TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/092589/09258900.069

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 4KB | 69 lines

BOOKS, Page 80

They Take Their Lumps

By Paul Gray


    BIG SUGAR
    by Alec Wilkinson
    Knopf; 263 pages; $18.95

    One good way to catch a reader's attention is to start off with
a bang. This book does so. Chapter 1, first sentence: "The most
perilous work in America is the harvest by hand of sugarcane in
South Florida." Holy mackerel, stop the presses! A lot of coal
miners will certainly be relieved to learn this, not to mention
scads of military test pilots. And just how perilous is this work,
which is principally performed by laborers brought in from the
Caribbean? An answer is tucked in at the end of a paragraph 245
pages later: "As far as I know a West Indian has never died in the
cane fields."

    This is certainly ending with a whimper. Yet such a dying fall
hardly saps the considerable strengths of Big Sugar, subtitled
Seasons in the Cane Fields of Florida. Forget the comparative
dangers of cutting sugarcane. Wonder instead why roughly 10,000
West Indian men, chiefly Jamaicans, come to South Florida each
winter to do it. That is what Alec Wilkinson, a staff writer for
The New Yorker, did when he came across this information in a 1984
newspaper story. Other questions aroused Wilkinson's interest as
a reporter. Among them: Is it not odd that a major domestic cash
crop should be so heavily dependent on imported black labor? What
is going on down there? For the next four years, Wilkinson paid a
number of visits to South Florida trying to find out.

    He was looking for an expose -- a big U.S. business using and
abusing desperate, impoverished workers -- and in large measure he
found what he wanted. Florida accounts for around 40% of the
sugarcane grown in the U.S., and producers there have been using
West Indian cutters for more than 45 years. Mechanical harvesting
would be much less expensive, but there are substantial areas in
the state where the soil is too fragile to bear the ravages of
machinery. So the brunt of cost consciousness falls on the cutters,
who invariably take their lumps. They are routinely cheated of some
time spent in the fields. They are expected to cut and stack one
ton of cane an hour. Those who fall behind are "checked out,"
deprived of any pay they may have earned that day and sent back to
their barracks, which in many cases resemble prison camps. As the
ultimate penalty, laggards or troublemakers can always be deported.

    Wilkinson, who has also written books about police work on Cape
Cod and moonshine enforcement in North Carolina, finds and displays
much genuine cause for outrage here, but he also brings back a
richer, more complex story than he seems willing to acknowledge.
Better pay and treatment from the growers might improve the
cutters' lot, but nothing will ameliorate the reality of harvesting
cane by hand. It is boring, backbreaking work, carried out in
oppressive heat, surrounded by the dangers of poisonous snakes,
fire ants and whirling, razor-sharp scythes. Some of those who
suffer these miseries take pride in their work. A man from St.
Lucia tells Wilkinson, "Cutting the cane in itself is also a
skillful task, you must be skillful at it. When you cutting the
cane you must have a free mind."

    Fearing reprisals, all but a few cutters refused to talk to
Wilkinson. Those who cooperated are quoted at length, and they do
not seem exploited in their own free minds. A bad job in the
Florida fields is better than no job back home on their islands.
This is where the message -- villains and victims -- that Wilkinson
would like to send gets scrambled, to his book's ultimate benefit.
What emerges instead is a parable, as old as the epics, of humans
trying to make the best out of life's imposing, impossible
conditions.