Raising Cane

Story by SHANE MITCHELL | Photographs by RINNE ALLEN

November 24, 2020

“Gimme some sugar,” said my great-aunt Adele Anderson, who always grabbed me to her bosom and plastered red lipstick kisses on my head when I landed on her doorstep. She was kind to a shy, disheveled adolescent who belonged neither here nor there, and lacked sweetness of other kinds in life. Like her sister, my Nana, she was the sort of Southern woman whose hair was never out of place, carried purses clutched with military precision on her arm, and marched staccato in matching heels, even on cobbled streets in Charleston’s historic district. A descendant of French Huguenot refugees and Scots traders, my great-aunt was raised on one of the more isolated Sea Islands off the Carolina coast during the early years of the last century. Her father ran the country store next to the steamboat landing, where all the island’s children bought penny candy. She could speak some Gullah, the unifying creole language of enslaved West Africans, but so did everyone back then, Black and white, even if they wouldn’t acknowledge it because of race shaming or shameful racism. She taught me a little bit too, enough to appreciate its poetry and rhythm. 

By the late 1920s, a bridge finally connected the mainland, and my aunt left to seek her way elsewhere. When Adele eventually returned as a widow to the Lowcountry, a certain condescending cousin, one of those Charleston snobs, reportedly said, “You moved away. What makes you think you can come back and fit into Society again?”

Her reply, I’m told, was less than sweet.

The world is made of sugar and dirt.

— Alfred Döblin

A root word for sugar is śarkarā, meaning gravel or sand in Sanskrit. The related Arabic phrase is sukkar. From these, we get sucré (French) and azúcar (Spanish), shuga (Igbo) and gaari (Yoruba). The accepted location of origin for Saccharum officinarum, possibly as early as 8000 BCE, is Papua New Guinea, where indigenous people chewed on a wild cultivar long before its domestication. The spread of sugarcane followed migration routes westward across the Pacific Ocean, and spice trade routes eastward through the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and Africa. The earliest written reference appears in a Hindu scripture known as the Atharvaveda, compiled around 1200 BCE. Then it was called ikshu, meaning something desired because of its sweetness. Greek botanist and physician Pedanius Dioscorides included sugar in his De Materia Medica (circa 50-70 CE), the crucial pharmacopeia of plants used by cultures of antiquity. He wrote, "There is a kind of coalesced honey called sakcharon found in reeds in India and Eudaimon Arabia similar in consistency to salt and brittle enough to be broken between the teeth … It is good dissolved in water for the intestines and stomach, and taken as a drink to help a painful bladder and kidneys. Rubbed on, it disperses things which darken the pupils.” 

The Persians perfected sugar refining. Crusaders brought it home as a souvenir. Venetian merchants cornered the import market for molded sugar loaves and pyramids, some perfumed with violets or dyed with saffron; pastry chefs to Renaissance aristocracy and popes created fantastical sugar sculptures known as subtleties. Bartolomeo Platina, the first librarian of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, wrote in De Honesta Voluptate et Valetudine: “There is no dish which cannot be improved with sugar.” By the 15th century, large-scale production arrived in the Mediterranean, centered on the islands of Madeira, fueled by a craving for confectionery and the fortunes made from them. 

And that is how we come to a sugar trader named Christopher Columbus. 

Madeira is where Columbus married Felipa Perestrelo, the daughter of sugarcane grower Bartolomeu Perestrelo, who was also the first governor of Porto Santo, and began conversing with Portuguese navigators about the discovery of the Volta do Mar, or prevailing trade winds, as well as the North Atlantic Gyre, a circular current that lured ships into the uncharted ocean beyond the western horizon. These atmospheric conditions speeded the Age of Discovery, and the centuries of exchange to follow. Columbus deliberately transported sugarcane seedlings on his second voyage to the New World in 1493. Within a decade, the first successful crop was harvested on the island of Hispaniola. Sugarcane rapidly transformed the economies and culture of the Caribbean, Brazil, and North America. It spawned the colonial molasses trade, an unquenchable thirst for rum, and, more dreadfully, the stage of a triangular trans-Atlantic route called the Middle Passage. Before the end of the 18th century, all of this would coalesce in the South, like the syrup dripping from hogsheads piled on the sugar levees of New Orleans.

Cane syrup produced on Sapelo Island, Georgia.

