Queen Sugar: A Novel (25 page)

•   •   •

Beyond the swinging door, the bakery floor stood large and boxy, with white tiled walls around three sides and two enormous ovens built into the far wall. The other men were already at work, stacking long rectangular wood boxes on top of one another and sliding big metal trays into tall racks. Everything—from the radio to the portable phone and the long wooden table in the middle of the room, to the men themselves—was covered with a fine layer of flour so that it looked as though an early-winter snowstorm had just blown through. Johnny introduced Ralph Angel to the guys, then led him over to the mixer in the corner. It was almost as tall as Ralph Angel, with a large stainless steel bowl and a huge paddle inside that looked big enough to row a boat with.

“People don’t realize, but baking is an art,” Johnny said. “Which is why I usually start new guys making loaves. I learned the hard way it takes a new guy three months before he knows how to form a decent loaf. But since it’s crunch time, and I can’t stop to train you, I’m gonna have you jump ahead and work the mixer first. Once you get the hang of it, made enough dough, we’ll see what needs doin’.” Johnny gestured for Ralph Angel to follow him behind the mixer where six large plastic garbage cans, each labeled with a different ingredient, stood against the wall. On the floor in front of the garbage cans, twenty fifty-pound bags of flour sagged like overgrown sandbags.

“I’ll do the first batch, then I’ll let you run with it.”

Ralph Angel watched as Johnny dumped a sack of flour into the big metal mixing bowl, then peeled the lid off the first garbage can, labeled
MALT
, and dipped a ladle into the dark syrupy liquid. He used a big scooper to measure out the salt and yeast, then poured in a pitcher of warm water and flipped the switch.

“It looks simple, and it is, as long as you get exactly the right amount of each ingredient. Screw up the proportions and that’s eighty dollars’ worth of product down the drain. After you put everything in, run the mixer for fifteen minutes, then take the dough over to the table. Billy will take it from there. Questions?”

“I got it.”

Ralph Angel stood silently by the mixer while the paddle turned a figure 8 in the big stainless steel bowl, and the radio played, and the guy named Joe lined the long wood boxes with canvas while Johnny fired up the ovens. As they worked, the men teased each other like brothers, lobbing curses and light insults across the bakery floor, and it struck Ralph Angel, standing alone, that he’d never had that; had never worked with people he liked and who liked him enough to joke around. Gwenna had been the only person, but she was gone. He’d thought he might be able to have that with Hollywood—they used to joke around all the time when they were kids—but Hollywood didn’t seem interested lately. Was always saying he had to work. It would be nice, for once, to be in a place where everyone was friends.

•   •   •

Three hours of mixing. Through the windows, the darkness seemed less dense. There was a hint of sunrise. Ralph Angel hauled the last batch of dough over to Billy, who reached his tattooed arms—Ralph Angel could see the designs and dark outlines under the layer of flour—into the metal mixing bowl and, with his bare hands, scraped the tacky glob onto the wooden table. He watched as Billy pulled off softball-size chunks of dough, ran them through the breaker to squeeze out the air bubbles, shaped each chunk of dough into a circle, then went back and formed the circles into perfect oblong loaves and laid them side by side in the long wooden boxes. Johnny was right. It was an art.

“How many loaves do you get from a batch?” Ralph Angel said, in a friendly tone. He leaned against the table.

“’Bout fifty.” Billy didn’t look up; his hands never stopped moving. “But they gotta rise for two hours in the proof boxes before we can bake ’em.” He nodded to the wood boxes stacked ten high under the window. “The second batch over there is about ready.”

Across the floor by the ovens, Johnny was baking the last of the first batch. Inside the oven, the rotisserie shelves revolved like seats on a Ferris wheel, and Johnny had just enough time to lift raw loaves out of the proof boxes and arrange them on each shelf before it was out of reach. By the time the shelf circled around and appeared again, the loaves had baked to the gold of dark honey, and Johnny lifted them out and slid them onto the cooling racks.

“What can I do?” Ralph Angel said, thinking he could do what Johnny was doing.

“Take those boxes over to the ovens.” Johnny pointed to the stack of wooden proof boxes. “But be careful, they’re heavier than they look.”

“I’m on it.”

It was hot in the bakery now with the ovens going full blast. Ralph Angel had already loosened his tie, unbuttoned his shirt, but sweat still trailed down his face. At the window, he stood on his toes to reach the top proof box. He lifted it from the stack, but stumbled backward. The box was awkward to carry at nearly six feet long, tall as a man, and heavier than it looked, loaded from end to end with balls of dough. Worn smooth as river stones from years of use, the sides of the box were hard to hold, and as Ralph Angel struggled to get his grip, the box fell forward and the front end crashed on the floor. Everything seemed to move in slow motion then. Ralph Angel felt himself reaching for the loaves as they slid on the strip of canvas, tumbled out of the box, and lay on the floor in a soft, doughy heap. He felt the box slip out of his grasp completely, and watched it knock against others. He saw the tower of proof boxes waver, then topple like Fiddlesticks.

