For Jan 17, 2022
Interlude
June 24, 1731 — Samba, an enslaved man in Louisiana, known to have led a revolt against the French in Africa before he was captured, is accused to have planned an uprising and executed, along with other alleged conspirators.
“Conjured” by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is about Samba and his story.
May 10, 1740 — In response to the 1739 (failed) Stono Rebellion, the Negro Act is passed in South Carolina, severely restricting the “rights” of enslaved Africans, including movement, assembly, learning to read and write, earn money, etc.
“A Ghazalled Sentence After ‘My People Hold On’ by Eddie Kendricks and the Negro Act of 1740” by Terrance Hayes.
What I had to look up:
A ghazal is a short poem, originally in Arabic love poetry, consisting of rhyming couplets; this one uses couplets, but instead of rhyming, the second line of each couplet ends in the word “people.”
Eddie Kendricks (1939-1992) was one of the founders of The Temptations and had a song “My People… Hold On” in 1972. It repeats this phrase many times.
Chapter 3: Sugar, by Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Muhammad opens the chapter on the Whitney Plantation, near New Orleans, where today’s historical exhibits emphasize the life of the enslaved, working on a sugar rather than a cotton plantation. It was built in 1752, on what was then known as the “German” (= not French) Coast of Louisiana. It operated until 1975, and there is still a small sugarcane production–negligible, but Louisiana still has a $3 billion sugar industry today. (Muhammad points out that sugar is causing major health issues via obesity, and disproportionately more in the Black community.) Although we might think of cotton and tobacco when we think of enslaved people creating the wealth of the South, sugar is key for developing the slave-trade triangle between England, Africa, and the Americas.
Sugar is hard to cultivate and laborious to harvest, and it needs a specific climate–so it was long a luxury good (“white gold”), but when the conquest of the Americas began, it became clear that the Caribbean islands were ideal for surgar production–first for the Spanish and Portuguese colonizers, then for the British, with Jamaica and Barbados (and the French – Haiti), all of whom participated in the slave-trade triangle–but especially Britain profited (Bristol & Liverpool wealth is built on enslaved sugar plantations) and also became a first-rate consumer of sugar beyond the super wealthy (sweetened milky tea as a staple of working-class diet). The Royal African Company had traded about 3 million enslaved people by 1808, when the slave trade was outlawed internationally. He provides some background on how people became trade goods: as prisoners of war of other tribes, as criminals /convicts, and as victims of kidnapping (the proportions of each are disputed). Working-age men and some women (judged by their “reproductive potential” like a “broodmare,” and a very few children were then taken to the Americas. He points out that part of the cruelty and violence aboard the ship (including the systematic rape of the women by white sailors) was part of “conditioning Africans for plantation slavery.” Modes of resistance were few, but there were hunger and labor strikes as well as suicide. Illness and mistreatment killed between 20% and 5% of the captives.
American slavers were not especially prominent in this particular approach (they do account for ca. 100,000 enslaved people between 1709 and 1807). But beyond the triangle, there was less formal trade with the American colonists, who traded cod, flour and pine wood against West Indies sugar and molasses (essential because of rum, distilled on the East Coast). And although sugar could not be grown in most of the South, Louisiana proved fertile ground for a domestic sugar production on the banks of the Mississippi, especially after the Haitian Revolution, when many planters and other white refugees from Haiti came to Louisiana (hence the Whitney plantation). When the international slave trade was outlawed, domestic slave trade boomed and Louisiana’s enslaved population soared, while New Orleans “became the Walmart of people-selling.” Sugar plantation work was very hard and also dangerous, and enslaved people were mistreated and exploited, so that the sugar parishes of LA for decades had more deaths than births. A rebellion in 1811 ended in the deaths of more victims than the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831.
After the end of slavery, the sugar labor continued, even as in some places, “Black sugar workers acting in solidarity negotiated the best terms they could” during Reconstruction. But by 1887, a post-Reconstruction attempt to unionize sugar laborers in Thibodaux, LA, ends in a massacre; very few Blacks ever ended up farming for themselves or owning land, and into the late 20th century were thwarted at every turn [this is what the two-part segment of the 1619 podcast is about, including a class-action lawsuit about loan discrimination that was only recently brought to the courts]. These farmers today are “in the single digits.”
Muhammad then discusses the role sugar plays in the role of Black people and their access to food and especially fresh food / non-fast food in many Black communities. He addresses the “food desert” scenario [some of the findings he quotes about the impact of food deserts are now being disputed, btw] and the blatant targeting of advertising junk food to Black consumers.