Queen Sugar: A Novel (35 page)

“
Thirteen dollars.
You’re not listening. I don’t have any money!”

Miss Honey stood up then. “I’ve heard everything I need to hear, and I’m telling you what you’re going to do. You’re going to find a job for your brother. I don’t care if he digs ditches or scrapes cane kettles. He’s coming to work for you until he gets back on his feet and you’re going to find the money to pay him. And when we get finished with that, we’re going to talk about giving him what is rightly his. If that takes till the end of grinding, if it takes the next ten years, then so be it.”

The room, as far as Charley could tell, had tilted ninety degrees. Everything seemed to be sliding off its surface, crashing to the floor. Cabinet doors swung open, dishes tumbled, and silverware flew from the drawers, and Charley almost reached for the salt and pepper shakers to hold them in place. She swore she couldn’t hear her own voice for all the noise, but when she looked around again, the room was quiet. Just the soft whirring of the ceiling fan, the steady dribble of water from the faucet.

“You can’t force me to do this,” Charley said, still dazed. “And anyway, the trust imposed restrictions on who can own it.”

Miss Honey pointed an indicting finger. “‘And now art thou cursed from the earth,’” she said. “‘When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.’”

The counter was littered with vegetable scraps. Charley stared at Miss Honey’s broad, silent back, listened to the hiss from her skillet. Outside, Micah and Blue screamed as they played hide-and-seek and Charley knew they were still high on all the cake they’d eaten. They would run through the woods for an hour and come back panting and spent and hungry all over again.

Charley threaded her belt through the loops of her jeans. “I’m going to work,” she said. “I won’t be back till late.”

“We’re having pork chops,” Miss Honey said. “I’ll leave yours on the stove.”

Charley recognized the gesture. Food was love. Food was Miss Honey’s weapon, her sword and her shield. Charley knew she could accept the olive branch, and put the whole incident behind her; she could surrender, hire Ralph Angel, and in turn, receive the nourishment she’d come to cherish and crave.

Or she could reject it.

“No, thank you,” Charley said, coolly. “I won’t be hungry.” She wouldn’t eat Miss Honey’s cooking if someone paid her. Not tonight, not for lunch tomorrow, not as leftovers later this week.

Miss Honey flinched, almost imperceptibly. She stirred something in the skillet and the hiss flared into a roar. “Then I guess you’d better go on.”

•   •   •

Charley was still shaken when she pulled up to Violet’s church, and for a few minutes she just sat staring at the words
TRUE VINE BAPTIST CHURCH
, which were painted over
FRANK’S STICK ’N STEIN.
Violet said the place used to be an old pool hall, Charley recalled, and she surveyed the row of dilapidated storefronts. Taped to the door, a piece of poster board meant to function as a marquee read
TODAY’S SERMON: DON’T BLOCK YOUR BLESSINGS!

Charley stepped out of her car and leaned against the hood. Soon, the door swung open, piano music wafted out to the street, and a handful of people streamed onto the sidewalk trailed by Violet, stunning in her bright yellow dress and hat like a Victorian lampshade.

“Oh, my Lord, would you look who’s here.” Violet strode over to Charley and seized her hand. “What’s going on? I can tell by your face this isn’t a social call.”

Charley leaned forward and buried her face in her hands. She told Violet about deciding to auction off
The Cane Cutter
, about writing Denton her last check, about her blow-up with Miss Honey.

“I can’t work with him,” Charley said. “I know he’s my brother, but he’s—”

“Combative? Erratic? Manipulative? Has an inflated sense of his own worth?”

“I’ll take door D, Monty, all of the above,” said Charley. “She wants me to give him a share of the farm, but she doesn’t understand I’m not allowed to. Either it’s mine or it goes to charity. Some legal thing.”

“So you get to support Ralph Angel while he works. Or, more likely, doesn’t.”

Charley’s eyes filled. “Yes. And Miss Honey is angry. She quoted a lot of scripture. I think she put a hex on the farm.”

“Girl, Mother always quotes scripture. She’d quote scripture in front of the Supreme Court if she thought it would help her win her case.”

“Yeah, but she quoted that passage about being your brother’s keeper. That last part about being a vagabond on the land was creepy.”

“Hmmm.” Violet went quiet for a moment, and Charley could practically see her scanning the biblical reference book she had in her head—it was the same edition Ralph Angel owned. Her lips moved as though she were reading to herself, her soft mumbling growing steadily louder. “‘A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth,’” Violet said. “Oh. I see what you mean. Most people leave out that last part.” She nodded, reverentially. “Mother’s good.”

“So I’m cursed?”

“Who can say for sure? This
is
Louisiana.”

“Violet, you’re not helping.”

