by Aaron Thier
I knew that Professor Kabaka was in the mountains, where he had raised a group of rebels, for he had written declarations and proclamations to this effect, and as my spirits rose I sometimes thought I might creep away and go in search of him. Yet each morning I delayed, thinking that I would lie yet a while longer under the great tamarind tree in the courtyard, for I was torn between my desire to see him and the blissful ease of this tropical Arcadia, where I might have been content to eat the bread of idleness all my days.
On the evening of the fifth day, we were enjoined to write to our families and explain that we would be leaving for the field the next morning, and that we would be gone some matter of weeks, and would therefore be beyond the reach of email or post. The Proxy College was to be made ready for some executives and shareholders of the Big Anna corporation, for that company was to be given the use of those facilities in exchange for providing us with accommodation on one of its plantations in the interior of the island. After all that Professor Kabaka had told me about the Big Anna plantations, it seems remarkable that I could have failed to grasp the evil portent of this announcement, and yet I think I did, for I supposed that the barbarities he described belonged to the twilit world of the poor, and though I might pass through that world as a tourist, yet I could never come to know it for myself.
We boarded the school bus once again and traveled east, over a range of low hills, into the flatlands which comprise the country’s prime agricultural zone. During this trip I sat gazing out the window at the small West Indian houses, which were painted the most cheerful colors imaginable and which fronted sandy yards marked out with pink conch shells. At midday we came to a dusty crossroads distinguished by nothing more than a series of low wooden structures, whether houses or shops we could not tell, and there we stopped, supposing this to be one of those communities we had discussed in our orientation meeting. In fact, as we soon learned, the land and all that we saw about us belonged to the Big Anna corporation, and the structures along the road were, respectively, a tiny commissary, sick house, overseer’s office, &c., &c. All about were the cane fields, and not far distant we could see the sugar mill and other structures essential for the processing of that evil plant. Farther still, as it was soon my misfortune to learn, were the banana groves and the packing sheds. We could see laborers passing to and fro, heavily laden with bundles of cane, and with expressions of the utmost severity and discomfort on their faces, which were much darker than mine, although at home I am considered very dark. Here and there a white man stood with his arms crossed. Indeed, it might have been a scene out of the dark past, and now I did experience a fleeting moment of apprehension.
During all this time, we were in the charge of Professor Beatrice Caponegro, our program director, and I cannot but express my feeling that she was one of those few who had some knowledge of the fate that awaited us on the Big Anna plantation, for it was she, and no one else, who led us into the rough stone longhouse in the back trace where we were to live for the remainder of our tenure on the island.
This structure, a ruin left behind by one of those empires which had preceded Big Anna, was only to become more hateful to me, and yet even on that first afternoon it was an abominable sight, with tuna cans, animals feces, and half-completed word-search puzzles scattered indiscriminately across the floor, lizards and other crawling vermin making free use of the space, and beds of the crudest design—no more than coconut-fiber mattresses moldering on irregular wooden frames. Above my own bed was a tattered image of Miami Heat star Dwyane Wade, upon which a number of small irregular hearts had been drawn, and it was among the saddest things I had ever seen. The lavatory was unspeakable and was, furthermore, like the dormitory, to serve all of us, men and women alike. To enhance the aspect of gloom, a tropical thundershower blew up quite suddenly, the rhythm of the wet and dry season being disrupted by global climate change, and we saw that the roof would not serve to keep out the rain.
Professor Caponegro delivered a few words of encouragement and enjoined us to do all that the Big Anna corporation asked of us, and more, for that company was fine and good and had our interests, as well as the interests of the Renardennes, at heart. It was a hollow and disingenuous statement, but it was her last word to us, for now she took her leave, never to be seen again by any of the students purportedly in her care.
The administration of our program was taken up by a Mr. Cavendish, who was to prove the most corrupted and licentious of all the men I knew in the island, and who presently made his appearance in the longhouse. Perhaps it had been his intention to welcome us, after his own fashion, and deliver the introductory monologue which would have been customary at that time, but in the event he was much exercised by the unseasonable rain, which is a great threat to the canes in crop time, and can rot them where they stand. Thus, in a mood of great anxiety, Mr. Cavendish led us through the fields of ripe cane to the sugar mill, which stood some three or four hundred yards from the longhouse.
The mill contained a variety of redundant apparatus, for it had at one time been fully mechanized, and dismantled machinery stood about in testimony to those happier days, when the demands upon the laborers were much less severe. Now that Big Anna was endeavoring to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, and indeed to adopt sustainable environmental practices, it had reverted to a much older method of processing the cane. This was an effort, as Mr. Cavendish explained, undertaken not out of concern for the company’s environmental impact, which he held to be negligible, but out of a need to impress customers with the illusion of that concern. The great problem, of course, as Professor Kabaka had taught me, was that sugar production is an arduous and labor-intensive process, and indeed nearly impossible without fossil fuel on the one hand, or, on the other, great suffering and loss of human life.
In the center of the facility were the great rollers between which the canes were crushed and their liquor extracted. These rollers were meant to be turned by oxen, and above our heads there were stout wooden projections to which those animals had once been yoked. But the oxen had all been slaughtered for want of food, the previous year having been one of privation and fear in the island, during which the plantations had been menaced, as Mr. Cavendish explained, by all manner of external and internal enemies, even including a gang of local children calling themselves the Number Ones, who had burned a toolshed and maimed an overseer.
The rollers were now geared to a treadmill, which had been salvaged from the ruins of an old jail or workhouse, and it was upon this terrible device that half of us were now set to walking. But the Big Anna treadmill bore little similarity to those machines upon which leisured people take their daily exercise, and upon which, indeed, I myself had so recently labored to slough off those sheets of flesh in which I had felt enrobed. It was a cylindrical construction, with thick boards fitted into it to form steps upon which we set our feet and walked, after a fashion, as if we were climbing a great revolving staircase. There was a rail overhead which we grasped in order to support ourselves and to which our wrists were tightly bound, so that we should not be crushed beneath the apparatus in the event that we lost our footing. The great difficulty consisted in keeping the feet moving from one step to the next at a pace consistent with the speed at which the treadmill was turning, for if one student was unable to keep pace with the others, then he would be left hanging from the rail, and then, though his life would be spared, with each incremental turn of the great cylinder he would be struck a blow upon the shins.
I walked the treadmill for what seemed to me an enormously long time, though I think it could not have been longer than twenty minutes, and then I was employed in gathering in the leaves and the crushed canes, which were together called cane trash or bagasse, and carrying them to the boiling houses, where they served as fuel. The islanders themselves were all this time engaged in cutting cane and preparing it for milling, or else in maintaining the fires beneath the great copper boilers, these being tasks that required more skill and knowledge than
any of the students yet possessed. They did not speak to us, as indeed they had been instructed not to do, and yet we felt a kinship with them, and we felt at the time that we were a great help to them.
I must pause now to observe once again that although I had learned from Professor Kabaka about the insidious and coercive labor practices of the Big Anna corporation, and though I had been very much preoccupied with slavery throughout the previous semester, yet I did not even begin to suspect that I had myself been reduced to that hateful condition. In truth my mood was very much improved from what it had been at Tripoli, excited as I was to experience new things, form lasting friendships, and help others to achieve that high degree of material prosperity to which I myself was accustomed. It is remarkable what the eye will fail to see, and the mind fail to apprehend, when all the faculties are bent toward sustaining an illusion.
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 5i. 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.