“Whoa!” Johnny yelled, rushing over. “Lord Almighty,” he said, grabbing his hair in his fists. “My orders!”

But it was too late. Nearly a hundred loaves lay scattered and smashed across the floor.

•   •   •

The red light over the bakery door wasn’t on yet and Main Street was quiet and still as Ralph Angel drove back to Miss Honey’s. Three little girls waved from the bed of an old pickup as Ralph Angel passed; an old man dressed in a brown striped suit and freshly shined shoes moseyed down the empty sidewalk. Ralph Angel had offered to stay till they made fresh batches to replace the ones he’d destroyed, but Johnny had declined his offer. They’d have to work double-time to get all the orders out, Johnny said; Ralph Angel would just be in the way. Johnny offered to pay him for the hours he worked, but as much as he needed it, Ralph Angel couldn’t accept the money. Even though it wasn’t the kind of work he’d wanted, the hours he’d spent in the bakery had reminded Ralph Angel how good it felt to be needed, to be productive. Everyone needed to feel that their days had purpose, that they were moving forward.

There wasn’t room for a car to stop on the high bridge, but since it was still early and no cars were coming, Ralph Angel stopped anyway. He stood at the guardrail and looked out over the cane fields, stretched out like a soft green carpet in the morning light, and the bayou sliding beneath him. It was a long way down. He thought again about how that man on the bike must have felt, falling through the air, then hitting the water. Was he surprised to discover he was alive or had he always known he would survive? Ralph Angel thought back to that terrible moment when Blue fell into the barge slip. He’d thought he would die and he’d felt—he’d felt relief that it would all finally be over. Almost wished it could be so. But then he’d thought of Blue, all alone in the world, and it had been enough to make him keep going. He had to keep going. Somehow.

Ralph Angel pulled his tie from around his neck, took off his shirt. For a long time, he stood there on the bridge in his undershirt, feeling the morning air against his skin. He held his new clothes over the rail until the breeze came up from underneath and then he stood there watching as they drifted down to the bayou.

August now, 5:30 a.m., and the temperature was already in the high seventies with 86 percent humidity. This late in the summer, anyone with money had escaped the asphyxiating heat and fled to coastal Florida—but not cane farmers. Because planting season had begun. There was no time to rest. And so, under a dawn sky aglow with misty pinks and purples, Charley, Denton, and Alison hitched planter wagons to tractors for the first day of planting, while crews of laborers—black locals and Mexican migrants up from Guanajuato—gathered around Denton’s pickup, waiting for instructions.

“Do we really need all these men?” Charley asked. “Isn’t there some machine we can rent that plants cane? Because my labor costs are going to shoot through the roof.”

“There’s no cane planting machine that I know of,” Denton said. “And if there was, we couldn’t afford it. You gotta trust me. Planting by hand is the way to go. Has been for the last two hundred years.”

Since cane grew from cuttings rather than seed, they had to cut some of Charley’s premium cane in the second quadrant that would ordinarily have been harvested—“mother stalk” Denton called it—and replant it in the freshly cultivated fields.

Yesterday, they had cut the mother stalk and loaded it into the cane wagons. Now, as soon as Denton gave the signal, each tractor would pull a wagon through the fields slowly enough for the crews following behind to yank the mother stalks off the back and lay them in the open rows. Later, another tractor would come along and cover each row with dirt.

Between now and early September, Charley needed to clear and cultivate 25 percent of her land—rid it of the oldest cane stalks, which were no longer producing, and replant the same ground with mother stalk. In a few weeks, delicate shoots known as first-year stubble would sprout from knobs along the recently buried stalks, and twelve months from now, if all went well, she’d have a decent stand of new cane to harvest for the next four years. That’s how it went: 25 percent new cane, 75 percent existing. It was a constant cycle, one made even more unforgiving by the brutal August heat. Planting season was fleeting; and between the thunderstorms and the equipment breakdowns, Charley couldn’t stop for a minute if she wanted next year’s crop in the ground on schedule.

•   •   •

By six o’clock, it was light enough to start. The last tractor was hitched, the crews assigned. They were about to head toward the back section, now known as Micah’s Corner, when Romero, the most experienced of the Mexican laborers, told Charley one of his men was sick.

