Queen Sugar Read online

  “What can I do for you, Miss?” His tone was cautious.

  “I’d like to talk to you about sugarcane.” Charley wished he’d step outside so she could see him, so he could see her. He would see the dark crescents of fatigue under her eyes, crescents she’d tried (and failed) to conceal with makeup. He would notice that she had made an extra effort to look nice: ironed her skirt, finally sewn that button on her blouse; that she was wearing heels, for Christ’s sake, and white nylons even though it was eighty degrees and her crotch was beginning to sweat, but worn them anyway because it seemed the proper Southern thing to do. But he didn’t come outside. “I understand you’re an expert.” Charley took a half step closer. “I’m in a bit of trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “I own some acreage out near the Old Spanish Trail.” Charley paused. “My manager quit.”

  “What manager would that be?”

  “Wayne Frasier.”

  “Frasier manages LeJeune’s operation.”

  “He used to,” Charley said. “My father bought it from the LeJeune family. When he passed last year, he left it to me.”

  The man said nothing.

  “I tried to phone—” Charley began, but mercifully, the screen door opened and she stood face to face with Prosper Denton. Brown skin smooth as a new baseball glove. Head shiny as a gumball. He could have been in his late fifties, Charley thought, if his sagging jowls and neck hadn’t told the real story.

  Denton appraised her over the tops of his bifocals, then elbowed the screen door open. “Maybe you better come in.”

  • • •

  The kitchen was tight but tidy. Shellacked homemade cabinets, dishrags folded neatly over a gleaming sink. Denton pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and motioned for Charley to sit. Someone must be taking good care of him, Charley thought, because his overalls and short-sleeved button-down were not only pressed but starched. Only his black brogans with their frayed laces and run-down heels were scuffed and dusty—probably as old was he was.

  “You’ll have to forgive me,” Denton said, some of the gruffness fading from his tone, “I’m a bit lost in this kitchen when my wife’s not here.” He set a glass of lemonade in front of Charley, then tore a square of paper towel, folded it in half for a napkin.

  Denton struck Charley as the kind of man who never wasted energy on extra movement or idle chitchat. He was foursquare Sonny Boy Williamson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a Silvertone guitar, older than old school.

  He sat in the chair across from her. “So.”

  “I apologize for not calling,” Charley said for the third time, and took a sip of lemonade. It was fresh-squeezed, with the perfect amount of sugar and not a hint of pulp. If summer had a taste it would be this. She could drink the whole pitcher. But when she looked up, Denton was waiting and not looking any friendlier. Charley set her glass on the table. Better get right to the point.

  “My dad owned a lot of rental property back in Los Angeles.” Charley pictured the four units in Paramount whose front doors all opened onto a small courtyard filled with palm trees and ferns, the duplex in Culver City around the corner from the Italian bakery, the condo in Long Beach with a view of the Queen Mary. “He believed real estate was the only thing worth buying. ‘Real estate is the horse you need to ride,’ he always said. When he died, I thought his lawyer would give me a list of properties. Instead, he said I’d inherited a farm.”

  Back up, she’d told the lawyer the day after the funeral. Eight hundred what?

  Acres of sugarcane, the lawyer had repeated, lifting the sheet of paper from the file. Two hundred acres of plant cane and another six hundred of something called first-year stubble. He’d rubbed his chin.

  “My dad waited years for the farm to come up for sale.” Charley told Denton. “It had to be these acres. When it finally came up, he sold all his properties for the down payment.”

  But that’s impossible, she’d told the lawyer. Her father was still living in the Long Beach condo, had lived there ever since he and her mother divorced. Gently, the lawyer explained that her father had rented it back from the new owners.

  Charley connected the beads of condensation that had formed on the outside of her glass. She told Denton about Frasier quitting and returning her money. She described her fields. “Until ten months ago, I thought sugar grew on the baking aisle at the supermarket. Right below the chocolate chips and the sprinkles.” As Charley spoke, she searched Denton’s face, waited for him to do something—nod in agreement, shake his head in disgust, sigh with exasperation—but he just sat there, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. “According to Frasier,” Charley said, “all the best managers are taken. He says I’ll have trouble finding help so late in the season.”

