They Take Their Lumps

By Paul Gray

BIG SUGAR

by Alec Wilkinson

Knopf; 263 pages; $18.95

One good way to catch a reader's attention is to start off with a bang. This book does so. Chapter 1, first sentence: "The most perilous work in America is the harvest by hand of sugarcane in South Florida." Holy mackerel, stop the presses! A lot of coal miners will certainly be relieved to learn this, not to mention scads of military test pilots. And just how perilous is this work, which is principally performed by laborers brought in from the Caribbean? An answer is tucked in at the end of a paragraph 245 pages later: "As far as I know a West Indian has never died in the cane fields."

This is certainly ending with a whimper. Yet such a dying fall hardly saps the considerable strengths of Big Sugar, subtitled Seasons in the Cane Fields of Florida. Forget the comparative dangers of cutting sugarcane. Wonder instead why roughly 10,000 West Indian men, chiefly Jamaicans, come to South Florida each winter to do it. That is what Alec Wilkinson, a staff writer for The New Yorker, did when he came across this information in a 1984 newspaper story. Other questions aroused Wilkinson's interest as a reporter. Among them: Is it not odd that a major domestic cash crop should be so heavily dependent on imported black labor? What is going on down there? For the next four years, Wilkinson paid a number of visits to South Florida trying to find out.

He was looking for an expose -- a big U.S. business using and abusing desperate, impoverished workers -- and in large measure he found what he wanted. Florida accounts for around 40% of the sugarcane grown in the U.S., and producers there have been using West Indian cutters for more than 45 years. Mechanical harvesting would be much less expensive, but there are substantial areas in the state where the soil is too fragile to bear the ravages of machinery. So the brunt of cost consciousness falls on the cutters, who invariably take their lumps. They are routinely cheated of some time spent in the fields. They are expected to cut and stack one ton of cane an hour. Those who fall behind are "checked out," deprived of any pay they may have earned that day and sent back to their barracks, which in many cases resemble prison camps. As the ultimate penalty, laggards or troublemakers can always be deported.

Wilkinson, who has also written books about police work on Cape Cod and moonshine enforcement in North Carolina, finds and displays much genuine cause for outrage here, but he also brings back a richer, more complex story than he seems willing to acknowledge. Better pay and treatment from the growers might improve the cutters' lot, but nothing will ameliorate the reality of harvesting cane by hand. It is boring, backbreaking work, carried out in oppressive heat, surrounded by the dangers of poisonous snakes, fire ants and whirling, razor-sharp scythes. Some of those who suffer these miseries take pride in their work. A man from St. Lucia tells Wilkinson, "Cutting the cane in itself is also a skillful task, you must be skillful at it. When you cutting the cane you must have a free mind."

Fearing reprisals, all but a few cutters refused to talk to Wilkinson. Those who cooperated are quoted at length, and they do not seem exploited in their own free minds. A bad job in the Florida fields is better than no job back home on their islands. This is where the message -- villains and victims -- that Wilkinson would like to send gets scrambled, to his book's ultimate benefit. What emerges instead is a parable, as old as the epics, of humans trying to make the best out of life's imposing, impossible conditions.