True Confections (23 page)

Anyway, lots of organic chocolate, perhaps most organic chocolate, has uneven quality control and can be unpleasantly musty, with a muddy mouthfeel and a moldy taste. That said, if Zip’s Candies were to make a calculated decision to commit to
fair trade and organic ingredients, we would have to charge north of three dollars for a pack of Little Sammies or a Tiger-melt bar, instead of a worrisome enough retail price that has finally gone over the one dollar line for the first time. That’s not going to happen, especially not now, with the economy the way it is. This is no time to start making premium chocolates for the prosperous. Except for the Bao-Bar, the best strategy for Zip’s Candies is to keep making cheap candy for working stiffs. I’m counting on this depression to create another golden era for the candy bar.

I
RENE IS INCREDIBLY
naive. I recognize that her heart is in the right place (about most things that aren’t directly connected to me). I don’t even disagree with her about these goals, in the best of all possible worlds. But one of the many differences between us is that unlike her, I was not born a princess, and I live in the real world. And meanwhile, since I have touched on fair trade and other problematic issues of cacao production, let us not forget that whole fiasco just six years ago, when Irene embarked on a campaign to end child slave labor on African cacao plantations, feeling, as she claimed, a personal responsibility, having “blood on her hands,” she actually said more than once in interviews, because of her family’s chocolate candy business.

I have always refrained from suggesting that there was any impropriety in Irene’s relationship with Abu Nkongo, who was both younger than her own son, Ethan, and also extraordinarily attractive and charming in a very sensuous, almost animalistic way, in those months when she had him living with her and they did all that traveling around together. Perhaps others thought there was something going on between them. It’s not my place to speculate.

Am I the only member of the family who has not forgotten about this episode, when Irene toured for months lecturing people on the shameful origins of their cheap chocolate? It was potentially very harmful to Zip’s Candies, it was certainly embarrassing in candy-manufacturing circles, and it forced us to take a position. Julie, who was already remarkably adept at website management and all things Internet even then, created a page on our site for a bland statement about our views on the fair trade issue and our hopes for more future involvement, stating that meanwhile of course we support the efforts being made to improve the quality of life for all cacao workers in Africa. It’s so much more complex than that, of course. But Irene pushed us to the wall. She forced us to say something about this so we would look good instead of bad, when we would have preferred to remain silent.

This issue of child slavery on cacao plantations in Africa became Irene’s raison d’être. It ended in embarrassment, if not humiliation. The randomness of her lighting on this issue in the first place is actually funny. Irene didn’t discover the plight of the African cacao workers because of her guilty conscience about living off a chocolate candy company. And she didn’t discover her destiny as a spokesperson for the cacao slaves because of inner soul work with any of her rent-a-gurus, either. Hardly. It all came about only because she went to Paris for a meditation workshop she never even attended.

On her first morning there, Irene went out to do her daily requisite twenty-four Tai Chi forms in the little leafy park across from her Left Bank hotel. It was very early, and she was quite pleased with herself, being a fit American doing her Tai Chi in a park in Paris, feeling superior to the indolent, smoking Parisians, loving her own sophistication about being in Paris by herself, especially smug because she was staying in a cozy Left
Bank hotel instead of going back to the very grand Right Bank hotel where she stayed the only other time she had been in Paris, with Arthur, when they were first married. As she went into White Crane Spreading Its Wings, her favorite Tai Chi position, the one she most liked to catch a glimpse of herself doing in the mirror during her Tai Chi classes, she saw a huddled form shivering on a bench.

This was Abu Nkongo, a charming teenage boy who admitted to her, in answer to her questions, which she asked boldly and a little breathlessly while doing her stretches, using the bench on which he had spent the night for support, that he was hungry. She took him to a café for breakfast, feeling utterly thrilled and delighted with herself for doing this, and he told her his story, all about how he was from a small village in Côte d’Ivoire, how he had nothing, knew nobody in France, and had been sleeping in parks for many days, since arriving in the back of a vegetable truck full of tomatoes from Holland. How did he get into that truck? He sneaked aboard on a loading dock in Rotterdam. He had stowed away on a bulk container cargo ship in Abidjan three weeks earlier as it was loaded with cacao beans en route to a Dutch cocoa processor.

