“They hope to sell Louisiana to the United States,” I said.
“Do they now! To America? And whatever will you do with it?”
“President Jefferson estimates it will take a thousand years to settle.”
“Let England take it, is my advice. You Americans are having trouble enough governing what you have. Vicious elections, I’m told. Lies, pamphleteering, and demonstrations by the rabble. You’ll want the Crown back someday, mark my word.”
“We have some loyalists here on the island waiting for that happy day,” Lady Lovington added.
“Our independence was confirmed twenty years ago by treaty.”
“I’m still correcting mistakes I made forty years ago!” Our host guffawed.
It was five, the shadows lengthening, by the time the governor took us on a tour of his plantation. His wife had offered to entertain Astiza at the house, but she’d demurred, preferring to come with me. I knew why. She found domestic chitchat boring. And after the botched sale of the emerald in Paris, she didn’t trust me on my own.
I’d merely picked at my food but still felt bloated in the heat. I was not alone. Three-quarters of the food was sent back untouched, presumably consumed by slaves happy to benefit from European attempts to maintain home customs.
We mounted horses to tour the fields, the epic blue of the sky hazed by field smoke and dust.
“Sugar, Mr. Gage, is the one thing that turns a profit here,” the governor said as we rode sedately toward a mill. “Up to eighteen months to grow, excruciatingly difficult to extract, and expensive to ship. What makes it possible is slavery, and the British abolitionists seeking to end the trade are seeking, sir, to end the prosperity of the empire’s richest colonies.”
“Captain Dinsdale said the same thing.”
“It’s why the revolt in Saint-Domingue is so worrisome.”
“How many slaves do you own?” We were three pale, sweating inspectors white as frosting, touring a dark chocolate of earth and skin.
“Two hundred, and they represent most of my capital. More than my herds, more than my horses, more than my sugar mills, and more than my houses. Even L’Ouverture insisted the freed blacks of Saint-Domingue continue to labor on the plantations. He knew there was no alternative. He needed money to buy arms and powder from America, and the only source of money was sugar. To strip the blacks away would be like dismantling the masts, sails, rigging, cannon, and ballast of a ship. It cannot be done, sir. It cannot be done, for their sake and ours.”
We came to the bare crown of a hill. The windmill rose there, its sloping stone walls fifty feet high. Opposite the blades of the mill was a huge timber as long as a mainmast. It led from the axle of the great windmill sails at the top of the tower down to a track in the ground. Now I saw how every tower’s blades had been aligned so neatly to the prevailing wind. The timber worked like a great tiller, pushed along the ground so that it turned the mill’s top to face the breeze’s direction. From within the structure came the great grinding, as cane was fed into the mill’s presses to be squeezed of brown juice.
We dismounted and went into the dimness. It was even hotter there, the trade winds not penetrating. Donkeys were led laden into the gloom with the last of the season’s harvest, their backs carrying a small mountain of harvested cane weighing more than two hundred pounds. A release of the hemp ropes that secured it, and their burden cascaded onto the mill’s floor. Then the cane was fed by the slaves into the gears of the windmill, the juice squirting to be caught in a tin trench below.
It’s my habit to be friendly, and I thought I might say something to these sweating laborers, but they ignored us as completely as working ants, their eyes only for their ominous, enormous black overseer in one corner who held a curled whip. The laborers’ movements were choreographed by gears and rollers. I couldn’t understand what they were saying to each other; their jargon was a broken mix of English and African, with bits of French and Spanish littering as well, all thickly accented.
It nagged at me to try to communicate, to somehow bridge our gulf of humanity, but what could I say? I was observing a brutal workshop from which no hope of deliverance was possible. The quips of we masters-and by the color of my skin I was one of those-were as irrelevant to these slaves as Marie Antoinette’s blabbering about baked goods. The French had succeeded in crushing a revolt in Guadalupe inspired by the language of the French and American revolutions, but only by roasting the ringleaders over open-pit fires like spitted pigs. Liberty was restricted to one color only.
My own country’s Constitution says much the same thing: no black man or woman can vote. So I felt inadequate to the heat, stench, and cruelty, a participant in a system I’d no say in inventing. Morality suggested I talk like an abolitionist, but practicality suggested I keep my mouth shut. I needed Lovington’s cooperation-meaning passage on a ship to the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue-to rescue my son. I cast about for something to say.
I was surprised to see a bright, well-sharpened cutlass hanging near the mill rollers. “You risk giving your workers a weapon?” I finally asked the governor, pointing to the sword.
“It’s for the overseer to chop off their arms,” he said matter-of-factly. “If they reach too far forward, the rollers catch their fingers and the pressure inexorably draws them all the way in, their heads crushed like melons. I lose valuable property, and a trough of juice is ruined by blood. A one-armed slave, on the other hand, can still be trained to do light chores. I keep the sword burnished to remind them of the danger. Stupid, some of them. Or careless. I let them know there’ll be whippings if there is any blood sugar.”
“Surely you could invent a safer mechanism,” Astiza said.
He was annoyed. “I am not a mechanic, madam.”
“Hot work,” I said more diplomatically, attempting to change the topic. I felt I was on a tour of Dante’s Inferno.
“Bearable for Africans. They’re lazy, actually, caring nothing about my profit, no matter how much I exhort them. They don’t really want to work at all.” He seemed perplexed by this, flicking his riding crop against his own thigh. “Come, I’ll show you where it really gets warm.”
We walked next door to the boiling house, a rectangular stone building shaped like a barracks. The air above it quivered from the heat within. Inside was a long, shadowy, luridly lit gallery. “Here’s the truly hot work, Mr. Gage. Israel there is my most valuable possession, because the boiler man makes or breaks the quality of the sugar.”
Five huge copper kettles hung over a trench of glowing charcoal. This Israel, stripped to a loincloth, moved between the steaming pots, ladling the cane juice into the first and biggest, skimming out the impurities that boiled to its top, and then ladling the purified remainder to each smaller pot in turn until the sugar juice began to turn thick and ropy.
“From a gallon of juice we can get a pound of muscovado sugar,” Lovington said. “The syrup is tempered with lime to become granular. Just before it crystallizes the boiler must judge the moment and ladle it into a cooling cistern. This work is more dangerous than the mill, because the hot syrup can stick like tar and burn its way down to your bones. Israel there moves like a minuet, does he not? In fact, I orchestrate at Carlisle a great dance. The cane must be crushed within hours of cutting lest the sugar deteriorate, and then the juice has only hours to be fed to the boilers before it ferments. We’ve been operating here day and night for three months now.”
“What happens when you’re not harvesting?”
“We plant, burn, weed, manure, and repair.”
“Do the slaves have religion?” Astiza asked. It seemed a digression, but she had great interest in that subject.