CRYSTAL PAYNE
Someone said that a dead body’s neck pops when you cremate it so I grew up believing that death was noisy. On Sundays, the day we celebrated the death of Christ over communion, my parents packed us up in their old black Nissan Sunny, a family of eight in a five-seater car, and drove an hour to deeper South Trinidad for church. On the days I stayed awake, I watched the trees and old houses blur by, chanting in my head the names of the villages we passed — Oropouche, Dow, Rosillac, La Brea, Vessigny, Vance River, Guapo, Gonzales — as my mother had taught me.
Before Oropouche, where I officially started my recitation, we passed Mosquito Creek, driving on the road alongside the brown seawater on the right side of the car, and mangroves on the left. Where the creek ended stood a cemetery overlooking the sea. I would glimpse funerals through the half-open car window, warm breeze carrying the scent of the dark grey smoke that was rising up, up, up and across the sea, becoming invisible in the distance as it melded into the wind, solid bodies becoming air, inhaled by families and friends.
I looked out for ash as we passed by, scared of what a body might look like as it burned, scared that the ashes of a person could be crushed between my brown fingers. I listened for the echoing sounds of death whenever we passed by. Enchanted, curious, afraid of these dead bodies that had no right to haunt and frighten the living, I imagined that the burning bodies must have popped and burned like sugarcane, until only ashes remained. The ashes fell into the dirty creek water until they were no more, the promise of wanderlust in death thwarted.
It was mostly Hindu families who held their funerals there, and as we drove by, I could see their blurred faces. I was sure that they wept and grieved for the end of their loved ones’ lives and the beginning of the reincarnation process. Their gods had promised them repentance, my pastor said. Like the process from sugarcane to sugar, you are broken, put through the mill, squeezed, pressed, until the juice comes out. Then boiled, over and over, and what’s left, if you’re good, if you stay true to the process, are the crystals of what you hope to become.
My grandmother was buried on a different cemetery hill, deep in Gonzales, Point Fortin, the destination of our drive every Sunday. As we passed through the town, I pointed out the houses of my parents’ family, and my mother picked up the thread and continued her narration… “In that trace is where Bernadette and Annette and dem live.” “Victor dem does live over here. Remember Victor?” “Nah you woulda been too small to remember dem. I go hadda take you there sometime.” As her voice narrated the trip, talking to everyone and no one at the same time, my eyes followed her fingers long after they pointed here and there. I wondered what I missed out on by living far from my extended family. I imagined that I would never know who I was until I learned my mother’s history. My cousins all lived nearby in Point Fortin; they walked to each other’s houses, ate, and played football in the stadium together on random evenings, creating or continuing traditions I did not know. I was jealous that they seemed privy to family histories I would never be a part of, for I could only learn from my mother’s narrated stories that I gobbled up in bits and pieces and committed to memory. They lived it. I was a visitor who only knew what I was told.
My own family tradition was limited to our house and backyard an hour away where we lived. I only knew mango-picking and guava-jam-making and sugarcane-sucking, which all happened within our gated yard, and only for a moment in time, for, as the youngest, most of my siblings had outgrown me. My idea of family turned into a bitter loneliness as they migrated to the US one by one, and I would learn that death was not the only way to leave someone behind.
On hot evenings at our home in San Fernando, after most of my siblings had gone to the States, my older sister and I used to catch the ashes of cane at the front of our house, in our uneven front yard, half paved in concrete, and half grassy, with ledges and massive boulders and red construction sand I sometimes ate. Our suburban neighbourhood was close to one of the largest sugar factories in Trinidad. In Ste Madelaine, the adjacent town with the closest cane factory to us, sugar continued to burn, even beyond the end of the sugar industry that once sustained the country’s economy. Left behind by the British for cheaper beet sugar, and then left behind by politicians for a railway industry, the cane kept burning.
The broken-down sugar factory in Ste Madeline was named after a woman called Mary Madeline. She haunts the island, but no one knows her. We lose our history in one generation in Trinidad, for what is worth remembering if we can forget the hurt and move on? Ste Madeline was the first central sugar factory in Trinidad and Tobago, a sugar hub. First transported along a river, then by mule, and then railways created not to transport humans but to transport cane sugar — “sweet gold.” Trains and sugar entwined in modernity, until, in resistance to the colonial past of sugar, government powers shut down the train system. The government website boasts that Ste Madeline was the largest sugar factory at the time in the British empire. This history comes in bits and pieces, narrated by other voices.
