Word: cane
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...hard to believe Euzhan Palcy (Sugar Cane Alley) has directed only two movies. A Dry White Season shows a mature restraint one wouldn't expect from a newcomer. Instead of dwelling on the violence in the townships she doles it out in shocking fragments...
...military test pilots. And just how perilous is this work, which is principally performed by laborers brought in from the Caribbean? An answer is tucked in at the end of a paragraph 245 pages later: "As far as I know a West Indian has never died in the cane fields...
This is certainly ending with a whimper. Yet such a dying fall hardly saps the considerable strengths of Big Sugar, subtitled Seasons in the Cane Fields of Florida. Forget the comparative dangers of cutting sugarcane. Wonder instead why roughly 10,000 West Indian men, chiefly Jamaicans, come to South Florida each winter to do it. That is what Alec Wilkinson, a staff writer for The New Yorker, did when he came across this information in a 1984 newspaper story. Other questions aroused Wilkinson's interest as a reporter. Among them: Is it not odd that a major domestic cash crop...
...state where the soil is too fragile to bear the ravages of machinery. So the brunt of cost consciousness falls on the cutters, who invariably take their lumps. They are routinely cheated of some time spent in the fields. They are expected to cut and stack one ton of cane an hour. Those who fall behind are "checked out," deprived of any pay they may have earned that day and sent back to their barracks, which in many cases resemble prison camps. As the ultimate penalty, laggards or troublemakers can always be deported...
...enforcement in North Carolina, finds and displays much genuine cause for outrage here, but he also brings back a richer, more complex story than he seems willing to acknowledge. Better pay and treatment from the growers might improve the cutters' lot, but nothing will ameliorate the reality of harvesting cane by hand. It is boring, backbreaking work, carried out in oppressive heat, surrounded by the dangers of poisonous snakes, fire ants and whirling, razor-sharp scythes. Some of those who suffer these miseries take pride in their work. A man from St. Lucia tells Wilkinson, "Cutting the cane in itself...