Eat the City(45)

Jorge was nine years old when his parents took him out of school to labor in the fields alongside them. “It wasn’t about what I wanted or didn’t want—I had to do it,” he says. A slight, small child, he joined grown men bregando con la ca?a, or doing battle with the cane, soaked with sweat as they hacked through the hot, reedy jungle that was their backyard. He started as a water boy, scooping river water into a coconut or gourd shell for the workers to drink for eight or nine hours and a salary of a quarter a day. Jorge was the oldest of thirteen, and as each of his brothers aged into cane work—at about seven, eight, maybe nine—each took his place in the fields. For Jorge, the system of farm work on an un-mechanized family plantation in Aguas Buenas seemed to stretch infinitely into the past and the future.

The planter would set fires on the farm, burning the leaves of the cane plants to make it easier to cut through their stalks. The wet, tropical swelter would be compounded by the fire’s ripping dry heat. From his family’s shack, Jorge could see thick black smoke whirling up over the crops. Later, when the sweet-smelling smoke had cleared, the workers would follow a blackened path into the field. There in the char, Jorge would gather the sugar plants, finding, again, that the thick skins of the stalks had protected the precious juice from the flames.

Work like this leaves its marks on the body. Fine hairs on the cane stalk implant themselves in the skin, causing a desperately itchy kind of pain—like rubbing up against fiberglass in the heat—and sometimes ulcerous sores and infections. Laborers like Jorge endured cuts on the hands and arms, sciatica, leg pain, and, too frequently, serious injury by machete. No one wore gloves. Thick, tall rubber work boots shielded the legs of those who could afford them, but Jorge worked barefoot. When he cut his feet on sharp cane husks, his father would salve the wound with a wad of chewed tobacco. Jorge became a carrier, forever stooping, heaving, bundling, and throwing cane like a javelin into the truck bed, and then a cutter—by his reckoning, a thousand times harder than any other field work.

His cane would be trucked to Central Santa Juana, a mill in Caguas, where it was crushed. The juice would be extracted and cooked into syrup, crystallized, and divided into raw sugar and molasses, ready for export to refineries. People describe the thick smell of the air around the central as a sweet burn, like cooking caramel. To Jorge Torres, it smelled like honey. It was the smell of transformation, as the stalks of a familiar plant became heaps of yellowish crystalline export. It was a smell that could mark the raw sugar all the way to places like New York, where that smell, and every indication of a growing plant rooted in a place, would be refined away.

Jorge’s family didn’t buy much in the way of food from the store, but sugar was one of the items, along with salt, rice, salted cod, and oil. Jorge would scoop up pure white refined sugar from unmarked sacks and carry it home in a folded-up piece of paper. He never knew the brand. In the middle of a sugar field, muscles aching from cutting cane, Jorge ate sugar that could have been from anywhere.

Eighteen years old, exhausted from sugar, Jorge had been working in cane half his life and wanted to retire. The year before Jorge’s birth, the Puerto Rican legislature—acknowledging that the island’s economy could not support its people—had created the Employment and Migration Bureau to help them to leave. Migration was increasing, and Jorge heard of a Department of Labor program: Sign up, and employers in places like New York and Connecticut and New Jersey will send for you. Your night flight will be paid, and you can double your wages the next day. The first independent decision Jorge made as an adult was to leave. He packed a heavy, handmade wooden suitcase with work clothes and little else, stepped onto a plane, and soon found himself in rural Pennsylvania, bending to pick asparagus just as he used to double over to collect cane. Soon, though, after a few more short-term contracts in agriculture, he moved to a “broken-down” neighborhood in the Bronx to work in a picture frame factory, in construction, in restaurants, never to return to the fields. There were big meals of pernil, chicken, pork chops, sweet flan—no yams if you didn’t want them. Jorge met his wife, Margo. Life seemed better than it had ever been.


IN 1799, William Havemeyer, a young sugar boiler from Bückeburg, near Hanover, was laboring in a hot sugarhouse in London, the world’s refining capital, when word of his skill crossed the Atlantic to New York, where the art of boiling sugar was still not very well known. William knew how to clarify the sweet extract of the cane plant with ox blood, clay, and albumen, bake his mixture for hours in a kettle, and pour it into a mold, producing an off-white crystalline sugar loaf to sell as a hard cone. His product was in high demand in New York, where people kept sugar locked in a box, like a collection of tiny gleaming diamonds, a chest of wealth.

The Seaman sugarhouse on Pine Street contracted William to come from London and run the refining, and his brother Frederick soon joined him. Not long for wage labor, the brothers decided to open a business of their own. They found a site on the very edges of the city on what would become Vandam Street, north of Canal and a few blocks from the west side wharves, a place so isolated that the stagecoach passed by mainly to transport prisoners. They built a two-story sugarhouse, as well as homes for their own families and two hired hands, and they began to roll barrels of tan-colored raw Caribbean sugar one by one in from the ships at the wharves. As was the custom, William and Frederick Havemeyer passed their trade on to their sons, William and Frederick Havemeyer Jrs., and they passed the trade to their sons, so that cousins and brothers and uncles at various times ran the company together. The account of which son-in-law came into the partnership when, adding an ampersand to the name of the Havemeyer firm, can read like a dense biblical list of who begat whom. The point is that the Havemeyers ran permutations of the sugar company for more than a hundred years, and their business would reshape the sugar landscape of the Americas.