The Ghost Apple (22 page)

It was during this period that I began to think of coming to St. Renard myself, where, I hoped, a change of scenery might do me good, and for all I knew I might happen upon Professor Kabaka in the street. It was with these ideas in mind that I applied to be a student in Tripoli College’s Field Studies Program in Tropical Agriculture, for not only would this bring me to St. Renard, but so too would it provide me with an opportunity to lose myself in charitable work, and it was my earnest hope that I might stir myself from that peculiar state of soul-sickness, and achieve a finer appreciation of all that was good in my life, if I labored to improve the lot of those less fortunate than I. The Field Studies Program, notwithstanding its association with Big Anna, an association of which I then had an imperfect understanding, seemed ideally suited to my needs, for the application materials available to me promised that it was a “broad-based initiative in resource management and community planning.” I give the very words so that the reader may see how I was led astray. Participating students worked to “improve community organization, reduce the island’s dependence on fossil fuels, and introduce sustainable methods of agriculture,” and would themselves acquire “hands-on experience with tropical food crops.”

O Reader, if I had but attended more carefully to that phrase, “hands-on experience,” I might have saved myself so much grief! And yet what indication did I have that the Field Studies Program was not what it purported to be?

It was the eleventh day of January, in the year
2010
, when I boarded a plane with six other students, to be joined on the island by nine more, and flew to the old colonial city of San Cristobal, on the island’s Caribbean coast. Thus in a matter of five hours I was transported from the unutterable gloom of the northern winter, with its bitter cold and low skies, to the paradise of the West Indies, for so it seemed to be: The water shone an astonishing blue, the air was rich and exhilarating to breathe, and the sun, at its meridian, was almost directly overhead, and seemed but a distant relation to that fragile gray disk that hung in the skies over wintertime Tripoli for a few hours each day.

St. Renard lies twelve or fourteen degrees north of the line, in tropical waters, and has accordingly only two proper seasons, a wet season and a dry season, making it suitable for the cultivation of tropical crops like bananas, sugar-cane, coconuts, and cocoa, as well as coffee at higher elevations or in shaded groves. And yet, as I had learned from Professor Kabaka, the island’s bounty is its curse, and these crops depart each day from its seaports, or are processed in factories on the island, and provide no nutriment to the Renardennes. Indeed, with so much of the cultivable land, and so much of the farmer’s own time, consumed in the production of these crops, the island is unable to produce food for its own tables, and later I often saw the local laborers eating tinned salmon or pale, canned vegetables, which were imported from the United States and Brazil. Our task, therefore, as it was represented to us in the only orientation meeting we were privileged to attend, was to help islanders make the transition from this manner of farming toward a model of subsistence agriculture. And yet such noble designs were quickly forgotten, and indeed were never mentioned again once we were in the island.

We had no time to explore San Cristobal, and promptly upon disembarking from the plane we were led to an ancient and rattling school bus and taken south to Tripoli’s branch campus, which is called the Proxy College of the West Indies. This beautiful house was to be our lodging for the first five days of the semester.

The Field Studies Program was at present the only educational program offered at the Proxy College, for the conditions of Tripoli’s agreement with Big Anna had necessitated a reorganization of sorts. This was all to the good, for it meant that we had the place to ourselves. The Proxy College is situated on a former coconut estate along the island’s Caribbean coast, from where it commands a majestic view of the water, which manifests, in its various depths, all the blues and purples of the spectrum. Our accommodations were spare but of the utmost cleanliness, with the excellent ventilation that is a necessary comfort in those latitudes. For the five days we were privileged to live there, I delighted in learning the names of the exotic plants that were in the grounds, and the wonderful variety of their colors and forms: the elegant disorder of the coconut palms, the haunting dream-purple blossoms of the jacaranda, the spreading banyan, the oleander, the pineapple plants, the salmon-pink ixora and the malodorous soursop, the silk-cotton tree with its buttressed roots.

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.