Muck City (4 page)

With the dike rising up around the lake, the final act of strangling the great River of Grass was nearly complete. As more and more land began to dry, South Florida continued to boom. The population of Belle Glade tripled, making it the largest city in the Glades. It was during this heady time that a second industry rose from the black, fertile muck, one that would define the region and render it forever notorious.

As it turned out, the muck was ideal for producing sugar. Cane is planted not by seeds, but with shoots that mature and can return over five successive seasons, much like grass. There are no branches or stems to mess with, only long, narrow leaves that can grow as tall as twenty feet. Sugarcane doesn’t require as much fertilizer as vegetables. It’s also more durable. After a heavy rain, farmers must scramble to drain their fields holding spinach or sweet corn, whereas sugarcane can sit underwater for two days.

But while sugarcane was a hardy crop, harvesting it was a costly
undertaking. The wheels of mechanical harvesters sank in the muck, and their blades ripped the delicate root systems from the soft soil. As with beans, sweet corn, and celery, the harvesting of sugarcane had to be done by hand and with a machete.

Cutting cane was arguably the most grueling fieldwork performed on American soil: exhausting, repetitive, and prone to serious injury as blades swung toward feet and legs, venomous snakes and insects coursed through the fields, and cane tops impaled skin like green daggers under a broiling subtropical sun.

In 1931 the U.S. Sugar Corporation opened its mill in Clewiston, just fifteen miles up the Hoover Dike from Belle Glade. In its first year of operation, the company posted ads in black neighborhoods across the South seeking labor for the harvest. “Enjoy Florida Sunshine During the Winter Months,” the handbills read.

Applicants were promised good wages in cash, plus free room and board, transportation, and medical care. But after the buses traveled through the night and reached Clewiston, canefields stretching in each direction like an ominous sea, the men were charged eight dollars for the ride. They were then told they’d have to buy their own blankets, machetes, and files. Some were even charged for clean drinking water.

In his book
Big Sugar
, which exposed the working and living conditions of cane cutters in the Glades,
New Yorker
writer Alec Wilkinson detailed how men in those early years essentially found themselves property of the sugar bosses. Wages were never as promised, but a pittance designed to keep each man in perpetual debt to the company store. Workers were forbidden to leave. Some were beaten, others told they would be whipped or shot if they tried to escape. Those caught out on the roads or trying to hop a train were charged with hitchhiking and thrown in jail. In the fields, white supervisors lorded over workers with rifles and blackjacks like horseback deputies on a chain gang. Other reports claimed that men were shackled to their beds as punishment for attempted escape. Many fled under cover of darkness, more destitute than when they’d arrived.

In early 1942, as the nation entered the Second World War, the FBI began interviewing workers across the South who’d returned and complained about the treatment by U.S. Sugar. The U.S. attorney general later issued a grand-jury indictment against the company on charges of peonage and conspiracy to commit slavery.

Four men were arrested—guards and lawmen whose names commonly surfaced in the interviews. However, the judge threw out the case before it could ever progress, citing a flaw in the way the grand jury had been picked.

By 1945, U.S. Sugar operated the largest sugar mill in the nation, spread across 100,000 acres around Okeechobee. But its growth was greatly constrained by federal limits on domestic sugar production, allowing Florida to produce only nine-tenths of one percent of the country’s overall crop. Everything changed in 1959, when Fidel Castro’s Communist-leaning rebels in Cuba overthrew the government of Fulgencio Batista. The U.S. government responded by issuing an embargo on Cuban sugar imports. It temporarily repealed the restrictions and allowed a free-for-all on planting sugarcane.

In the Glades, the rush was on. Two additional sugar companies would emerge in the coming months, giving rise to Florida’s super-industry.

For years, Bahamians had been a fixture in the Glades during vegetable harvests, and even more so during the war as the draft diminished the availability of American men. So, starting in 1943, in the midst of the FBI investigation, U.S. Sugar started turning to the Caribbean for its field labor, and the industry as a whole followed suit. For the next fifty years, half the sugarcane grown in the United States was harvested by as many as ten thousand workers from Jamaica, Barbados, St. Kitts, the Bahamas, and elsewhere in the Caribbean. They were known as “offshores” or “H-2s” for the government worker program that brought them here. Most people simply referred to them collectively as “the Jamaicans.”

