cynical and limited understanding of the word “sustainable”: Not only did the company apply deadly pesticides, but its products had then to be shipped very great distances, an operation which required enormous quantities of fuel.