“I’m sorry, darling, but this one has me stumped. I have to say, I don’t envy you.” Violet gave her arm an encouraging pat. “Don’t worry. You’ve managed to get this far, you’ll figure something out. I have faith in you.”

Just before Charley pulled away, she had a thought and rolled down her window. “How come you don’t have a Blessing of the Crops service here?” she said. “Because if you did, I promise I’d come.” She gazed again at Violet’s church with its hand-painted sign and poster board taped to the door. Violet looked up and down the street and sighed. “’Cause none of our members own any crops to bless, I suppose.”

•   •   •

Mr. Guidry’s tiny shack was tucked far back in the woods, back beyond the dam where the local high school kids smoked pot and blasted the Black Crows from their car stereos, past the
POSTED
sign and the little lake covered with a thick quilt of algae, and standing on Mr. Guidry’s creaky porch where every other cypress board was missing, Charley thought only a fool would venture this far back in the woods by herself with no invitation and no idea what to expect. How she’d found Mr. Guidry’s still confounded her, but she had, just where Violet said it would be. “This is going to sound crazy,” Violet had called to say, not long after Charley got home from her church, “but, there’s an old man, a
traiteur.
”

“What do you mean, a
traiteur
?”

“A healer.”

“As in
voodoo
?” Charley had held the phone away from her ear. “You’re right. You do sound crazy. I’m desperate, Violet, but I’m not
that
desperate.”

“Now, hold on. Just hear me out before you say no. It’s not voodoo.
Traiteurs
do good things like heal snakebites and get rid of warts and cure colicky babies, but they do other things too. Mother used to go to Mr. Guidry. Swore by him. I don’t even know if he’s still alive, but it’s worth a try.”

Now Charley knocked on Mr. Guidry’s door—just one knock—and when he answered, she stood facing a blackberry-colored, rheumy-eyed man no taller than Micah, and older, it seemed, than time. Charley almost turned and ran. But Mr. Guidry invited her in as though he’d been expecting her, and before she knew it, she found herself sitting on an old wooden stool in a corner of his one-room cabin.

“You’re a Bordelon,” Mr. Guidry said. “I remember your daddy.” He was soft-spoken and frail, but moved about the cabin with relative ease. Charley watched as he pulled herbs and feathers, dried chicken feet and scraps of leather from dusty bottles on the shelf beneath his window.

“You knew my dad?”

Mr. Guidry nodded. “Long time ago.”

He laid all the objects on the table, then rubbed each of them while he muttered an incantation, and when he finished, he touched his hand to Charley’s forehead. What she felt was something between falling and flying. She wasn’t sure when he removed his fingers, but when she opened her eyes, he presented her with a necklace—just a piece of string, really, with nine equally spaced knots—which she let him tie around her neck. Violet said he’d refuse to take any money and would even consider a thank-you unnecessary, so Charley shook his hand and offered him the fig cake she’d baked. She was already through the woods when she realized he’d never asked her why she’d come—he seemed to know—and that she’d forgotten to ask what he’d done for her father.

Standing under a sky that had yet to break, Charley marveled at how different the air smelled. Mixed in with the usual mildew and damp earth was a carbony sweetness, and Charley knew that from this day forward she would always associate mid-October with the smell of burnt sugar. She took a final swig of coffee, dumped the rest in the bushes, screwed her thermos cap on tight, and crossed Miss Honey’s yard, her breath pluming in a small cloud of white vapor, the frost on the grass crunching under her boots. In the car, she turned on the radio. And the heater. Mornings were cold now, and while the car warmed up, Charley listened to the first few minutes of
Morning Edition
. Sluggish economic growth, congressional logjams, unrest in the Middle East. Nothing ever changed.

Two minutes later, the car was toasty. Charley honked, then honked again, and was about to get out, when Ralph Angel tripped down the front steps carrying his shoes.

“Sorry,” he said, sheepishly, sliding into the passenger seat. “I was looking for my gloves.”

Charley threw the car into drive. “Let’s just go.”

•   •   •

By the time they reached the drawbridge, night was peeling away from the horizon, amethyst and plum replaced by a rising line of tangerine light. Fog swirled across the asphalt. The bayou was the blue-gray of a Confederate coat.

Ralph Angel rode in silence, which was fine with Charley. He looked out the window and picked at a blister on his hand. But every once in a while, he seemed to hear something on the radio that troubled him and he stared at the dashboard as though the announcer had insulted him personally.

“You’ll be on Romero’s crew,” Charley said, not because she wanted to talk, but because once they got to the fields, there wouldn’t be time to explain.

Ralph Angel looked over at her.

“His men work fast,” Charley continued. “It’ll be hard to keep up.”

“Gotcha.”

