Big Sugar: Seasons in the Cane Fields of Florida.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. First Edition, stated. Octavo, green cloth & boards (hardcover), gilt letters, uncut, 263 pp. Near Fine, with light foxing (age darkened spotting) to page edges; in a Near Fine dust jacket with darkening to underside. From dust jacket: Big Sugar marks the emergence as a major voice -- and with a major subject -- of Alec Wilkinson, already established as one of our most gifted young writers, author of two acclaimed books: Midnighs: A Year with the Wellfleet Police and Moonshine: A Life in Pursuit of White Liquor. His new book is a revelation of a largely unknown American scandal: the brutal exploitation of migrant West Indian cane cutters in south Florida by the big sugar companies. And he depicts -- with a respect for the particulars of human lives that transcends mere expose -- the world that the cane cutters have made as they endure their perilous work and situation. The story he tells is one of unapologietic exploitation that seems to belong to an earlier time or to another country. Wilkinson describes in compelling detail how the sugar cane is grown, and how it is harvested -- a job so dangerous, hot, exhausting, and low paying that American workers will not accept it. He tells how just forty-seven years ago the biggest of the sugar growers, then employing Americans, was indicted for slavery, and how, rather than reform its practices, big sugar has sustained its vastly profitable enterprise by replacing Americans with West Indians (mostly Jamaicans) imported seasonally, who can simply be shipped home if they do not do exactly as they are told. But Big Sugar is more than a record of exploitation. Wilkinson leads us to know the Florida towns of Belle Glade and Clewiston, where the cutters are barracked -- little pieces of the Third World in the United States -- and the small islands of pleasure, from taverns to brothels and enticingly stocked stores, that the cane cutters have found there. Above all, we hear the voices of the cutters themselves as they recount their lives and hardships. “We are slaves,” one of the men explains. “The companies pay us money, but really they buy us. Our government sell us to the contract. We live in captivity, we must obey our master -- anything he say, we do. For we it is rough. We are all of us under a sufferation.” Big Sugar is a powerful book -- about the abuse of workers by a rich and protected industry. It is as well a moving recognition of individual men struggling to seize a decent life from impossible circumstances.