Eat the City(44)
Because slow ship-borne messaging created a delay of months between placing an order and receiving the goods, selling sugar was a futures trade, forecasting supply and demand. “We are of Opinion Good Bright Muscovado will be wanted here towards the fall of the year,” wrote the merchants John and Henry Cruger. Ambitious young bankers monitored the sugar markets from their countinghouses. Newsmen at the New-York Gazette, the colony’s first newspaper, published reports of West Indies harvests, shipping traffic, and hazards such as piracy and storms. Everyone was interested in the ebb and flow of sugar. Confectioners began to advertise “all kinds of sweet meats, sugar work, sugar plums, cordials,” for the wealthy to serve at dinner parties and teas. Intense, giddy sweetness was moving within reach.
The problem with this enterprise was that it rested on the backs of African slaves. Because of the Caribbean trade in sugar, Manhattan became the most important slave port in North America. The Witte Paert sailed into the harbor in 1655, stinking from the waste of three hundred African women and men confined for months in the holds. Soon slavers docked regularly in the East River, and from 1700 to 1774 they unloaded as many as 7,400 slaves—more captive Africans than the total population of New York City at the start of the period. At first almost all were “seasoned” workers from the sugar islands of the West Indies who came on the return leg of New York–based merchant ships. Fully a fifth of the city’s people were black—more than any other city in the North. Black women often worked in the home, and men assisted their owners in their trades. They served as butchers and farmers and shoemakers, but the city’s highest concentration of slaves was in the Dock Ward neighborhood on the East River, where sugar traders lived and managed busy wharves and warehouses.
Leading New York sugarers already moving cargo through the Caribbean found it hard to pass up on the lucrative slave trade. John Van Cortlandt’s sugarhouse, according to the looping, calligraphic handwriting in his leather-bound account books, might go a week without selling a thing, or fulfill five orders in a day; he usually sold ten to twenty loaves of sugar at a time, but could sell more than a hundred, or as few as two. So his small house also trafficked in guns, swords, pistols, and bags of lead, and to supplement these enterprises: slaves. Among other ventures, in 1764, Van Cortlandt bought the brigantine Mattey and instructed Captain Richard Mackey to bring slaves from Sierra Leone to sell in New York or in Barbados for “as much good sugar and rum as will freight the vessel.”
Some combination of remorse and disgust about the slave origins of the city’s sugar wealth surfaced in the 1780s, when proposals began circulating to replace the tainted juice of the cane plant with clean sugar from the good American maple. A 1790 letter to a city newspaper advocating a boycott of slave-produced sugar suggested the maple tree as a “boundless” source of physical and moral sweetness. William Cooper, a leading New York anti-cane campaigner, took out a land patent covering an enormous tract upstate, around Lake Oswego, and promoted it as a site for a maple tree sugar plantation. He envisioned an elaborate system of maple sugar sharecropping, in which landlords would provide tenant farmer families with tools, credit, and transportation to market, he told the Agricultural Society of the State of New-York. Maple sugar, he promised, did not require “the lash of cruelty on our fellow creatures.” Yet the profitable cane sugar trade only grew, and before the end of the century, it had helped build the colonial backwater of New York into the new country’s capital and largest city.
THIS was the city that would one day receive Jorge Torres from the cane fields. “I was around sugar from the time I was born,” Jorge says. He was born in 1948 at home in a two-room shack in a Puerto Rican sugar field. Growing up, he thought the cane plants outside his door were very beautiful. In the fall, the guajana, or cane flower, would blossom, making a field of shimmering fifteen-foot plants. Those sugar stalks ordered everyone’s lives with their needs—to be replanted, burned, reaped, and hustled to the mill. Jorge was raised in their thrall.
Families like Jorge’s patched together shacks out of scrap wood, old sacks, remnants of boxes, and leaves of the cane plant itself—“whatever you could find,” Jorge said. He would wake in the morning with smoke in his eyes from the lamp, a glass bottle filled with burning oil. Outside, over a pit filled with stones, kerosene, and fire, his mother would prepare breakfast—coffee and grilled yams. His father and mother would step out before seven to work, armed with machetes. At the end of the day, Jorge, the oldest, would help cook dinner—usually yams with cornmeal, occasionally with codfish or sardines or the crabs the kids caught after a rain in the sloppy mud of the riverbanks by the cane field. Jorge’s family grew food—potatoes, cassava, plantains, avocados, pineapples, bananas—but the only thing they could count on for a meal year-round was yams—always yams—and Jorge came to hate them. After dinner, at sunset, a curtain of blackness swept thickly onto the fields, until there was nothing to do but sleep.
Sugarcane had been planted all over Jorge’s island. Cane stalks climbed slopes—even though the plant prefers the flat, coastal land and its rich alluvial soil—edging out the coffee and tobacco that had once grown so well in the hills. Sugarcane grew in narrow river valleys all the way down to the water, among the houses and up to the roadsides, in any of the flatter places among the ranges of the sierras of the eastern highlands. The local planter would give workers an acre of land to build a shack and farm some food, along with barely subsistence wages in the cane field.