“And you’ll want to keep your jacket on all day, even when it gets warmer. Those cane leaves will slice you up if you’re not careful.”

Ralph Angel reached into the well and lifted a book to the window. “
The Southern Gardener
.” He flipped the pages, bending them slightly at the corners.

Charley cringed. He may as well have been rifling her underwear drawer. “Careful with that,” she said, “it’s not mine,” and practically snatched the book from him.

•   •   •

Even in the near-darkness Charley could tell, by the height of the headlights and the rhythm of their bounce, that the approaching vehicle was a tractor. As they got closer, she saw that it pulled an enormous V-shaped trailer loaded to the top with cane. Stalks jutted through the metal rails and spilled over the sides. Charley slowed. “Will you look at that?” Gazing up at the creaking wagon, Charley couldn’t help but smile. It was the second sign, after the burnt-sugar smell, that grinding season had officially begun.

When the tractor passed, Charley touched the necklace Mr. Guidry gave her, fingering each of the nine tiny knots.

“Where’d you get that?” Ralph Angel asked.

“It’s nothing.”

“Please tell me you don’t believe in all that hoodoo shit.”

Charley pressed the necklace to her throat. “It can’t hurt,” she said, her mind drifting back to the dark woods. Maybe she was imagining things, but she felt different—still anxious about their chances, still nervous about how much
The Cane Cutter
would sell for, knowing that it was her last hope, still furious with Miss Honey—but there was a quiet calmness too, one that had not been there before, as though a cocoon, loose and silky, had been spun around her.

Ralph Angel rolled his eyes.

“You only break when the cane wagon is empty and goes to reload,” Charley said. And since she was at it, added, “You have an hour for lunch,” and thought of the plate covered in tinfoil—last night’s pork chops—still on the stove where Miss Honey left it for her. She would ask Denton to pick up an extra sandwich if he went into town.

“Aye, aye,” Ralph Angel said and saluted. “No breaks unless the wagon is empty; an hour for lunch; clock out at seven.”

If she weren’t so angry with Ralph Angel, Charley thought, his response just now would be funny. Which is what Ralph Angel must have thought too, because he smiled to himself, and Charley felt a quick softening around the edges of her disgust. From the corner of her eye she watched Ralph Angel slip his hands into his gloves. They were extra large and looked cartoonish on his hands.

“It was the only size left,” Charley said. “One of the guys might trade with you.”

Ralph Angel shook the gloves into his lap, and for the next mile, they rode with just the radio playing, until Charley glanced over and said, “When I told Miss Honey I didn’t want to hire you, you know it wasn’t personal, right?”

Ralph Angel looked at Charley. His expression was cold. “Everything’s personal,” he said, then turned to the window.

•   •   •

At the shop, Denton and Alison had built fires in two empty oil drums and the crews huddled around them, warming their hands as the flames licked their fingers. Charley saw half a dozen new faces, men Denton recruited back in July, in addition to Romero and his crew. She introduced herself, asked the new men’s names, what towns they were from, and welcomed them to her farm.

“You ready?” Denton zipped his jacket. He stopped, puzzled, when he saw Ralph Angel.

“I’ll explain later,” Charley said, though she still hadn’t decided what she’d say.

“Hey, Denton,” Alison called, the first cigarette of the day bobbing from his lips. “Why’re we standing around?”

“Take it easy.”

“I can’t help it. First day of grinding always gets me fired up. Feel like a damned jitterbug.”

Denton called for everyone to gather ’round and mapped out the day. Romero’s men would keep planting while he, Alison, and Charley drove the tractors and the combines through the fields that were ready for harvesting. The new guys would replenish the planting wagons and haul the cut cane to the mill.

“Bayonne is taking four hundred tons a day,” Denton announced. “We got eight cane wagons, but we really need ten. That means we got no time to waste. Longer that cane sits once it’s cut, more likely it goes sour. Got to keep things moving. It’s all got to flow.” He reached into an old duffel bag, doled out walkie-talkies, and told the men to check in on the hour. “Questions? Anyone got anything they want to say?”

“Yeah.” Alison raised his hand and stepped forward. “As some of you know, I ain’t too high on organized religion.” He glanced at Charley and Denton. “The Lord hasn’t exactly been good to me these last few years, but that’s beside the point. I think we should say a prayer, just to be safe. I’ll lead it if you want.”

All heads bowed.

“Gracious Lord,” Alison began. “You know if there’s ever been a sadder group of folks just trying to do what’s right, it’s this group of misfits right here. Why Miss Bordelon came down here and teamed up with us two old goats continues to be a mystery. But if you want my opinion, I think we done a pretty freaking good job pulling her farm together. The way I see it, we got a chance of bringing in a decent crop. So Lord, I’m asking you to cut us a break. You don’t have to perform any miracles or nothing, though that’d be nice. All I’m asking is that you let us do what we do best, what each of us was born to do. Let us be the best damn cane farmers we can be. Help us get to the end of this grinding season, and maybe even live to do it all again this time next year. Oh, and stick close to Miss Bordelon when she goes to New Orleans tomorrow. Amen.”

