Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008 - (Page 59)

cultivation on Hispanola. Cane was successfully implanted to such a degree that later explorers and conquistadors thought that the sugar-bearing reed was native to the hemisphere, but the crop was not commercially viable due to the long ocean transit back to European markets. Peter Macinnis, author of Bittersweet: The Story of Sugar outlines the difficulties in early mass sugar production: • Sugar production is capital intensive. To make a profit from a mill, there must be a certain minimum size of crop. • Sugar must be processed shortly after harvest. Such urgency increased the need for multiple mills as tensions arose when several farmers would line up to share a single mill. • Cane is hungry for fuel. Processing cane destroys surrounding forests and to obtain one ton of sugar, seven tons of cane must be crushed and five tons of water evaporated. • Sugar is labor intensive. Where sugar production went, slavery followed. In the New World context, it would take the thrifty Dutch in Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco to perfect the plantation system into a large working for almost 25 years. There was not even enough cane processed for local use and rum, syrup and molasses were imported from Cuba. If 19th-century Louisiana historian Charles Gayarre is to be believed, sugar was first granulated in Louisiana by Etienne de Boré, whom the scholar hails as “the savior of Louisiana.” It’s a bit more complicated than that. What de Boré probably did was become the first to produce sugar in commercial quantities, beginning in 1796. In the preceding decades, the French were in the throes of their own revolution and the drums were being tuned up for the beats that would call forth the Ceremonie du Bois Caiman (a ritual that rallied revolutionaries in Haiti). For political stability, sugar would move north to Louisiana. One of the people who would cement Louisiana’s place in the sugar aristocracy of the world was a free man of color born in March 1806, Norbert Rillieux. Rillieux, a quadroon, was acknowledged by his white father, engineer Vincent Rillieux (who built the cotton baling press on New Orleans’ Poydras Street), and sent to Paris for his education. He studied engineering and turned his interest to the technology of sugar production. In the 1840s, he patented an evaporating pan that improved the speed with which sugar from cane [and even beets!] was refined. It revolutionized the sugar industry and outmoded the “Jamaica Train” method of sugar production by which the juice from the cane was evaporated in a series of open kettles, with slave labor troweling the syrup between the vessels. Rillieux’s method required the use of only one individual and was completely enclosed, thereby reducing the number of injuries from burns. The revolutionary method resulted not only in savings in labor, but also with more sugar produced. It revolutionized the business of sugar in Louisiana. Unlike chiles, which took over the taste of the world in less than a century, sugar took 700 years to make its way from the Indian subcontinent to the shores of the Mediterranean organism designed for large-scale profit. The system they perfected depended on large landholdings, seemingly unlimited natural resources, and the labor of enslaved Africans to work the cane and who, when “used up,” were replaced by more enslaved Africans. The New World became an El Dorado for second sons and those who had the money to invest in sugar ventures. By the middle of the 17th century, the agriculture of the Caribbean was transformed to the monoculture of sugar. By the turn of the 18th century, sugar cane was well established in Saint Domingue. It had arrived earlier in the other French islands: 1644 in Martinique and 1647 or 48 in Guadeloupe. But it was Haiti — La Perle des Antilles or the “pearl of the Antilles” — that would prove to be a jewel in the crown of the French empire. This jewel would fuel some of the excesses of the French court that would ultimately cause the upheaval that would bring sugar to Louisiana in a big way. Though a handful of early 18th-century Louisiana planters had harvested sugar cane with relative success, by 1765 the colony’s cane producers had abandoned cultivation While Rillieux’s advance made the production of sugar easier, the growth and harvesting of cane was still a brutal business. Louisiana’s sugar country evolved as a hybrid region that combined aspects of Caribbean and American slavery. The plantation elite drew upon the slaveholding culture of the American South and Northern business practices, and it matched the cold-blooded exploitation of the West Indian sugar lords. So, next time you sweeten your coffee, get dusted by a Café du Monde beignet, nibble on a praline, savor a gateau sirop, or have a sip of rum, think of the New Guinea wilds, Darius the Great, crusaders, explorers and New World plantation owners. Remember Louisiana’s de Boré and Rillieux. Then take a second out. Honor the cane workers past and present and remember all of the history that is included in a little lump of sugar. Jessica B. Harris, Ph.D., is the author of eight books documenting the foods and foodways of the African Diaspora. Summer 2008/LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 59

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities George Rodrigue’s Louisiana: Cajuns, Blue Dogs & Beyond Katrina The Historic New Orleans Collection After The Flood Faubourg Marigny: The Creole “Suburb” Preserving New Orleans Jazz, One Generation at a Time: Conversation & Music with Tom Sancton Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Architecture Baton Rouge Photographs, 1863-1910 Jazz Notes The Ogden Museum of Southern Art Louisiana Association of Museums Nature of the “Beast” Louisiana State Museum Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008

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