Droste? Irene wondered, naming the only Dutch chocolate company she knew, and Abu nodded. She was moved to tears by her sense of her own empathy welling in her chest for this sweet boy.

He was a Cameroonian citizen because his mother was from Cameroon, Abu explained to her as they walked back through the park, though his mother had arrived in Côte d’Ivoire before he was born, and so he had never seen Cameroon himself. Irene was able to get him a passport, working with a corrupt official at the Cameroonian embassy. I have no idea how, but apparently Irene, ditsy as she seems, knows how to find the people who
know people who know how to make things happen (perhaps this skill is a by-product of her passing involvement in a druggy underworld), and she can certainly always come up with the cash.

Irene took Abu for photographs and had them delivered to the official, and then two days later she met the buyable Cameroonian embassy worker in a café, where they exchanged envelopes folded inside copies of
Libération
. He got up and walked away a moment later, and she sat there with her coffee for five more minutes, as instructed, peeking at Abu’s new passport inside the folded newspaper. I am sure she thought she was Lillian Hellman
in Julia
.

Irene had meanwhile talked Howard into having Zip’s Candies sponsor a work visa for Abu, some nonsense about cacao harvesting and consulting on chocolate candy manufacturing, and incredibly enough, after three dramatic weeks, during which time she fed him and paid for a hotel room for him, she was able to fly him back with her to New York. She brought him to New Haven for a week (they stayed with Frieda), where his consulting consisted of a tour of the factory and a prodigious consumption of Little Sammies and Tigermelts fresh off the lines. Howard took him along for a round of golf and lunch at his club, and reported afterward that Abu had been polite but quiet and had enjoyed driving the golf cart, and that if he was pushed off his set pieces, his fluency in English deteriorated markedly.

Julie and Jacob, who were both in college at the time (Julie had just started at Wesleyan, Jacob was in his last year at Kenyon), came home that weekend and found Abu strange and unlikeable. Julie thought there was something not quite right about him, but she couldn’t really say why she got this vibe (she is a very good observer of people), and meanwhile, we were of
course all contorting ourselves to find things to like about him and ways to make him feel welcome.

After it came apart, Julie accused the whole family of being naive limousine liberals like the people in
Six Degrees of Separation
. We had been so eager to embrace Abu as this heroic victim who made us feel better about our own white privilege, she said. She had a point. Would Irene have taken him under her wing if he were white and homely instead of an exquisitely beautiful African boy?

Irene took Abu home with her to Telluride. She dressed him in a lot of Patagonia fleece, which he liked very much. She began to write letters to newspapers on the plight of the cacao child slaves in Africa. They were invited to speak at a Telluride school, at a church in Montrose, and then on a radio station in Durango, and then, with Irene growing more and more passionate about the issues, and more and more delighted with herself for her noblesse oblige, they embarked on a lecture tour together, which she bankrolled. She hired a publicist, who was able to get them invitations to speak at churches and schools mostly, and they got good press coverage wherever they went.

Over and over, for the next three months, Abu told his heartrending story about having run away from a brutal cacao plantation where young boys were held captive and forced to labor under the scorching sun, harvesting cacao pods fourteen hours a day in exchange for prisonlike accommodations and scant meals of corn paste and boiled bananas, at risk of being beaten by guards if they failed to work quickly or efficiently enough.

It was quite moving, their show (Julie and I saw them at Wesleyan, early in their East Coast run), with Irene working the PowerPoint, with photos and graphs and charts and bullet-pointed phrases, while Abu explained in his halting English that
he has learned that it takes four hundred beans to make a pound of pure chocolate, and each pod contains some forty beans, and all of these beans are harvested by hungry, scrawny boys who have never tasted chocolate. Abu himself first tasted chocolate in Paris, when Irene bought him
a pain au chocolat
for breakfast in the café that first morning, and he thought it was the sweetest taste in his mouth, like something surely from heaven, not something from the earth, and he was amazed that those dirty, gritty beans could produce such richness.