Sugarcane and its derivatives would become foundational for Southern culture. It’s in the pecan pie and the gâteau de sirop and the corn pone. Poured on biscuits. Some fools — what the hell are they thinking — even put sugar in their grits. Women are expected to be sweet. So is the tea. William Faulkner praised drinking whiskey “cold as molasses” in Light in August and dissolved a teaspoon of sugar in rainwater from a cistern for his own toddy. Otherwise, he wrote, it “lies in a little intact swirl like sand at the bottom of the glass.” A Southern-born conspiracy theorist named Robert Henry Winborne Welch, Jr. invented Sugar Daddies and Sugar Babies. (He also founded the John Birch Society.) Fullback Bobby Grier first broke the collegiate football color barrier during the Southeastern Conference’s Sugar Bowl on Jan. 2, 1956, when he took to the field for the University of Pittsburgh Panthers against Georgia Tech’s Yellow Jackets. Ella Fitzgerald sang “Sugar Blues” in 1939; Bob Wills of The Texas Playboys wrote “Sugar Moon” in 1947. Over three long days in 1969, the same year my great-aunt demanded filial kisses from me, The Rolling Stones holed up at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, in Sheffield, Alabama, where they recorded “Brown Sugar.” Those stark lyrics by Mick Jagger played on tight rotation last month as I snaked beside the Mississippi on River Road, heading west from New Orleans as the annual sugarcane harvest got underway.

The skin of yesterday's sugarcane is a harvest to an ant.

— Swahili proverb

Patrick Frischhertz stepped over a drainage ditch at the edge of a field of sugarcane stubble on St. Louis Plantation land. A tall man with auburn hair shaded by a Louisiana State University (LSU) AgCenter bill cap, the 37-year-old former criminal lawyer lit a burn canister and touched the flame to dry ground. White smoke billowed into the late autumn sky as fire advanced between plowed rows, roiling ash floating toward the Mississippi. Assistant manager Refugio Rodriguez Sandoval wielded a second torch, so the two brush fires could meet in the middle and cancel each other out. 

The burning field smelled like scorched marshmallows. 

“Some people still burn whole stalk,” Frischhertz said. “They're farther up north where a couple of parishes have really low population density. We stopped that practice. Can’t do that so close to town. Two years ago, I was watching a football game at LSU, and sugarcane embers were raining down in Tiger Stadium. I knew exactly who was burning that day.”

Turkey buzzards landed, looking for leftovers.     

“When you burn the residue, birds and everything else see the smoke, and they know it's dinner time.”

We climbed in his pickup truck and cracked open bottles of water. Even in late October, the temperature in Iberville Parish hovers in the mid-80s, complicated on some days by high humidity and an unhealthy air quality index. Clearing fields for the next planting cycle requires the tracking of transport winds and a favorable forecast, made even more unpredictable during a hurricane season when the World Meteorological Organization ran out of proper names for the severe storms that slammed, one after another, into the Louisiana coast. Only the week before, Hurricane Delta roared past and punched down his cane, the stalks still warped in the aftermath.  

“It could have been a lot worse,” Frischhertz said, turning onto the dirt road leading back to the equipment barn. “Might have been steamrolled flat. And it will right itself. Cane takes a lot of abuse and keeps coming back.”

Sugarcane is a returning crop.

Frischhertz married into sugarcane. His father-in-law, John Gay, is a seventh-generation planter. The family is intimately tied to the origins of the industry in Louisiana, and members include the first president of the sugar exchange in New Orleans, a founder of the Audubon Sugar Institute, a founder of the American Sugar Cane League, and even a King Sucrose, invested every year at the Louisiana Sugar Cane Festival in New Iberia. Yes, there is a crown and scepter.  

“I don't claim the eighth,” Frischhertz said. “But my son will be the ninth generation if he so chooses. And same thing with my daughter, although I have a feeling she's going to be running for president.”

St. Louis Plantation was founded in 1807 by Joseph Erwin, only 12 years after Jean Étienne de Boré successfully produced the first granulated sugar in Louisiana, making it a hotter commodity for ambitious planters than cotton or indigo. A hand-drawn plat map of the property dated 1852 shows almost 1,000 acres under rotation: multiple fields of cane interspersed with corn, oats, and other cover crops. By then, the property had been taken over by a grandson-in-law, Edward J. Gay, a former grocer who built a white-columned house facing the Mississippi and continued to acquire holdings and interests in neighboring plantations until 1880. The Gay family papers, now housed in the Hill Memorial Library at LSU, are an important record of antebellum cane production, and the daily life of a sugar baron. Correspondence includes descriptions of costume balls, smallpox and yellow fever outbreaks, political campaigns, the market prices of cotton, sugar, and molasses, and the construction of a railroad leading from cane fields to sugar mill. Many letters mention enslaved workers by name and document their fate. A receipt dated Feb. 1, 1853, for services involved in tracking a runaway slave named Israel, details the cost of advertising a reward for his capture, shackles, jail fees, and transportation. Also of note is a letter in 1860 from William Tecumseh Sherman, then superintendent of the Louisiana Seminary of Learning, informing Gay that a wayward relative was expelled from the school for smoking tobacco. Later that same year, Lavinia Gay wrote to her husband, worried what would happen if “old Lincoln” was elected. 