I wonder how the nation smelled then — did the scent of molasses migrate beyond Ste Madeline and Cocoyea village; beyond Pleasantville into downtown San Fernando? Or Eastward toward Princes Town and Fifth Company, towards Moruga where African American soldiers — ‘Merikins’ — once migrated to escape the US. I wonder if the scent travelled southward to La Brea and Point Fortin, finding similar blackness in one of the only pitch lakes in the world, or in oil spills that made Trinidad one of the richest nations in the Americas for a time. Perhaps it went northward to Port of Spain, the capital city, which seemed like an entirely different world to me. Did the cane ash fall there too? Perhaps their cane ash was from Caroni or other sugar factories. We were a nation defined by the scent of molasses, by innumerable grains of sugar that could only lead to our self-destruction, and we were not the only one. We shared that history with the rest of the Caribbean.
***
On those boring evenings when we stood in our front yard, looking up, dancing, playing, trying to catch the ash, my sister and I pretended the ashes were snow, and we were in that distant land everyone left us for — we were some distant children — with wealthier parents, better food than we saw on TV but never tasted, with snow piles and snowmen. But instead, my sister and I played in sand and ashes. Our snow did not stick; it was not white either. It was black and when we caught an ash-flake, we rubbed it between our thumbs and forefingers until it blackened our fingers a different black than our skins. There were no angels to be made. We played with death and decay.
But I received my new life on a Sunday after being baptised in the dirty waters of the San Fernando wharf. At twelve years old, I separated myself from the brownness of the water and the deep stench of fish. The pastor dunked me under water and they sang hymns as I was raised and joined the heavenly throng and I thanked God that I wasn’t going to hell like my twelve year old classmates. I was white as snow now. When real death got close, it was a fellow high school student with cancer. I was confused about how illness could attack someone so young, but I was confident that my baptism would ward off that evil. As my catholic school teacher chanted hail marys, she searched our eyes to make sure we felt sorry that we had lost one of our own.
I bowed my head, but I didn’t feel sorry at all. No one had taught me how to have empathy.
Neither did I know that when my time came, cancer would have ravaged my twenty-six-year-old body. The hair first. Then a piece of yourself in a surgery room. Losing your dignity as your mother’s aged brown hands bathed you. And you forget the history of who you were. Only bits and pieces are left.
As my sister and I bathed in the black rain of the cane ash, a sweet burnt smell filled the air. It was not unpleasant. The scent was heavy, casting its net over the close by towns and villages. Spiritual, ethereal even — cane burning at the altar of the factory. Sugar used to be an offering for the colonial gods around and above us. Ashes on foreheads, Ash Wednesday to cleanse the sins of Carnival Monday and Tuesday. Crosses. Death, then new life. When you cut down a cane stalk, another grew from the same root. Perhaps we were progenitors not of mankind but of sugar. It was the life cycle of the plantation: life grew from death. Rebirth and regression. Reincarnation too, perhaps.
We forget. The soil remembers. Eric Walrond writes that there are “nigger corpses” everywhere on the plantations, reaching their bony hands up to grab ankles, to haunt. In his story “Vampire Bat,” the corpses regurgitate a child, one that sucks the lifeforce of the living. I had heard fables about such beings when I was a child. Jumbies who followed you home. La Jablesse who bade you to follow her. Douens who ran with their feet turned backwards. Harbingers of death.
Caribbean mythical creatures change slightly from island to island, but, like cane, the root remains. The soucouyant comes at night — there is something about the night — with a woman-like appearance (or is it a witch-like appearance?). You must have an innumerable substance to trick the soucouyant into counting, wasting her time until she turns into a ball of fire in the night — or is it near sunrise? These are uncountable substances: salt, rice, sugar, things traded and planted and exported and taken, then imported back home, as if they had not originated here. Salt in Aruba. Rice in Guyana. Salt and sugar in St Martin.
Sugar everywhere, its crystals connecting the chain of islands floating in the Caribbean Sea. The plantation and the sparkling seas, the white and pink and brown sands, they all house death, like my three-year old cousin drowning at the beach as we played in the water unaware that death had already come for one of us; or like a 300-year-old would-be ancestor choosing freedom by drowning below the waves. We play, we dance, we swim, we eat on broken shells. Yes. You must have an uncountable substance to thwart the soucouyant. Good and evil exist in strict binaries that must never be entangled. Evil must be dealt with, and always with fire.
The fire burned in the cane factory: the phallic cane stalk is crushed; its liquid caught. Burning. Remaking. Drying. Molasses. Brown sugar crystals. Again and again until there is no more sweetness left and the fruit is unrecognizable.