“Sick how?” Charley said, eyeing the thermometer she’d nailed to the shop door so she could warn the men when it got too hot to work. Last week she rushed a man with a core temperature of one hundred six to the clinic. Two more degrees, the doctor warned, he would have died.

“Fever,” Romero said. The brim of his hat flared wide as a whirling dervish’s skirt. “It’s no good, I know. But if he works today, he will maybe make the others sick too.”

“Shit,” Charley said, but Romero was right, of course. After all the trouble she’d gone through to get the men up here—the H-2 visas and the bus tickets from Guanajuato, the expense of fixing up the workers’ house behind the shop so they’d have a decent place to sleep—the last thing she could afford was for them all to get sick. “I’ll drive him to the clinic.” Charley dug in her pocket for her keys. She pulled a black man who went by Huey Boy off the crew and told him to drive the tractor, then radioed Denton and Alison, already on their way to Micah’s Corner, that she’d return soon as she could.

•   •   •

It was after eight by the time Charley got back from town. In halting high school Spanish and with a series of hand gestures, she explained the prescriptions to the sick worker, set a bottle of water by his bed, then headed for Micah’s Corner. When she’d first arrived in Saint Josephine, this quadrant was the worst section of her land—blackjack land, Denton had said, ominously—overgrown with weeds, johnsongrass, and useless fourth-year stubble, the rows crooked as witch’s fingers and so deeply rutted they were almost beyond repair. But since they’d cleared everything out and started over, the rows were straight and evenly spaced. Every time Denton pulled the cultivator through, he’d climbed down from his tractor, shaking his head in wonder, saying, “If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I wouldn’t believe it. Cutter goes through there like a wind song.”

Now, standing at the edge of those fields, under a sky that had already faded from blue to white in the rising heat, it was obvious what the morning’s delay had cost her crew. The goal was to plant five rows at a time with each man responsible for a row. But with four men, not five, behind the wagon, they hadn’t made much progress. The crew moved slowly, pulling cane stalks from the wagon with extra care to ensure each row was filled, but Charley saw gaps where there was still simply no cane at all. Those spaces would be empty once the cane grew, which meant a lower yield next year.

Without another thought, Charley ran out to the field. Huey Boy was doing a good job of driving, so instead of replacing him, she joined the crew, pulling armloads of cane stalks off the back of the wagon. The men looked at her as though she’d lost her mind, whispered in Spanish, but there was no time to explain. Piled ten feet high in the wagon, the cane was still heavy with dew. Leaves and dirt were mixed in with the stalks, as if an enormous hand had ripped a ton of cane from the earth and dropped it into the wagon. Which was pretty much the way it had happened: after Denton cut the cane yesterday, Alison had used the derrick, which looked to Charley like a gigantic claw, to scoop the cane off the ground and dump it into the wagon until it was close to overflowing.

Positioning herself behind the wagon, Charley was surprised to discover that the tractor bumped along at a steady clip, and it was all she could do to pull a few stalks off and lay them end to end before the tractor was out of reach and she had to run to keep up. As she worked, she thought of the rats, snakes, rabbits, even wild pigs that might, at that very moment, be buried in each scoop. Chances were they’d outrun the combine when it went through, or were sliced up as it passed, but who knew for sure? She’d heard stories of rats leaping out of the wagon, of men being bitten by snakes coiled among the stalks. Then there was the broken glass and the cane leaves with their razor-sharp edges. That was only the beginning. After just a few minutes, dirt had caked her arms, her watch, and the front of her jeans and had even sifted into her pockets, and she wondered if she’d ever be clean again.

Every few minutes, the men whistled to Huey Boy, who flipped a switch causing the hydraulic arm to shove cane from the front of the wagon to the back, closer to where Charley and the crew were pulling stalks. It felt to her that a tsunami of cane was coming at her. But there was no stopping. Each time the cane got low, the men whistled and more stalks got pushed back. At the end of the row, the tractor lumbered onto the headlands, moved five rows over, and the work began again. It was simple, mindless labor, but grueling and treacherous all the same. As the workers grabbed armloads of cane, the long stalks knocked Charley in the head before she learned she needed to duck. When the men dropped the cane in the rows, it landed on her feet and she stumbled. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought they were doing it on purpose. But there was no time to wonder. The cane wagon kept moving. Men kept whistling. The hydraulic arm kept shoving the cane to the back edge of the wagon, and Charley kept working.

The sun rose higher, the temperature leaped by ten degrees in the time it took to reach the side of the field where they’d started, and Charley’s clothes were drenched. One of the men stooped beneath the wagon, grabbed a metal cup from the hook, and held it beneath the watercooler strapped to the axle. When it was full, he offered it to Charley and she gulped it down, not caring that she’d heard members of the crew hack and cough and spit before drinking from that very cup. The water was sweet and cold and trickled down the front of her shirt.