Framed photographs of Gay’s descendants and a red toy model Allis-Chalmers tractor sit on a fireplace mantel in the second-floor family offices, above the plantation’s original general store, where Frischhertz sat down briefly at his desk to read reports of quotas and sucrose levels from the mill that processes his cane. All told, he manages 4,800 acres of deep bottom cropland and timber, some still leased on a gentleman’s handshake. He explained that St. Louis is also an expansion station that tests out new varieties of sugarcane, developed across the river at LSU or down the road at the U.S. Department of Agriculture labs in Houma, Louisiana. The farm grows 17 different cultivars. According to Frischhertz, all of them trace back to the West Indies.

“Breeding new varieties through traditional cross-pollination methods is the lifeblood of the industry.” 

Louisiana lies at the highest latitude for growing sugarcane, a tropical plant more suited to the climates of Brazil and the Caribbean. 

“Cane is a returning crop, so we never have to plow the entire place.”

“What time does your day start?” I asked.

“I’m up at 3:30 every morning. We’re cutting roughly 1,100 tons or 20-33 acres a day, depending on stalk and fiber density. Sometimes means up to 15 hours in the field to meet our daily tonnage quota.” 

“Breakfast?”

“A bowl of cereal. If the kids are up, I have whatever sugary kind they’re eating. Frosted Mini-Wheats or Lucky Charms.”

The Gay family has been growing sugarcane for eight generations.

Plaquemine, Louisiana, population 6,539, was named for the persimmon. On a hairpin bend of the Mississippi, the town is bounded by a Dow Chemical Company plant on one side, and the world’s largest manufacturer of PVC resin on the other. A freight line rumbles through the historic district, where a CSA memorial statue erected in 1912 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy stands next to the courthouse. (Earlier this year, following a reckoning on racial injustice in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the city council unanimously passed a resolution to remove it.) Best Donuts is known for its hot boudin-jalapeno kolaches; the shrimp po-boy at Tom’s Seafood comes with a side of fried rice and egg rolls. The gas station doubles as a casino. At the junction of Louisiana Highway 1 and St. Louis Road lie the graves of Joseph Erwin, his wife, and daughter, dusted by container trucks hauling cut cane to the mill in nearby White Castle, Louisiana. 

At sunrise the next day, a state-of-the-art CH570 John Deere track cane billet harvester busted through the canebrake, crop divider scrolls whirring like one of those battle mechas from a sci-fi film. The half-million-dollar machine had a striking resemblance to a giant praying mantis, whose mouth gobbled the crackling stalks, and then spat out chopped chunks through an elevator chute to be caught by an accompanying basket wagon. The wheels had been replaced with customized caterpillar tracks to churn through mud. In hours, this machine accomplishes what hundreds of people once did with a cane knife. The driver smiled and waved before turning back into another row. A tune by Banda Sinaloense MS de Sergio Lizárraga could be heard through the open cab window. Dry chaff blown from the extractor drifted in the morning breeze. 

Locals call this Plaquemine confetti.

The fresh stubble smelled surprisingly like cut grass. But then, for all its height and rind-hardened stalks, sugarcane is a type of grass.

A billet harvester in the canebreak at dawn.

Frischhertz pulled up next to my car. 

“You want to go for a ride?” he asked, grinning. 

“Oh yeah.”

When the harvester returned, I climbed a ladder outside the cab, steel railings already blistering hot, and sat down next to Israel Huerta, a stocky 45-year-old wearing wraparound sunglasses. One of 16 full-time workers employed by St. Louis during harvest season, Huerta, originally from Guanajuato, has worked on the farm for 18 years. The Gays sponsored him for citizenship. He put the tractor in gear again, and we rode into the sea of grass. The cab was equipped with GPS, a camera for viewing under the base cutter, and a stereo system. Huerta told me he listens to norteño while harvesting. He leveled topper blades into position, and they sliced through the leaf sheaths. 

“How long are you in the harvester?”

“We start at 5 o’clock in the morning, we finish around 4 o’clock. It takes about six minutes to fill up a wagon, about one and a half rows. But some rows have more cane than others.”

“What will you have for lunch today?”

“My wife made me caldo de pollo.”

“Are there any good Mexican places to eat in Plaquemine?”

Huerta shook his head.

“Not what we would call good.”

After he mowed several more rows, I thanked Huerta, and jumped down to the ground, unwittingly stepping on a fire ant nest. 