Amen.

•   •   •

The sun had risen in earnest, the fog lifting off the fields to reveal a carpet of solid green so thick Charley couldn’t see between the rows. In the combine, she fingered the knots on her necklace and waited for the signal. Another minute, and the walkie-talkie on the dashboard crackled—
Jose to Missus. One-two-three.
Through the window, she gave Jose the thumbs-up, turned the ignition, and the combine lurched forward, the massive scrolls on its front end slowly turning. Down on the ground, cane stalks trembled. The machine moved forward, chewing through the rows. She made sure to stay a few feet ahead of Jose’s tractor so that the combine was in line with the cane wagon he pulled as they moved along the row. Choppers inside the combine stripped leaves from stalks and cut the cane into billets, carrot-size pieces that traveled up the conveyor belt into a chute that spat them into the cane wagon. As Charley drove, shredded leaves and dirt fell around her like rain.

In an hour, the first two cane wagons were full. Jose pulled the tractor onto the headlands and waited for a driver to unhitch him. In the combine, Charley’s walkie-talkie sputtered, then Denton’s voice came in clear. He was sending Huey Boy out to relieve her.

“But I’m fine. I’ve got a rhythm going out here.”

“Okay, but I thought you’d want to be the one to haul the first load to the mill.”

•   •   •

Set back from the road, the Bayonne Sugar Mill was a jumble of geometric shapes—triangular warehouse roofs, cylindrical smokestacks, boxy square buildings housing the boilers and evaporation tanks, parallel rows of bulging cane wagons waiting in the yard to be unloaded. In Pittsburgh or Milwaukee, a mill like Bayonne Sugar would have closed years ago, dismantled and shipped piece by piece to Cuba or Santo Domingo, or converted into a sprawling indoor shopping mall with a food court and a metroplex. But this was Louisiana, and Bayonne Sugar was the largest, most powerful sugar mill of them all.
Take that, Landry and Baron!
Smoke and steam billowed from the stacks while the windows in the main building glowed orange as
bagasse
, the shredded cane pulp, burned. The air vibrated with the muffled roar of furnaces and the drone of gears turning. Twenty-four hours a day, from now through the end of the year, Bayonne Sugar would roar and growl and hiss until it pulverized, ground, and boiled every stalk of cane to crystal.

A convoy of trucks and tractors hauling cane stretched a quarter mile down the road, and Charley, strapped into the passenger seat of the bull-nose semi, smelled burning sugar even through the closed windows. She rolled hers down and inhaled deeply, not caring that she drew some of the white ash falling like fine snow into her lungs. She had dreamed of this day, this moment. For the first time she saw the true connection, saw the chainlike links of iron between herself, her father, and grandmother, and their fathers’ fathers before that. She was bound to this place, this small patch of earth; it was she and she was it. She thought of Ernest, who must have died praying—believing, crazily—that his daughter could do this. She thought of Micah, at school, where the scent of burning sugar must be seeping into every classroom. She even thought of Norbert Rillieux, son of a white plantation owner and free woman of color, who turned sugar processing on its head when he invented the muliple-effect evaporation system. Charley turned to the driver, a middle-aged black man whose nickname was Mule. His dark face was a map of scars and pockmarks. He hadn’t said more than two sentences for the entire ride—out of respect, Charley guessed; after all, she was the boss. Charley didn’t care. As he shifted gears and the truck inched forward, she put her hand right on top of his.

Mule looked startled.

“It’s okay,” Charley said. “I just wanted to say thank you.”

“We got trouble.”

Charley’s boots had barely touched the ground. “What happened?” she asked, but thought she knew.

“Your brother. The men won’t work with him.” Denton pulled her aside. “He got angry. Thought the men were making fun of him; thought they were working fast on purpose, stepping up the pace to embarrass him.”

“I told him Romero’s team works fast.”

“I’m not done. He didn’t like that the men spoke Spanish. Thought they were talking behind his back. Or, I guess you could say, way out in front of him.”

“Where is he?”

“Hold on. Somehow, he found out what everyone’s making; that he’s making less.”

“Well, of course he’s making less!” Charley shouted. And just like that, she was back in Miss Honey’s kitchen, standing there like a stooge while Miss Honey shoved Ralph Angel down her throat. If she could, she would call Miss Honey right now and scream,
You’re killing my farm!
“Damnit. I knew this was going to—This is exactly what I—”