  Denton sat back. “Frasier’s right. You’re already three months behind. Even if you find someone, they might sell you a lot of promises. Might say all you need to do is get out there with a cultivator, clean up the rows. They’ll spray some Roundup on them weeds, charge you twenty thousand dollars, then disappear.”

  “Oh my God,” Charley said, and saw a corresponding flicker on Denton’s face.

  “If Frasier ain’t been doing his job, getting ready for grinding is gonna be like licking honey off a blackberry vine.” He rubbed his hand over his bald head. “Back when I was running Simoneaux’s plantation, I’d see LeJeune’s wagons at the mill. His fields were yielding one, maybe two hundred tons an acre. You don’t get that kind of tonnage without working that land right, working it all the time.”

  Keep talking, Charley prayed. The more he talked, the more he might care. “Please go on.”

  “Frasier ain’t been working your fields, you probably down to twenty, thirty tons. Maybe less. You might be lucky to get five tons an acre. That’s hardly worth your time.” Denton paused. “Shame those LeJeune kids didn’t do better by their daddy’s land.”

  “So where do I start? How can I catch up?”

  Denton ticked off the tasks. His nails were clean and short, except his pinkie nails, which were half an inch long and filed to points, as though he used them to scoop things or pick locks. “First you got to test your soil, run your drains,” he said. “You needed to start off-barring way back in March, and the time for laying-by has almost passed. If I remember right, LeJeune’s got a lot of three eighty-four out there, which tends to lodge. He might even have some five forty, which is like candy to them borers.”

  “Off-barring? Laying-by? Borers?” With every word Denton spoke, Charley felt herself pulled farther out to sea.

  “What kind of equipment you got?”

  “Frasier said something about a new belt for a tractor,” Charley managed, “but I’m not sure what he meant.”

  Denton frowned deeply. “What do you mean, you’re not sure?”

  “He went over the list, but everything sounded the same.” Charley exhaled. “Maybe I can just buy what I need.”

  “I don’t know what kind of money you got, Miss, but a new tractor’s a hundred thousand. Combine’ll set you back two fifty.”

  “Two fifty what?” Charley could only stare at him. “Two hundred and fifty thousand?”

  “That’s for last year’s model.” Denton scratched the tuft of hair below his lip. “I’m not trying to frighten you, but you’re an easy mark. You’re young, you’re not from around here, you’ve never worked cane, and frankly, you being a woman’s gonna work against you.”

  “What difference does my being a woman make?”

  “And colored on top of it?” Denton clasped his hands together as if in prayer, and rested his head against them. He was silent for a long moment. “You got to know what you’re getting into here, Miss Bordelon. This ain’t no game.” He pushed away from the table and stood at the counter. “Tell you a quick story. Few years ago, a farm went up for sale. There was a bl
ack farmer, Malcom Duplechain, thought he’d put in a bid. He already owned three hundred acres out near Bienville. Real good land. His daddy owned it and maybe his daddy’s daddy before that, but he wanted to grow his operation, wanted to get real big like some of these white farmers you see around. Duplechain and another colored fella decided to go in together. Property went up for sale, Duplechain put in his bid. Now, the bids were supposed to be sealed.” Denton wadded his paper towel and tossed it on the table. “I’ll give you one guess what happened.”

  “I don’t know,” Charley said. “They got outbid?”

  “Yeah,” Denton said, as if that much was obvious. “But by how much?”

  Charley shrugged. “Ten thousand? Fifty thousand?”

  Denton shook his head mournfully. “A hundred dollars, Miss Bordelon. Pocket change. Now, how do you think that happened?”

  “I get it.”

  But Denton shook his head again. “I’m not sure you do. This down here makes inside baseball look like a cakewalk. You can’t come down here thinking the field’s wide open. You gotta know this thing. You got to live it. I’ve been in this business all my life.” He sat down again. “Now, I can’t sit here and say every white farmer’s the same. That’d be like me saying all us black folks was the same. I know some whites that are real decent people.