As I brushed the stinging insects off my sneakers, Frischhertz explained ruefully that they had been introduced to Louisiana to combat the cane borer, but now wreaked havoc on bird populations that also inhabited the fields. He pulled out his phone and opened an electronic plat map created by the Department of Natural Resources. The color-coded program contained data on the cane planted in each field.

A hand-drawn map from 1852, updated for the digital age. 

“What's beautiful about farming, it can be as high tech or as low tech as you want it to be,” Frischhertz said. “It's just up to the farmer. We track everything down to the sub-tenth of an acre.” 

Even high-tech farmers must still battle brown rust, mosaic disease, cane borers, rats, wild hogs, snap frosts, and field-swallowing hurricanes. We pulled over next to a swampy canal to peer down at a petrified cypress stump. Frischhertz remarked that the topsoil in the River Parishes is 10 feet deep in places. 

A crop duster swooped low over a field being graded and reconfigured.

“When I first joined the farm, my father-in-law said, ‘You have three big things to worry about for sugarcane farming. Number one is drainage. Number two is drainage. Number three is drainage. Because cane does not like wet feet.’”

Patrick Frischhertz tracks the harvest on his phone.

Our last stop was the big house. The original was taken by the Mississippi in a flood, but the family reconstructed. St. Louis has all the classical elements comparable to the other grand houses built by sugar on River Road. Columned verandah out front; wide staircases, formal front parlors, a dining room designed for entertaining; pantry and kitchen with a cast-iron stove leading to staff quarters at the back. I’ve stayed in many houses like this, some belonging to my own family, with all the conversations — or silences — accompanying ownership. Frischhertz guided me all the way up through an attic to the roof, and we stood on the cupola looking down over manicured gardens to the levee and river. 

“How do you address the past of this place?”

Frischhertz nodded. 

“As far as the burden of it, my wife Sarah and I have talked a lot. It's great that we can have these discussions now because they weren't happening not that long ago. I'm not just saying that to be positive. I’m doing something I love here on the farm, but at the same time, it does have a history of slavery. You have to be mindful and present to try to move society as a whole forward.”

Frischhertz’s in-laws formed a new company in 1983 with the immediate intent to change with the times. St. Louis Plantation is now St. Louis Planting. Employees are paid a living wage. 

“Everybody has a retirement plan. Everybody has a life insurance plan. Most everybody has some type of cell phone plan. We have radios, but it's a lot easier.”  

He voiced frustration about the green card process and the political roadblocks to citizenship for long-term H-2A workers wishing to change their seasonal residency to permanent status. The application for his assistant manager, Sandoval, has been in limbo for more than four years. 

“I’m ready to pull my hair out,” he said.

You've got enough sugar
To start a sugarcane mill
And when you hold me baby
I'm thinking oh a lifetime deal
Little boy how do you say
What you say when you say it
It sounds so good I just got to ok it  

(Woo)

You're a sweet man
(You're sweet, baby)

— Aretha Franklin, You’re a Sweet Sweet Man, 1968

Charles “Charlie” Schudmak had to shout over the roar of trucks that pulled through the mill yard hauling 50-ton loads at Cora Texas Manufacturing Company in White Castle, about 10 miles downriver from the St. Louis fields in Plaquemine. Frischhertz is one of 37 farmers contracted to send his harvest here.

“We call this grinding season,” Schudmak said, as we crossed above carrier belts on a steel catwalk. “The cane deteriorates very quickly, so we have to process it within 18 hours. We’re dumping three trucks about every five to eight minutes right now.” The 43-year-old chief operating officer wore a white hardhat and noise deafening earplugs. 

“When you say deterioration, do you mean sugar content?” I asked.

“The sucrose in the cane starts to change molecularly, and so the complex sugars can't crystallize, or crystallize in strange shapes, and it reduces yield. Slows the process down too, because that stuff can get real gummy.”

Schudmak is the fourth generation to manage his family’s sugar mill, which dates back to 1817 when it belonged to a plantation of the same name. In a single day, Cora Texas has the capacity to grind over 19,000 tons of cane and produce 5 million pounds of raw sugar. The mill also processes other byproducts like molasses for cattle feed and bagasse, the pulpy residue remaining after the extraction of cane juice, which is burned in separate boilers to generate power that keeps the lights on and steam turbines running.

“We were green before green was cool,” Schudmak laughed. 

The catwalks were covered with cane sawdust and spider webs.

“Do you get a lot of bugs in here?” I asked.

“Only honey bees.”

Cane moved into giant shredders — the stuff of my nightmares — and passed into diffusers, where the juice was extracted, then mixed with calcium hypochlorite to raise the pH and stabilize sucrose. Next, it went through a clarifier, and a series of evaporators to increase specific gravity, measured as degrees Brix (°Bx), until the juice crystallized.

