A couple of weeks ago I was visiting family in Baton Rouge, and drove across the river to Port Allen to do some genealogy research. Port Allen is a very small town. The South in general is very rural, and Louisiana is more rural than most of the South, and that part of Louisiana is just plain rural.
It's probably not the type of thing you envision when you think about farming -- it's sugar cane, which used to be labor intensive but now doesn't need many people to work the fields. I remember, when I was a kid, how tough the black people who worked in the sugar cane fields were. Jet black, originally from the Congo, gold teeth, and scars on their faces from knife fights. They reminded me of pirates.
They only worked the harvest, so they didn't make much money the rest of the year, but they were descended from slaves who were brought in hundreds of years ago, and this was pretty much the only life they could imagine, a hundred years after slavery was abolished. It wasn't slavery, but they were still working the fields.
I remember how in the fall, the air would be full of fragrant smoke from burning bagasse, the fibers left over when the sugar cane is crushed. Mules pulling wagons in the fields.
No more. They've been replaced by machinery. The sugar cane fields still stretch as far as the eye can see, mile after mile. I was right in the middle of the town, at the courthouse, and I could see sugar cane fields two blocks away.
It had rained the night before, and there was runoff of dirt drying in the cracks of the sidewalk. It was jet black. I bent over and picked some up and crumbled it in my fingers. Almost pure humus. Full of life.
Washed in by the Mississippi River, from the entire eastern half of North America. The richest soil in America.
Three hundred years ago when my some of ancestors were forcibly transported there from the prisons in France (probably debtor's prisons), the soil was exactly that black. My ancestors grew indigo first, but that poisoned the slaves who worked it -- their gums turned blue! Too expensive to keep buying slaves. So they turned to cotton or sugar cane.
They owned plantations! Just think, from prison to plantations in one generation! But that's America.
Two generations one third of Americans worked in agriculture. Now it's more like 1%.
Better or worse? Just is. |