  “One grinding, I had thirty-two rows left to cut when my combine went out on me. Mill was closing up the next day and all that cane would’ve been lost. Know who cut those rows for me? A white farmer. My neighbor, Wilson Lapine. But it’s hard enough when you’re born into this game. What you’re trying to do?” Denton let his head drop and rubbed his temples. “Your cane’s gotta be thirteen notches high come the end of August if you want to be ready for grinding, and from what you’re telling me, I don’t see how that’s gonna happen.”

  Charley closed her eyes and struggled to hold herself steady. She breathed deeply, fighting back the tears that burned her eyes and the tightening in her throat. She exhaled, and a weight, as though someone had laid a sack of cement on her breast, settled across her chest. She thought of Miss Honey—Can’t fall apart like a ball of twine—and opened her eyes. “Mr. Denton, I know this is a lot to ask. You’ve already been so generous.” Charley touched her ring, pressed her fingertip against one of the prongs. If she sold it, she could pay Denton whatever he demanded—maybe not forever, but for as long as it took to learn what she needed to know. “I wonder if you’d work with me, for pay, of course. I could use your help.”

  She waited.

  Denton rubbed his hands together thoughtfully. “I’m flattered Miss Honey sent you out here to talk to me, Miss Bordelon. Your grandmother’s no fool. She knows her onions. And I hope some of what I’ve said makes sense.”

  “It does,” Charley said. “All of it.”

  Denton stared through the kitchen window. “I turned seventy-one back in April. This is the first time in sixty years I haven’t had to get up before dawn to go to work. I got a little garden out there I like to mess around in. And when I’m not doing that, I like to go fishing.” He turned to look at Charley, the expression on his face more open than she’d seen, as if he were searching for something. “You like to fish, Miss Bordelon?”

  “My dad liked to fish,” Charley said. “On weekends sometimes, he’d go down the beach near his house and catch abalone. Or he’d take his fishing pole and climb out to a rock way out in the surf.” She could still see him standing there, a lone figure perched on top of the huge boulder, the ocean churning and crashing all around him while she played in the sand. They’d have fried fish and corn for dinner. “But me? I never tried it.”

  “Well, you ought to,” Denton said. “It’s peaceful. Nothing but you, your thoughts, and that fish. Everything else falls away.” He paused, his shoulders slumping a tiny bit. “You’re a smart young woman, Miss Bordelon. I feel for you, I really do. But I’m retired.” Someone had mounted an Audubon clock above the sink, with birds—an American goldfinch, a Carolina wren, a hermit thrush—positioned at each hour. For a few seconds they sat listening to the clock’s gentle ticking, and when the second hand reached the quarter hour, the clock chimed happily with a different bird’s song. “Maybe you oughta sit this one out,” Denton said, raising his head to look at Charley as the idea seemed to come to him. “Get a feel for things and, in a year, see if it’s still for you. Who knows? You might decide to sell.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not that simple.” Charley glanced down at her lap. She had a run in her nylons, right above the knee, and the dark skin of her thigh shone through like a gash where the white threads were pulling apart. She thought back to her conversation with the lawyer that day in his office. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, she’d said, knowing that ungrateful was exactly how she sounded, but are you saying there’s no money? Nothing? Just some farm in Louisiana? There was money at a local bank in Saint Josephine, the lawyer explained, but it was entirely for operating expenses. Other than that, no, there was no money. Even now, after all these months, the truth was hard to accept. Her father had sold every piece of property he owned to buy what amounted to a vacant lot.

  Sitting across the table from Prosper Denton in a kitchen that smelled faintly of homemade bread, coffee, and freshly picked tomatoes, Charley tried to make Denton appreciate her predicament. “I can’t sell,” she said. “My father put the land in trust, I don’t know why, but if I run it, I get the profits after the bank is paid. If I walk away, the land goes to charity.” Charley felt a space open inside her as she thought about her father’s other favorite saying: “I give you what I want you to have”—which sometimes sounded intensely generous and sometimes rang with fierce control.