In 1843, Norbert Rillieux, a free man of color born in New Orleans and educated in Paris, patented a triple-effect evaporator that revolutionized the technique of turning syrup into sugar. Not much about the process has changed in 170 years, only the scale, and at Cora Texas, the crystallization vessels, called vacuum pans, are massive. I could see hot juice sloshing around through a porthole. 

Schudmak explained that each pan of sugar boiled under pressure is called a strike: “Because they used to hit the pan with a hammer to break the vacuum.” Seed crystals are suspended in this mother liquid, or massecuite, and a centrifuge drum separates the syrup into molasses and raw sugar. The Dutch word stroop (syrup) is the root for blackstrap, brown sugar is also known as Barbados or muscovado, and demerara is named for the sugar-growing region in Guyana. The British have Lyle’s Golden Syrup. The South has Steen’s Pure Cane Syrup. And, inevitably, we all have what my health-nut mother once referred to as White Death. 

Before arriving at the mill, Frischhertz told me the art of making sugar happens at this stage: H-2B workers with an extremely specific skill set examine crystal samples under a magnifying glass, and instinctively know when it’s time to strike and pull the plug on the pans. Most apprenticed for years. Technology, he claimed, has not caught up with this ability, and these artisans follow wherever the harvest takes them, from the Dominican Republic to Brazil to Louisiana. 

Schudmak hiked down a series of stairs to the mill floor. He stopped next to a conveyor and grabbed a red plastic scoop. 

“Want to try some?”

The raw sugar was still hot, like sand in the Sahara.

Before being transported to a refinery farther south in Gramercy, Louisiana, the overflow was stored in two warehouses behind the main factory. These resemble airplane hangers. We ducked inside the smaller one. 

I gawked.

A mountain of sugar. An absolute pyramid, 77 feet high, 110 million pounds. It reminded me of artist Kara Walker’s 2014 installation at the abandoned Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, New York, a hypersexual sphinx titled “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby.” Her intent was to reference the subtleties designed for pampered royalty at the cost of those who labored in bondage. The mound in White Castle was certainly less freighted, but still a testament to how our tastes continue to be refined by sugar.

“My kids climbed it,” Schudmak said. “When they came back down, they were barefoot. I had to call the refinery to be on the lookout for lost sneakers.”

Wind is in the cane, Come along.
Cane leaves swaying, rusty with talk.
Scratching choruses above the guinea’s squawk,
Wind is in the cane, Come along.

— Jean Toomer, Cane (1923)

Charles Poirier picked up stray shingles torn from the roof of a church next door. The cane patch growing in his backyard looked almost as tattered. 

“You see how high it is?” he asked. “Well, yeah, that's probably, I don't know, 6 or 7 feet. That cane ought to be about 13 feet tall. Half is lying down and the tops turned up. It's a mangled mess.” 

“So was that Laura or Delta?” I ask.

“Both of them.”

He climbed into the cane and pulled up some of the crooked stalks. 

“And this is probably, I don't know, the sixth or seventh consecutive year, a little storm will come through, and usually right before it's time to harvest. I’m learning not to complain and just deal with it.” 

The latest storm knocked the bejesus out of Lake Charles, 80 miles west of his house in Youngsville, and more direct hits arrived soon after. 

“See this right here? Big old purple cane. That makes some beautiful syrup.”

Poirier pulled apart another batch to hunt for ribbon cane, distinguished by pretty bands of purple and green beneath the outer rind.

“The bad thing about these old varieties, the longer time goes, and you keep on replanting, they degenerate. Size decreases. Sucrose goes down.”

The 47-year-old mechanic works for the local municipality but devotes his spare time to collecting and refurbishing antique farm equipment. He also rescued an abandoned Goldens' Foundry & Machine Company No. 27 horizontal belt three-roller cane mill, patented in 1904 and manufactured in Columbus, Georgia. And that led to building a sugar shack behind the house where he grew up in Lafayette Parish, on the remaining land once farmed by his paternal grandfather, whose cane knife he now uses to chop down stalks by hand.  

“What kind of idiot does that?” he said. “That’s what some people say when they see me out there cutting with my cane knife. My grandpa was the last generation to farm sugarcane. He was a sharecropper, but was able to buy 100 acres in 1936, and paid it off in little over two years. He left his cane equipment to my dad, who worked offshore, and still always grew a little bit, a 15-foot row, for us to chew as kids.”

Charles Poirier starts boiling syrup before dawn at his backyard sugar shack in Lafayette Parish.

