Epilogue

Sweets for my sweet

sugar for my honey

I’ll never, ever let you go.

In 1719 Governor Hamilton (from tTHE DRIFTERS,

111In 1719 Governor H“Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch”

In 1719 Governor Hamilton (from the Leeward Islands) complained that slave imports had lately declined and that slave prices had been rising, both trends proving to be a great Hindrance to the Sugar Plantations . . . Of the 41 vessels entering Antigua with slaves in 1721–27, 38 arrived from the African coast and 3 from Nevis, Boston, and Barbados.

DAVID BARRY GASPAR,
“Slave Importation, Runaways, and
Compensation in Antigua, 1720–1729,”
The Atlantic Slave Trade

When I danced my way through my teenage years, I always stopped to do my very fancy footwork to The Drifters’ “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch/You know that I love you / Can’t help myself /I want you and nobody else.” Of course, as a fifteen-year-old I wasn’t thinking that the consumption of sugar, itself, is a kind of addiction, nor did I consider the vicious irony that sugar-cane production fell in proportion to the development of beet sugar, which didn’t require great numbers of African slave laborers at a great expense, as noted above. One of the keen marketing tools of the sugar beet farmers was to remind their dessert-craving consumers that their sugar had never been touched by black hands, which maybe made it taste better or whiter, I don’t know. What I do know is that, regardless of our initial encounters with cane, we are still singing songs like Como La India, “Mi querida tan dulce, tan rica” (My beloved, so sweet, so sensuous), and asking our toddlers for some sugar, meaning “kisses.”

We remain a complex people with a sweet tooth. I’d just as soon slice a mango and dice some strawberries, add a bit of grated coconut, and call it a day. I mean dessert, but I know there are some of us who must show off after the main course. I’ve found these receipts from the Yucatán.

Mixed Fruit in Syrup

Set a pot to boil a little more than a cup of dark brown sugar, a quart of water, and 2 cinnamon sticks for about 20 minutes, when it begins to thicken. Add 1 whole cantaloupe, cubed and seeded, three oranges peeled and sliced horizontally, 4–5 pieces of sugar cane peeled and in thin strips, a half dozen guavas, halved and seeded. Cook on medium heat until fruits are tender, about 10–15 minutes. Take off stove. Let this cool significantly before serving.

The Dominican Republic has a bloody as well as rich history of struggle for democracy and resolution of centuries-old conflicts with black Haitian neighbors, inescapable when we hear tales of the River of Blood, when Haitians crossing the border were butchered in a scene that’s now been repeated in Rwanda and Burundi. We could even revisit the dictatorship of Trujillo and the thousands tortured and silenced, as remarkably recounted in Julia Alvarez’s “Tres Mariposas,” or simply push our memories to Argentina in the 1970s or the soccer stadium in Santiago with Victor Jara’s voice lingering somewhere among the clouds, veering off toward horizons where our dreams still prod us through one more day.

We want to offer our children, our guests, something to relish, something that makes them smile. We could always go to the magnificent Merengue Festival in Santo Domingo and end the day gleaming with sweat and Olga Tanon’s voice still electrifying our hips or Johnny Ventura seducing complete strangers to unimaginable romantic flourishes, or we could just cook something up.

Dominican Bread Pudding

Let your raisins, half a cup or so, soak in about 3 tablespoons of dark rum. Put that somewhere the children can’t reach it. Then let half a loaf of hardened day-old bread soak in about 3 cups of milk (mixture of buttermilk or sweetened condensed milk will do just as well, it’s your choice). After a half hour or so, add 1 Vi cups of sugar (white or light brown), 4 tablespoons of butter, 5 eggs slightly beaten, 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract, and a pinch of salt. Throw in your rum and raisins (you can substitute strawberries or peaches or just put the rum in, but if you use these reduce the amount of milk slightly) and mix thoroughly. Grease your baking pan with butter and sprinkle some brown sugar about it evenly, on the bottom and the sides. Place this pan in another pan of hot water to make sure nothing burns or gets uneven while baking. Bake at 350 degrees for nearly an hour until a straw from the broom comes out cleanly. This can be served warm or chilled once turned over a serving dish.

Baked Papaya

For those of us with more simple tastes, this dish is perfecto. Mash the pulp of 4 ripe papayas, set this in a baking dish, and cover with 2 cups of grated coconut. Leave that alone. Take 4 cups of milk, 1 cup of sugar, and the grated rind and juice of an orange and boil, making a custard that we pour over the papaya and coconut; bake at 350–375 degrees. Then, when the custard is firm, we take it out the oven, chill, and serve.

And there’s always corn bread in warm syrup or molasses. Marc Latamie, conceptual artist and photographer from Martinique, posed an ontologically challenging question at a conference called The Fact of Blackness at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art. While he was examining the remains of abandoned sugar refineries and chatting with workers at the lone functioning refinery in Martinique, he was exploring our relationship to sugar, our purpose for being, our continued presence in this hemisphere.

Of course. The Plantation is the reason we are in Martinique even though today nobody understands why we are there because the question is not a natural question. For the piece I made for Mirage [the exhibition at the conference], I worked with images of the last sugar factory in Martinique. I found it very interesting to see how this factory—which is still working perfectly—is trying to survive pressure from around the world regarding its product . . . I didn’t want to raise the question of why sugar is no longer one of the main products in Martinique or elsewhere in the Caribbean . . . I cannot make a factory. I have no reason to make one. I try to force myself into the position of the traders. I ask them, “Why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? Why are you moving tons of sugar everyday?”¹

Well, Latamie discovered that two of Frantz Fanon’s nephews worked at the refinery, so they know why they are here in this, the New World. Yet, what about the rest of us? If we were here to produce cotton, sugar, indigo, rice, tobacco, coffee, gold, et alia, and most of us aren’t doing that anymore, what are we doing here? I know the history of the world would be a contorted mess without the disciplined and rapacious drive of the slave trade. I know untold and largely unrecognized humanity were brought to realms where they were a step beyond human debris. But I also know we’ve done more than survive. We’ve found bounty in the foods the gods set before us, strength in the souls of black folks, delight in the guele (smell) of our sweating bodies, and beauty in Jean Toomer’s image of a November cotton flower.

What and how we cook is the ultimate implication of who we are. That’s why I know my God can cook—I’m not foolish enough to say I could do something the gods can’t do. So if I can cook, you know God can.