The Sugar Planter's Daughter (4 page)

I won't say that I wasn't happy at Mama's return. It was a surprise, indeed; and initially a happy one. She had been away so long, I had almost forgotten her, and anyway, I'd hardly known her before she left, sunk as she was in her melancholy. I was happy to get my mother back; but she had changed, for her melancholy had left her, and she came full of vigour and fervour and before long she had ganged up with Winnie and Mad Jim against myself and Clarence. Thus the stalemate.

So when Winnie married her darkie George soon after Mama's arrival, I breathed a sigh of relief. It left me alone with Mama on the plantation, true enough: but it also removed Winnie and her constant nagging, and that's why I went to the wedding, abominable as it was. But I wore that hat to show her, to show everyone, that I am now in charge.

T
he following morning
I took Mama to visit Uncle Jim. We went by bicycle, and as we walked over to the bicycle shed they all came out, the servants Mama had known in the years gone by. First Bobby, the yard-boy, now a grown man. Once I had called him simply ‘Boy'; now I knew his name, and I whispered to Mama: ‘His name is Bobby.' She nodded, understanding. He came up to me shyly, smiling somewhat hesitantly – but Mama stopped in her tracks and held out both her hands for his, and that wavering smile turned into a fully fledged grin.

‘Ma'am,' he said, ‘so good to see you back again!'

‘Oh Bobby, how you've grown!' she exclaimed. Then came Doreen, the washerwoman, also waiting to greet her, and Patch, the gateman, who had left his post at the gate to approach, and others. People who had known us since I was a spoilt little brat, floating in an unreal bubble of light and beauty, oblivious to the trials and tribulations of the common folk. Mama remembered them all; she had always been good to the servants, and they welcomed her back with joy.

As for me: that spoilt little girl was long gone. I was a grown woman now. These people I had once treated as servants; I now understood that their inferior roles in life were just that, roles, roles as in a theatre play; and beneath the roles they were as worthy of respect, and even love, as we who play more elevated roles. And just as the actor is not identified only by the role he is playing, so too I knew that we are all on this earth as equals. Shakespeare's words sprang into my mind:
All the world's a stage, and
all the men and women merely players.

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.

Y
oyo 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.'