  The lawyer, looking like an old owl behind his mahogany desk, had said, Your father was a good man. He was trying to provide for you. He put up a hand to stop Charley’s protestation. You’ve got a million dollars’ worth of presumably good land down there. I suggest you bone up. Get in touch with this man. He slid a folder across the desk. On the front was a sticky note with a name, Wayne Frasier, and a number. He’s sort of a caretaker, the lawyer said. Managed the property for the sellers and, from what I understand, he agreed to work for your father. She had flipped through the documents and photographs. Handle this right, the lawyer said, standing up and showing her to the door, and your great-great-grandkids will never have to worry. His final words convinced her. Charley had thought of Micah and Micah’s children. And even as she reeled at the news of her inheritance, loving and resenting her father all at the same time, she knew what she would do.

  Charley looked at Mr. Denton. “So you see, sitting out isn’t an option. And selling is out of the question.”

  “Give yourself a chance to think on it,” Denton said. “You might feel different in a day or two.”

  Charley nodded vacantly. He might as well have patted her head, might as well have told her all she needed was a long soak in the tub or a good night’s sleep and she’d come to her senses.

  Denton reached to refill her glass, but Charley covered it with her hand. “No, thanks, I’m fine.” She folded her paper towel over, then over again. “My father sold everything he had to buy that land.”

  “Lot of farmers wanted that place.” Denton’s face brightened with admiration. “Must have come in with a strong offer.”

  “A million, one twenty,” Charley said. “He had nothing left.”

  Denton whistled. “That’s fourteen hundred an acre.”

  “Yes, it is. And at the end of the year, the bank is going to want its first payment. So I can’t afford to ‘think on it,’ as you say.”

  Denton looked at Charley. “I wish I could help you.”

  And so, Charley stood. The conversation was over. Denton had shut her down before she got started and she wasn’t in the mood for more talk. She carried her glass to the sink and rinsed it before he could object, then grabbed her backpa
ck. “Thanks for your time.”

  Denton looked startled, but he led her to the door. “I can only tell you what I know to be true, Miss Bordelon.”

  Beyond the screen door, the yard was bright, the clouds overlapping like leopard spots against the flat sky, and Charley braced herself for the heat. The dogs, stationed at their post, looked up expectantly as she pushed through the screen door, and followed her to the car as if it were their duty. She pulled out of the yard, the dogs chasing alongside her, the narrow country road unwinding like thread from a spool, the sugarcane seeming taller and even grander than when she arrived. Charley gripped the wheel and noticed how her diamond ring glowed as it reflected the sunlight. So many things she didn’t know, so many obstacles she couldn’t see, so many challenges she couldn’t even imagine, and no one to guide her.

  • • •

  Even before Charley saw them, she knew, from the garlicky smell that hung in the living room, that Micah and Miss Honey were cooking.

  “You got up and out early this morning,” Miss Honey said as Charley tossed her backpack on the table.

  “Mom,” Micah said. “Miss Honey’s teaching me how to make Dirty Rice.”

  “I went to see Prosper Denton,” Charley said.

  Miss Honey’s eyes narrowed, but then she turned her attention back to the cutting board with the chopped onions piled like a mound of confetti. “He knew you were coming?”

  “He thinks I should sit out for a year. Either that or sell. Which I can’t.”

  “Hmm.” Miss Honey tapped Micah. “Baby, hand me that spoon.”

  In the vacant lot next door, some of Miss Honey’s dresses and two of Micah’s shirts hung stiffly from the clothesline. “Don’t take this wrong,” Charley said, “but how, exactly, did you think Denton could help me?”

  Miss Honey’s lips pursed. She kept her eyes on the cutting board, continued to chop, but said, “Last month, folks over in Pointe Olivier needed their water tower taken down. Whole thing was rusted out and waiting to fall. Problem was, they couldn’t find anyone for the job. Power lines all around it, and every engineer they called swore they couldn’t say for sure where it was gonna land. Everybody screaming it couldn’t be done.”