Each morning before dawn, buses would be waiting to carry the men to the fields. The cutters wore hats and long pants and long-sleeved shirts,
both to protect them from the sun and to keep the gritty muck from irritating their skin. Slicing one’s toe or hand was common, so cutters outfitted themselves with aluminum guards that fit over their arms, legs, and boots, giving them the appearance of jousting knights or storm troopers. The camps they returned to each evening were drab, airless structures made of concrete, with few amenities. There were common toilets and showers, and dorms often featured a single sink where workers could get water for cooking and scrub the black dust from their clothes.

Even as the sugar industry grew, the muck around Belle Glade was producing bumper crops of produce. Each harvest brought its own groups of people: Jamaicans for cane, while Haitians, Mexicans, migrants from the South, and local “mucksteppers” all flooded in for sweet corn, celery, oranges, and beans. From September through May, more than fifty thousand migrants would move through town. They arrived in old buses and jalopies packed to the roof, squeezing under whatever shelter they could find in Belle Glade’s black quarter.

Whereas the housing provided to cane cutters was stark and gloomy, the rooms and hotels available to migrants were wholly abysmal, operated by slumlords who saw an easy buck in the desperation of the moving masses.

“Thousands sleep packed together in sordid rooms, hallways, tar-paper shacks, filthy barracks with one central faucet and toilet, sheds, lean-tos, old garages, condemned and shaky buildings,” wrote Marjory Stoneman Douglas in her landmark 1947 book,
The Everglades: River of Grass
. “The patched and peeling walls seem saturated with their heavy smell of dirt and fatigue and disease and misery.”

In the early 1930s, Eleanor Roosevelt had been appalled by an article in
Collier’s
magazine that described the conditions of migrants in the Glades as worse than anything in the Dust Bowl. The plight of farmworkers became her cause, and on April 24, 1940, the First Lady visited Belle Glade and christened the Okeechobee and Osceola labor housing projects. With war in Europe dominating the news, the event had merited only a small,
bottom-of-the-fold story in the
Belle Glade Herald
. Twenty years later, however, these same tin shelters, now tumbledown and rank, would appear on televisions across America, with Belle Glade once again depicted as a cauldron of human suffering.

The day before Thanksgiving 1960, the documentary “Harvest of Shame” aired on the TV series
CBS Reports
, and indicted an entire industry. Narrated by Edward R. Murrow, the opening scene of the film takes place in Belle Glade at an early-morning call for farmworkers. We see crowds of thin, wan-looking blacks pressed around the toothless hawkers who barked the daily picking rate, before being crowded like livestock into belching open-bed trucks and taken to the fields.

“This is not taking place in the Congo,” Murrow said. “It has nothing to do with Johannesburg or Cape Town.… This is Florida. These are citizens of the United States, 1960.… This is the way the humans who harvest the food for the best-fed people in the world get hired.… They are migrants. Workers in the sweatshops of the soil.” A farmer who saw Murrow’s footage of Belle Glade commented, “At one time we owned our slaves. Now we just rent them.”

The documentary was scathing. American families gathering for the holiday were shown the human toll for the Thanksgiving spread: migrants dragging their families across thousands of miles to pick the produce bound for supermarket shelves, their children filthy and largely uneducated, living off rancid-looking beans in one-room shanties with beds eaten by rats.

The living conditions for migrants were certainly deplorable, even hazardous. But those who traveled the circuit all agree that good money could be made in the process, depending on the fields and the farmers who owned them. A more truthful portrait of Belle Glade probably fell somewhere in between Murrow’s exposé and what Johnny Davis described:

“It was a rich poor town,” said Davis, who arrived in 1963 from Woodbine, Georgia, to coach football. “You had migrants living in these
stilt houses. But they had some of the most beautiful cars you’ve ever seen. Buicks, Cadillacs. It’s what they spent their money on, and I thought that was so strange. They’d be living better in their cars than their houses.”