Unaware of the history, we danced in the ashes of cane, my sister and me.
Every year, we were sequestered from dancing and fire, from carnival — considered too evil, people painted in pitch black oil or in blue paint, horns on their head. They mocked and they jabbed at those walking by and reminded us that we were the devils. They gyrated on each other reminding us that there was heaven right here. At the church camp located kilometres away from civilization, in an encampment in the middle of tall bamboo trees and an unbeaten path, we played games and prayed and tip-toed into dirty old bathrooms to pee late at night. Once back in town, untouched by sin, I watched the devils walk out of church with ash on their foreheads. After days of moving their hips to the heady music of the steel drums I was forbidden to listen to, forged in the same fire that burned the cane, the ash showed that the devils had emerged on Ash Wednesday new beings.
I once tried to capture the cane ashes, cupping them carefully between two bony hands, but I couldn’t keep them, for they crumbled or flew away, into another hand, another town, another island, only leaving their black stains behind.
Some days at my home in San Fernando, I spent time sitting on the mossy side steps, looking out through our front yard and into the street for passing neighbours. Once a neighbour caught me loudly reciting the giant’s call from Jack and the Beanstalk. I didn’t know what a beanstalk was, but I liked stories that enabled me to escape the real world. In the real world, I only knew peas — the green ones in pods. I liked planting them at Easter when we began tilling the soil, after the memory of carnival was gone. I opened little holes in the ground with my fingers or a stick or a fork, and carefully dropped in three corn seeds and two green pea seeds. I watched them grow in the next few months — from adolescence to adulthood, hopping so as not to trample them under my feet. By the time it was Corpus Christi, they were taller than me and the soil was deep brown and often wet, heralding the rainy season. It was a joyous time.
Cornfield by Zoii
My father cleaned the backyard when the rotting fruit dirtied it. He dug long trenches for the water to pass through, constructing his own makeshift irrigation system, ensuring that every tree would have access to a water supply and that they would all have an equal chance of living. I did not care much about the life of the plants, only what they produced.
After months and months, it was time to pick the peas. I hated shelling them. Cracking open the pods with silver bowls beneath our hands, ready to swallow our peas until some undefined future moment. We flicked each pea out of its assigned place in the pod, and if there were worms, I would secretly run away deeper into the back yard, beyond the mango trees, past the non-bearing lime tree that still lived. I hated it. It had no right to hold on to life.
I would run past the pink petals that carpeted the ground below the pomerac tree. While someone else continued shelling, I would stand at the precipice of our backyard where the guava tree was, always skipping over the hump where my brother told me our first dog was buried. My father said our land ended after the guava tree, but the area beyond it was too small for anyone to use and so we planted bananas and cherry trees until the land ended in a large drain. We never had to plant cane, because it grew on its own, even when we did not want it, even after my father poured concrete over the cane patch. It made its way up, up through the soil and stone, a reverse tower of babel bringing people of different languages together in one place. For days after shelling the peas, we would have Pelau, or stew peas and rice, or anything made with peas.
It was the same with guava jam. My grandmother picked large bowls of guava, boiled them, squeezed out the pulp, and continued boiling it with cane sugar until it moved from solid to liquid to solid again, a part of the original fruit thrown out with each step of the process. Then we ate guava jam for months afterwards. Whatever was in season was on our plate.
I was happy when it was corn season. The blades of the corn leaves were sharp, but not as sharp as cane leaves. I once heard that there were massive corn fields in other places. But I was here, and here, there were only corn patches. I imagined that the farmers who my mother bargained with in the market every Saturday morning had larger corn patches. I wondered if the difference between a patch and a field was the same as the difference between a hill and a mountain, between this and that, between here and foreign.
Cane was here. Everywhere. In large fields and in small patches, cane stalks grew toward the sky, individually, each cane flexing its body upward, until it climbed too high and fell over onto the ground. It didn’t matter much whether the cane stalk was standing or lying down. We would use a cutlass, brown and rusted with age and easy to wield, to massacre the plant. Cane cut down Abel, Abel cutting Cane. We denied its ascension into the heavenly realm. And Abel offered first-fruits to his gods in Europe, believing we were their favourite. Except those gods didn’t love us; they loved cane.
Cane became sugar but cane was ours.