Every few rows, Huey Boy shifted the tractor into neutral, climbed out of the cab, and scaled the plant wagon to check on their progress, his expression, as he looked down at Charley, a mixture of amusement and admiration. Charley imagined what he’d tell his buddies when he met them for a beer after work: that he was working for a crazy black woman from California who not only
owned
the land, but got behind the wagon and planted cane herself. Then Huey Boy climbed back inside the cab and Charley heard the faint beat of hip-hop over the engine’s rumble.

Finally, the wagon was empty. The men fell back. And as the tractor lurched away, the men gathered handfuls of leaves into small nests and sat down right in the middle of the field, cowboy hats shielding their faces from the sun, and Charley sat too, glad to watch the tractor roll down the headland and out of sight, grateful for the few minutes to rest. One man smoked, but the others took the opportunity to eat, ripping the outer husks off the cane stalks, gnawing at the sweet fibers, sucking and chewing, and finally spitting the pulpy wads in the dirt.

“You work hard,” Romero said, offering Charley a length of cane.

Charley sucked the juice greedily and spat. “Where will you go after this?” The money Romero would make during these next four months was good, Charley thought, but it wouldn’t last all year.

“Arkansas to pick apples,” Romero said, “then home to my village. I have a small farm.”

Charley thought of all the men like Romero—Native Americans and indentured servants from Ireland and Germany, Chinese, West Indians, and former black slaves—who, through the centuries, had left their families and their homelands behind, sometimes voluntarily but sometimes not, to work sugarcane. “I hope you’ll come back next year.”

It wasn’t long before Huey Boy, pulling an empty wagon, appeared and made his way along the furrows. Groaning as they rose, Charley and the rest of the crew didn’t bother to dust off their jeans as they fell in line and the work began again.

•   •   •

By lunchtime, it was hotter than the Congo Basin, the air heavy with humidity, the few clouds flat against the sky, the trees at the edge of the field blurry through the heat rising from the field. Denton and Alison brought Charley’s lunch from the shop, and the three of them camped out in the tractor’s meager shade.

“I’m impressed,” Denton said. “I thought you’d quit after the first row.”

“My hat goes off to these guys,” Charley said. Normally, the heat lessened her appetite, but the hours of work had left her ravenous and slightly dizzy. “I don’t know how they do it.” She thought about the sick worker she’d driven to the clinic. Whatever he had, she hoped it only lasted twenty-four hours because she doubted she could keep up this pace much longer. Still, as Charley looked at the progress they’d made that morning, there was no denying the thrill of it, no ignoring the simple delicious fact that she had reached this stage in the game.

“Looks like your plan worked, Denton,” Alison said. Indeed, word of their pay package had spread. In addition to the men Denton had hired earlier in the summer, twenty-five more had stopped by the shop in the last week, interested in hiring on, and they’d had the rare luxury of handpicking the crews. “Keep up this pace, we’ll have the back quadrant planted in ten days. Even the locals are putting out a hundred percent.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Charley said, though she knew exactly what Alison was saying. She’d stopped counting the number of times she’d heard people refer to black folks as “locals,” and was weary of their suggestion, sometimes their outright declaration that black folks would rather sit home and collect welfare than put in an honest day’s work.

“Nothing personal,” Alison said.

“I get so tired—” Charley began, and thought, at least call them
pioches
, which was the term the eighteenth-century planters used in referring to their black slaves and more honestly captured the feeling of disdain, but Denton interrupted.

“Just heard on the radio they’re talking about a hurricane.”

Alison pushed his cigarette into the dirt. “Jesus, Denton. Why you want to go and jinx us?”

“I’m just telling you what I heard. Right now, it’s a tropical storm off Haiti, but it’s getting stronger. Next forty-eight hours it’s supposed to hit between here and Port Arthur.”

“That’s almost a hundred and fifty miles,” Alison said. “May as well say between here and the moon.”

“Maybe,” Denton said. “But it means we’re east of it.”

“What difference does that make?” Charley said, trying to imagine what a hurricane might be like. Earthquakes she knew; but with the exception of the one or two truly devastating ones that had occurred in her lifetime, she didn’t think much of them, they were more of a nuisance, really, and she always laughed to herself when she talked to someone from the East Coast or Midwest who spoke of their unpredictability with what seemed to her an almost irrational fear.

“Winds are always stronger east of a storm,” Denton said, “and there’s usually more water. Has to do with how the storm turns.” He looked out to the horizon and frowned. “I’m telling you now, that storm makes landfall, we’re in big trouble.”