Before dawn on a recent Friday, Poirier finished feeding one ton of cane through his mill and channeled 120 gallons of juice into a pair of custom-forged cast iron kettles. (Back in 2005, he cooked his first batch of cane syrup in a pork cracklings pot.) Poirier positioned propane burners underneath the round brick housing and fired them up. The weather had turned cool, a relief really, as boiling cane juice can be a steamy task. 

“The higher the sucrose the less I have to boil it.”

South Louisiana was once populated with amateur backyard boilers. Cajuns took pride in making their own syrup. Poirier keeps the tradition alive and does so with immense finesse. He didn’t exactly break for lunch — fried catfish and crawfish étouffée from a local takeout — but rather, balanced the Styrofoam clamshell in one hand, while with the other, skimmed scum and other impurities using a homemade fine-mesh sieve. It took all day to reduce and thicken the syrup, slowly turning honey-gold in hue, as antique Emerson electric fans whirred in the screen windows. 

“Out of this batch, I’ll probably get 21 gallons, which is actually good.” 

“When is the season over?” I asked.

“Not ‘til we get our first killing freeze.”

As the syrup got closer to its finishing point, Poirier dipped a precision hydrometer in the kettle to measure density. 

“I’ll usually bring it up to 32, that’s like maple. I’ll go 33, 33 1/2, sometimes 34.” 

The soft-spoken mechanic handed me a spoon, and I blew on the hot syrup until it cooled a little. At 33 Brix, it still had a hint of grass; the next spoonful, at 34, the taste of molasses was more forward.

Poirier scooped the syrup out of the kettles and poured it in a 25-gallon Maxant bottling tank. After wheeling it to his workbench, the top was wrapped with cellophane and then covered in a blanket. He explained that the longer it stays warm, the darker the syrup becomes. A good measure of this first batch was reserved for chef Melissa Martin of Mosquito Supper Club in New Orleans. Her gâteau de sirop, a Cajun cane syrup coffee cake, is based on the one she remembers her mother baking on Bayou Petit Caillou, from a commercial “back of the can” recipe. Cakes are still a big part of afternoon coffee breaks in the bayou. Martin remembers stopping by an old cane mill to buy syrup, ladled in a jar still hot, and gingerly placed on the floor of the car for the ride home.

After hosing down the kettles, Poirier carried the bucket of skimmed liquid outside, where the spent cane was piled on a trailer for removal.

“I was scratching like a cat what to do with the bagasse. Then I found a friend who raises Black Angus, and he takes it all. They love chewing on it.”

Next to his sugar shack, old plow attachments were lined up, awaiting restoration. 

“Want to see something super rare?” he asked, opening the door to his garage. 

A rooster red 1954 International Harvester McCormick Farmall Super MTA-V High Clearance row-crop tractor was parked in one bay. A model designed expressly for small family operations like his grandfather’s 100-acre farm.

“Only 64 were ever made,” he tells me.

Poirier explained he would drive by places in the parish where they sat unused. The owners refused to sell at the time. 

“A few years after, a friend of mine calls. He goes, ‘Charles, may come pass by and tell me what you think I've got.’ Well, I drove up to his house, and I saw the back end of this, you know, good trash. He got my dang tractor. So I said, ‘Look, if ever you go to sell it, let me know. Make your price.’ About 12 years later, he calls me, he goes, ‘Man, come pay me a visit and talk about this thing.’ And I said, ‘If ever I would get it, I would pull out all the stops restoring it.’ That was three years ago.” 

He patted the engine housing.

“There she is.”

Poirier spent three years restoring this rare row crop tractor.

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugarcane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

— Billie Holiday

“Cornelia didn’t want to talk to me at first,” said Nik Heynen. “It took so long to build trust. And then she passed away.”

A professor of geography at the University of Georgia, he pulled a mask over his salt-and-pepper beard before boarding the state-operated ferry to Sapelo Island. Tattoos on his arms, a trucker snapback, crisp black overalls, he looked more country rocker than academic. His concentration investigates the impact of humans on the Earth, and vice versa, but now and then, understanding these dynamics involve plain old digging in the dirt. Other passengers paid their $5, and we all waited on the top deck until the McIntosh County school bus dropped off three students heading home for the day.

For people from the mainland, crossing over the water will not have the same framework, but for those known as Sapelo descendants, riding through the Doboy Sound estuary out to this Georgia barrier island is a passage that may bring to mind earlier arrivals. 

A woman who overheard our conversation begged us to stop talking politics. Who can blame her? Georgia, a few weeks ago, was on everyone’s mind. Mortified, I complied and looked out across the spartina. 