Sugar is a tourist, for it left our shores and sat with Kings and Queens, returning to its home at higher prices, flexing its new look in unrecognisable packaging. Ian Strachan writes that the plantation and paradise cannot be separated. The plantation is part of the pastoral landscape that defined the Caribbean as paradise for Western tourists. Brochures and Postcards. Tea with sugar. Cakes with sugar. Cocoa with milk and sugar, a recipe taken from black Jamaican women. Hans Sloane stole the recipe and sold it to Cadbury. So the story goes. Bits and pieces of history, narrated through other voices. Millions, billions of dollars, and poor women keep making cocoa tea for their sugar plum-darling-chunkalunks.
In 1808, there were 272 sugar mills in Trinidad. The country produced over 53,000 tons of sugar in 1880. And Ste Madeline was the first central sugar factory. Since then, cane ash has been blowing like kites over Trinidad, ashes of life and death wandering lonely as a cloud. Before the town of Cocoyea was built. Before my sister and I were born, and before we lived in the large concrete house on fertile soil built upon old cane fields that refused to let us have the land.
***
I watched as my father’s slim figure skillfully flexed his old cutlass, cutting down cane every year only for it to spring up again, unrelenting, dying but undead. It was a common occurrence. He would slice the cane stalk, carefully peeling the hard purple skin. He would cut the fruit into slices, getting rid of the knots, the parts too hard to chew, along each stalk. And into a Ziploc bag they would go, into the fridge, for one of the six children to chew and chew and spit out once the sweetness was gone. My father peeled the cane for us, but my mother once showed me how to peel it with my teeth and I never forgot.
Cane was always in season. Or so it seemed.
My grandmother, my mother’s mother, had Sugar — the colloquial name for diabetes in the Caribbean. She used to hide her guava jam away from her grandchildren in the far reaches of cockroach-laden cupboards, sealed for future days. After my grandfather left her with three young children to go live in a nicer house not ten minutes away, she did what she could to provide. The land helped her. It never stopped producing.
The guava jam was made from the lone guava tree that nuzzled the large square hole that acted as a kitchen window in her wooden house. Flour bread was made from scratch and peas were shelled. Corn that we planted grew and died every year. And she would buy white rice, brown sugar and packets of cocoa tea that she used to make two cups for me and my sister at night. The earth fed her as it betrayed her body. The grains trickled down from the factory into our everyday lives until it became our poison, from dearth to overuse, manufacturing sick generations.
The first sugar mill in Trinidad became a cemetery. In 2019, the World Health Organization reported that diabetes, Sugar, was one of the leading causes of death in Trinidad and Tobago.
My grandmother died quietly on a Sunday like any other, after church. Her death was not as noisy as I believed death to be. There were no ashes either. Only a black body on white bathroom tiles, the remnants of her food still on a plate on the dining room table. Then she was lowered deep down into the heart of the soil. And my father told me not to cry at twenty-one as I watched her limp body, “You must behave.” So I stood mutely, watching everyone sing at the funeral. Dry eyed and heart broken, I walked back down the cemetery hill that I’d never visit again. And when my own disease took me at twenty-six, I also sat quietly and heartbroken, this time in a hospital in New York, far from the raised lump that held my grandmother’s body, even further from the lump under the guava tree where my first dog was buried. But too close to the lump in my own body. Breast cancer, the doctors said. Strange, they said, No family history?
No. No family history.
The only history I knew was the soil and the sugar and maybe the ashes. Always in bits and pieces. One day, I thought at the doctor’s office, I’ll also be a member of the underground corps of black corpses, manure for a thousand new cane stalks and guava trees and corn patches and green peas. And for those who supposedly died loudly through cremation, in fire, only ashes are left to prove they were alive, and ashes are fragile, dissoluble. No trees will grow on their bones. No new life. No children will hop over raised lumps of soil on cemetery hills.
But ashes still haunt us, floating over and among us like feathers in the wind, black pieces of the dead begging to be touched, to dissolve between fingertips, to be inhaled and then to move on to another place and time. They surround us, remnants of a living thing that once seemed so grand, the sweet and the macabre forever intertwined.
References
Gerard A. Besson. “Sweet Sorrow: The Timeline of Sugar in Trinidad and Tobago.” Caribbean History Archives. 12 Dec 2018.
NALIS Trinidad and Tobago. “Merikins: Free Black Settlers 1815-1816.”
National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago. “The Rise and Fall of King Sugar.”
Mimi Sheller. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. Routledge, 2003.
Ian Strachan. Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean. University of Virginia Press, 2003.
The National Trust of Trinidad and Tobago. “Ste Madeline Sugar Factory.”
Eric Walrond. Tropic Death. 1926. Liveright, 2013.
World Health Organization. “Trinidad and Tobago: Health Data Overview for the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.”
