Christian sociology; Labor -- United States; Labor movement -- United States; Working class -- United States
Not many of us stop to consider the man who made possible the white
bread that we eat at our daily meals.]
=The Cane-Sugar Makers.= If we travel in a direction a little east of
south from the wheat-fields of Canada, we come to the great plantations
of Louisiana and Mississippi where sugar-cane is grown. Here we
find people of a different type living under different conditions.
Sugar-cane is grown in fields that have been won from the swamps by
hard toil. In this rich soil, cultivated and ridged by the plow, the
sugar-cane is laid in long parallel rows. After it has been buried a
few days it begins to sprout, and from each one of the joints on the
stalk of cane there grows up a new plant. These are tilled and come to
maturity in October. The stalks grow from eight to fifteen feet high
and at harvest-time are cut down and then stripped of their leaves by
the workers, who take them up in their hands and with a flat knife
slash off the long, bladelike leaves, leaving them clean and smooth.
The stalks are piled in rows to be picked up later and put into wagons,
taken to the siding, loaded into freight-cars, and hauled to the mill,
where they are crushed between rollers, and the juice pressed out.
The liquid so obtained is then put into large vats and evaporated,
leaving brown sugar and molasses. The crude or brown sugar is sent to
the refinery and passed through various processes until we get the
white sugar that comes to our tables. Practically all of the work on
the sugar plantation is done by Negroes. These people live in small
cabins and work for a very small wage, ranging from 75 cents to a $1.25
a day. Their tiny houses, which are usually whitewashed and surrounded
by a little plot of ground, are the property of the owners of the
plantation. The Negro is expected to buy everything from the company’s
stores. The prices are high and it is rarely that one finds a family
that is not in a perpetual state of debt to the owner of the plantation.
When the migration of Negroes from the South to the North began some
few years ago, a great concern was felt in many quarters as to what
the result would be. A meeting was held in one of the Southern cities
and the Negroes were invited to be present. One of the Negroes said:
“If you let me tell you what I think, it is about like this. We-all
have been working here for about 75 cents to $1 a day, but we never
see the time when we have any money of our own. It takes more than we
make for the things we use. Folks in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and
Massachusetts offer us $15 to $18 a week, tickets for ourselves and our
families, and a free house to live in with two weeks’ rations provided
and in the house. Now none of us wants to leave Louisiana, and if you
want to keep us here just raise our wages to $2 a day. We would a heap
rather stay here than go North.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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