Amid this fleeting cycle of coming and going, boom and bust, a football tradition was born in the Glades. Included in the masses of migrants who moved up and down America each year were the thousands of blacks who called Belle Glade home. Most had arrived from towns and cities across the South looking for work and settled in, gotten married, had children, laid down roots. Once the muck got in your toes, the saying went, it was too damned hard to leave. Some bought homes in the densely packed quarter, while most cut deals with landlords for year-round leases, then went “up the road” once the money seasons began.

Buried in the boot heel of the Deep South, Belle Glade was racially segregated at every level of society, with the canal providing a watery, gator-infested divide between the black and white sections of town. Whites attended Belle Glade High School, located behind a grove of trees on the canal’s northern edge, while blacks attended Lake Shore High, out toward the railroad tracks where the sugarcane thickened at the lake’s approach.

Since it opened in 1943, Belle Glade High had showcased a football program stacked with scrappy farm kids and coaches from small towns across the South drawn to the Glades for its community and good fishing. By the 1960s, the Golden Rams had won three championships in the Suncoast Conference, which stretched east to Fort Lauderdale on the coast. Its Friday-night games drew hundreds and became an imperative on any social calendar, especially if the opposing team was rival Pahokee.

For the fans of Lake Shore, it wasn’t so easy. Each May when the school season came to a close, most black families in Belle Glade would pack up and chase the harvests. They’d gather in the community center of the Okeechobee housing project or along a giant parking lot known as the “Ramp” that bordered Southwest Fifth Street in the heart of the black
neighborhood. Here, as Murrow’s film depicted, they’d find the contractor that paid the highest rates or offered the best living arrangements, then squeeze into buses or covered trucks and head north.

There were beans to pick in North Carolina, sweet corn in Georgia, then more beans and apples in upstate New York and New Jersey. The trucks were covered with tarps, with one bench down the center for kids and two along the sides for adults. Pressed shoulder to shoulder, they often traveled two and three days at a stretch, stopping only for the needs of the driver.

“We slept sitting up, leaning against one another’s backs. And if you had to use the bathroom, you had to wait till everyone went,” said James Johnson, Lake Shore Class of 1959. “Once we got to the farms, we usually slept in a barn. Someone gave you a mattress and told you to fill it with hay.”

By the time school started again, many families were still finishing seasons up north. Some even enrolled kids at schools in Utica or Waterville, New York, and points along the way as they returned south. At Lake Shore, the children of migrants trickled in throughout the fall, with their own woeful and fantastic tales of rocky bean fields, sore knees, and the towns and people they’d encountered along the way. For teachers, it was a yearly hurdle. For football coaches, it was plain maddening.

“My first two games of the season I didn’t even have half my players,” said Antoine Russell, who coached in Pahokee. “Here you had a 250-pound boy you can’t even use as a tackle because his mama’s making him work. Until the third game, we used what we could get.”

With no preseason conditioning or time to foster chemistry, black teams in the Glades were often left playing catch-up against those along the coast. Even worse, the schools were too poor to provide training equipment. Cast-off sleds were fitted with old tires in place of padding. Tackle dummies were handmade and hung from chain hoists otherwise used to pull engines from vehicles. Few players even had shoes.

“When guys would come off the field in a game, they’d toss you their shoes,” said Elsie Dawson, who played for the Lake Shore Bobcats. “We’d keep a cardboard box in the locker room that was full of shoes. First come, first served. Maybe you got one size nine and another size eleven and then have to trade.”

Being migrants also gave the boys a reputation throughout Palm Beach County. “Down on the field, other teams would tease us by calling us ‘bean-pickers,’ ” Dawson said.

In 1959 the Lake Shore Bobcats managed to defy the odds by going undefeated with the help of now-mythical players who stand as pillars for the storied tradition. Rosailious Hughley was a head-busting lineman who’d been raised in an Everglades boys’ home. He conditioned himself by ramming his forearms into cinder-block walls until they dripped blood and the skin hardened like elephant hide. Later on, those forearms became weapons, once splitting a boy’s helmet and sending him out on a stretcher.