Irene told me proudly that he would always stop to say this, always using those words. His already moved audiences were rapt as he went on to describe how the boys would labor every day on the plantation, with dangerous snakes underfoot and stinging insects circling their heads. The boys, wearing little more than shorts and flip-flops, would just work and work, lifting the heavy machetes high to cut the ripest heavy pods from the trees—the bosses would be angry when some of the cacao pods were useless because they were blackened with disease from rot or bird damage—and then with their machetes they would slice each pod all the way around and then pull the two halves apart to get the placenta, the gooey brainlike mass of precious beans in the core.

The boys would scoop out the beans and spread them on woven mats or on banana leaves, and cover them with more banana leaves so they would ferment properly. Every day they would cut the pods and split the pods and spread the wet beans on mats for fermenting, and each batch, after a few days, once the sweet milky fruit surrounding the beans had fermented and begun to dry on the beans, would then be uncovered and the beans would be dried in the sun for a few days, perhaps a week, depending on the weather. Once dry, the beans would be shoveled into large burlap bags, each bag weighing some sixty-eight
kilos, and the boys would carry these big sacks of dried beans weighing nearly twice their own weight to a collection point, and there they would load the bags onto the trucks that came.

Abu said he had been lured to the plantation from a bus stop outside the town of Daloa, when he was traveling from his rural village to visit his grandmother. He had been promised money, $150 for a year’s labor, and a new bicycle. He was sixteen at the time, and small for his age, and the man who approached him had thought he was younger. Many of the boys on the plantation were only nine or ten. Abu was taken hundreds of miles in a truck with some other boys who had also been picked up that day, to the plantation. He didn’t really know where it was, this cacao plantation where he spent more than two years in captivity. Abu never found out the name of the townland and he never saw any nearby villages. He never got his money or his bicycle.

Details of Abu’s escape were murky, and he would always hesitate and then drop his eyes and lower his voice and say he could not tell all the truth of the story because he could not name the people who helped him without endangering them even now, from the person who helped him climb in with the sacks of cacao beans as they were loaded into a truck, to the driver who smuggled him with the cacao as the sacks were loaded into the hold of a cargo ship that sailed from Abidjan. He felt responsible for the other two boys who had run away with him, Malik and Jumo, both younger than Abu, who died when the bulk container of cacao beans was fumigated a few days before the ship arrived in the Dutch port. Abu didn’t die only because he had crawled out of the container in search of water, and was in another part of the ship’s cargo area during the fumigation. He was found by a member of the crew, who heard his anguished cries when he returned to the container with water for his friends.

Although he was being held for the Dutch authorities, a sympathetic sailor who was supposed to be watching him (Abu thought the boat and crew were from Singapore) turned him loose on the dock, he said, before the police arrived. Abu would always emphasize that the details of his personal story were unimportant, and what mattered was that everyone should know about the boys who had not escaped, all the hundreds and perhaps thousands of children who were wielding those rusty machetes to cut the cacao pods, all those children who were captive to this labor, living on corn paste and boiled bananas, living in fear of the guards who could beat them or even kill them if they didn’t work hard enough, so the world could have its chocolate.

T
HIS COMPELLING TALK
was given probably thirty times in various locations, with Irene making all the arrangements and covering all travel expenses. They raised more than two hundred thousand dollars for Common Dreams and the International Labor Rights Foundation. I am sure everyone who heard one of these talks was shocked and moved and shamed by these revelations about where our chocolate comes from. Just as we are all shocked and moved and shamed each time we are reminded where our clothing comes from. It’s always uncomfortable to stop and imagine for a moment exactly what the origins of the chocolate in your M&M’s might be, and to consider who has labored in what way, under what conditions, in order to provide that sweet melting-in-your-mouth moment. It is also difficult to consider the life of the child in Bangladesh who was paid pennies to make your Old Navy T-shirt. So I want to say again, Irene’s dedication was impressive, and even though the inspiration for her involvement turned out to be a fraud, that doesn’t
undo her accomplishments in getting attention and raising money for a worthy cause.