When we reached the landing pier, trucks and side-by-side mules waited for passengers. Walking past a pile of luggage belonging to a returning resident, I spotted dried plants with leaves turned silver and roots intact, and recognized it as life everlasting. Maurice Bailey, a heavily muscled man with wire-rim glasses and a Biden 2020 hat, tossed my bag in his pickup, decorated with bumper stickers that read “Save the Land” and “Proud Saltwater Geechee.” We drove toward Hog Hammock. Rain started to fall. First drizzle, then heavier, and in another moment, typical of the squalls that blow in from the Atlantic this time of year, impossible to see through the windshield. 

“It’s dark soon, so we’re getting right into it,” he said, pulling over to a field shielded by saw palmetto and loblolly pine. He grabbed a Stihl brush cutter out of the back and walked into the patch of purple ribbon cane.

Sugarcane first came to Sapelo when Thomas Spalding, a tidewater planter, acquired the south end of this 16,500-acre barrier island in the early 19th century, and began to grow the crop commercially. He also built a sugar mill, with a cane press and curing house. By 1843, at the height of his tenure, he secured all but 600 acres of interior land. Upwards of 384 enslaved workers labored on Spalding’s plantation. The most notable was Bilali Muhammad, born in Guinea, and sold into slavery as a young man. First transported to the Bahamas, he eventually arrived in Georgia some time after 1802 and was appointed head driver for Spalding’s plantation. Literate in Arabic, and a practicing Muslim, his influence on the small Geechee community, current permanent population 28, is tribute to generational resilience. Pews in the Sapelo First African Baptist Church, founded by freedmen in 1866, are oriented to the east. His handwritten manuscript on sharia practices in West Africa is now held in the Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia. It is the first Islamic text written in the United States. Bilali died in 1857, and his burial site remains undisclosed. 

Bailey is a direct descendant.

After the death of his mother, Bailey had a calling to answer. 

Cornelia Walker Bailey was a storyteller, historian, and griot. Her memoir, God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man: A Saltwater Geechee Talks About Life on Sapelo Island, is an essential account of Saltwater Geechee folkways. She was also a standard-bearer for self-determination and a fierce advocate of several food sovereignty projects to propagate heritage crops — red peas and sour oranges and purple ribbon cane — once grown in the kitchen gardens here. What Heynen and her son, among so many other practitioners, now call “liberation farming.” 

This year they planted 3 acres of sugarcane.

A young volunteer from Project South topping cane in Lot One on Sapelo Island.

Hog Hammock is the last remaining Geechee community on Sapelo. The rest closed long ago. (Tobacco tycoon R.J. Reynolds, Jr., who forced descendants off their land so he could create a hunting preserve, has a lot of explaining to do to his god.) Litigation over inheritance and land transfer has fractured this population more. The island’s highest elevation is 7 feet above sea level, but Hog Hammock sits at a low point between hand-dug drainage canals and a stretch of maritime forest that separates beach dunes on the Atlantic side. The Baptist church, grocery store, post office, and a library are the only public services. A sign on the unpaved road acknowledges Atlanta Falcons defensive end Allen Bailey was born here. 

Surf boomed on the beach at dawn, within earshot of Bailey’s backyard, still muddy after the downpour the night before. A stray cat weaved between the barbecue smoker and a white-painted school bus called The Spirit parked at the edge of his property. Volunteers drank coffee on the porch until Heynen arrived in a truck belonging to the university. Work gloves gathered up, bug spray passed around, masks over noses, everyone climbed into the back. 

“Are you going to take the rest of the cane down today?” I asked. 

“Yes,” Bailey replied. 

“With just that one weed whacker?”

“Well, we got two.”

The largest plot of cane was in a patch called Lot One. Several teenagers from Project South in Atlanta walked through the rows of white and purple varieties with branch loppers and topped the sheaths. 

“We used the clippers to harvest for the first two years,” Heynen said. “That was slow going.”

Ayinde Summers, who creates cultural awareness and service-learning programs for the nonprofit, started singing “Joy and Pain” by Frankie Beverly and Maze. Bailey chopped the stalks at their base, while others followed behind, gathering them by the armload. It was hot and awkward work. Mosquitoes swarmed. Tiny tree frogs croaked in the ditch. Fred Hay, island manager for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, arrived with a small trailer. Within a couple of hours, the field was down and cleared. 

“Sugarcane’s not blocking out the sun no more,” Summers said. 

I grabbed a purple ribbon cane off the pile and cut a chunk with my pocket knife. I peeled back the rind and sucked on it. 

No wonder.

According to Slow Food USA’s The Arc of Taste, purple ribbon was the predominant crop cane in the South for most of the 19th century, supplanting earlier cultivars, its juice higher in starch and plant sugar. But it nearly died out, surviving only in backyard patches, until Clemson University plant geneticist Stephen Kresovich collected descendant canes and back bred to a close approximation of the original strain using herbarium specimens as a template. Dixie Crystals sugar arrived in the island grocery store by the 1960s, but it was still an expensive treat. During his childhood, Bailey recalls refined sugar was used sparingly, never in breakfast cereal, and added to sweet tea only on Sundays. Purple ribbon seedlings were returned to the island for planting in 2016, a year before Cornelia Walker Bailey passed away.

Her son put down his weed cutter and wiped sweat from his face.

“How did that original batch go?” I asked. 

“We bedded it up the first year that we got it,” he said. “And by that, I mean we buried it in the ground, the old traditional way. When we dug it up in the spring, it already had shoots started. Then we planted those.”

Hurricane Irma took out a large chunk of that. They replanted.

“In the old days were the rows narrower?”

“Yeah, but they were narrow because we did it by hand.”

“Not at all like this year.” I said.

He chuckled.

“Next spring, I’m hoping we’ll have a tractor.”

The crew broke for lunch, then wound up back at Bailey’s house to stack the cane in a dumpster that would be barged across to the mainland for processing. Originally, Heynen and Bailey had hoped to boil on the island this year, but their kettle and furnace project was delayed by the pandemic. 

They covered the cane with a tarp, and Heynen left to shower off mud from the field. Bailey cracked a soda and sat on the porch.

“Why are you cutting the cane and letting it sit?”

“It allows some of the water to naturally evaporate out. So when you cook, it’s a shorter process. You're not spending all that time to get to the sugar content. Even if you wanted to replant, you’d let it rest for a week or so, before you actually put it back in the ground. That's what we always done.”

At sundown, Summers built a bonfire in the yard, while his daughter and her friends huddled inside Bailey’s house watching “Twilight” on television. Maryann Bailey arrived with a Lowcountry boil. We stood in the dark, cracking crabs. Someone cranked up the speakers. Then we sat around the fire, drinking clear liquor out of coffee mugs.

“Is Sapelo different from other Gullah and Geechee communities, like, say, on Daufuskie?” I asked.

“I must say a lot of our doings, we held on to because we were isolated a whole lot longer than other people were,” Maurice Bailey said. “All we knew was each other, and how we do what we do to survive.” 

“When did you decide this was your calling?”

He looked up at the dark sky.

“You know, your ancestors appoint you to do this stuff. I was always taught you do your part in life. You got to do your part, and you won't have any regrets at the end of your life.” 

In her memoir, Cornelia Walker Bailey wrote, “Bilali is watching, he has to be watching … The spirits will watch over us and over the island through the dark night as we search for the first rays of light in the sky at dayclean.”

The next morning, before leaving on the ferry, Maurice Bailey handed me a jar of Sapelo cane syrup. Rich brown, closer to molasses in hue. He explained that was the tradition. 

“We want the original thick syrup. Not the syrup you get in the store now.”

“But why did they make it thick?”

He smiled, the answer plainly obvious.

“For it to stick to your food.”

Every day ain’t going to be sugar, honey, and ice tea.

— Emily Meggett

Whenever close by, I’ll visit the island cemetery where most of my family is buried. They’re all in a row, my sweet great-aunt Adele between her sisters. I scrape off lichen from the headstones with a knife, or wipe away tangles of Spanish moss fallen to the ground, then commune for a bit in the shade under a live oak, spreading limbs furred with resurrection fern. 

My part. 

Unless you can claim direct lineage with the dead already at rest, this cemetery is closed to newcomers. The church wants to charge a shocking amount for a plot, however, so about a year ago, my brother scattered the last of my father’s ashes in this row, and some of my sister’s too. Belonging has a steep price at times. But it doesn't stop you summoning the resilience of your ancestors, whether that means cutting cane in the mud and rain, or boiling syrup in a shack, or baking a cake like your mother once did. 

I ate a candy bar, half-melted in the heat, all the sugar I had to give, and crumpled the wrapper in my pocket.

Shane Mitchell has received three James Beard Foundation awards for problematic crop and food insecurity stories. "Raising Cane" is the sixth installment in her Crop Cycle series for The Bitter Southerner. She still hates grits. Follow her on Twitter @shanegoesforth and Instagram @shanefarafield.

Rinne Allen is a photographer living in Athens, Georgia, who documents process as a way to visually demonstrate the effort that goes into creating things. She spends most of her days collaborating with chefs, farmers, artisans, designers, and researchers to document their work and the process that goes into making it, with the hopes that those who view her pictures will learn something from them. Follow her on Instagram @rinneallen.

The People We Feed

Kiss My Grits

Shop the General Store