Queen Sugar: A Novel

VIKING

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First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

A Pamela Dorman Book / Viking

Copyright © 2014 by Natalie Baszile

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Excerpt from
A Southern Garden
by Elizabeth Lawrence. Copyright © 1942 by the University of North Carolina Press, renewed 1970 by Elizabeth Lawrence. Used by permission of the University of North Carolina Press.

Quotation by Anne Wilkes Tucker from
Carry Me Home: Louisiana Sugar Country
, photographs by Debbie Fleming Caffery (Smithsonian Institution, 1990). Used by permission of Anne Wilkes Tucker.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Baszile, Natalie.

Queen sugar : a novel / Natalie Baszile.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-698-15154-3

1. African-American women—Fiction. 2. Family life—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3602.A8523Q44 2014

813'.6—dc23

2013036789

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Hyacinth and Chloe

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you, first and foremost, to my family. To Hyacinth and Chloe, the lights of my life, and my husband, Warrington, who has always been in my corner. Thank you for believing in me. To my parents, Janet Baszile, a woman of extraordinary strength and wisdom, and my father, the late Barry Baszile, who was always willing to drive and more than happy to cook. To my sister, Jennifer, for the early-morning calls. To Aunt Vicie, Aunt Royanna, Antionette, Antonio, Uncle Dan, Marvin, Michelle, Pop and Aunt Dell, Uncle Sonny, Uncle Charles, and Aunt Mary—thank you for your huge hearts and for always welcoming me home. To Gig, Big Warrington, Shanga, Monique and Kala Parker for all the summers.

I am eternally grateful to my adopted Louisiana family, without whose help this book would not have been written. First, to Rene Simon, Stephen Stirling, and Paul Fitch—for your kindness, generosity, expertise, and unwavering support. You have been the best friends and guides I could have hoped for. To the Shea family: Stuart and Becky, Suzy, Maureen, Katie, Miss Barbara, and their families—thank you for helping with research and for making me feel welcome. A special thank you to Stephanie Shea—for your friendship, the birthday invitation, and the afternoon drive that changed everything. To Maggie, Aimee, James, Paul, and Grace Simon for always setting a place for me at your table. To Patricia France for my first Mardi Gras shoe and Mrs. Daniels for being a gracious New Orleans hostess. To Suzonne, Sarah and Taylor Stirling for opening your home, and to my buddy Philip for the flowers and the fishing lessons. Thanks also to Leigh McGowan, Gail Porter, Peter Patou, and Suzonne Stirling, for the wonderful meals and excellent conversation. To Chad and Clint Judice. To Cleveland Provost for your patience and quiet wisdom.

To my agent, Kimberley Witherspoon for believing in my work. To William Callahan for those first kind words. To Allison Hunter and Monika Woods.

A thousand thanks to my secret weapons: Dylan Landis—a true friend and brilliant surgeon—thank you for the thousands of hours, for never leaving my side, and for the pixie dust. To David Groff, who appeared at precisely the right moment—thank you sharing my vision, for your encouragement, and for always making time. To Jim Krusoe for your ability to offer the one, surprising suggestion.

I owe a tremendous debt to Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. To Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy, David Haynes, Diana Wagman, Adria Bernardi, and Debra Spark for your guidance and outstanding teaching. To the members of the novel workshop, especially Diane Arieff and Larry Bingham who encouraged me to keep going, and to my fellow Wallies, Catherine Brown and Gabrielle Viethen. A special thank you to Ellen Bryant Voight and Peter Turchi for providing the beacon.

To my wonderfully supportive writing group: Louise Aaronson, Catherine Alden, Leah Griesman, Susi Jensen, Kathryn Ma, Bora Reed, Elana Shapiro and Suzanne Wilsey.

Thank you, dogs and cats at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, for your friendship and wise counsel. Especially to Julia Scheeres, Laura Fraser, and Caroline Paul.

To Alison Hiraga and Barbara Brooks for being good friends and trusted readers.

To the Ragdale Foundation for providing much needed time and space, and Sylvia Clare Brown for her generosity. To my lovely Ragdale spouses, Rick Hilles, Raymond Johnson, Gregory Mertl, Robin Messing, Nancy Reisman, and Sarah Van Arsdale.

To the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the generous souls at Hedgebrook, particularly Nancy Nordhoff, Vito Zingarelli, Amy Wheeler, and their staff for their radical hospitality.

To the wonderful, insightful, supportive folks at Penguin Random House: Pamela Dorman, Kiki Koroshetz, Beena Kamlani, Carolyn Coleburn, Holly Watson, Winnie De Moya, Paul Lamb, Nancy Sheppard, Roseanne Serra, Carla Bolte, Clare Ferraro, Kathryn Court, and the entire sales and marketing teams of both Viking and Penguin.

Finally, to Coach Flagler and to the late Charles Muscatine, who were there at the beginning.

I have a field on my mind that needs plowing.

—Anne Wilkes Tucker

Three days ago, Charley Bordelon and her eleven-year-old daughter, Micah, locked up the rented Spanish bungalow with its cracked tile roof and tumble of punch-colored bougainvillea and left Los Angeles for good. In an old Volvo wagon with balding tires and a broken air conditioner, they followed the black vein of highway—first skirting the edge of Joshua Tree, where the roasted wind roared in their faces, then braving the Mojave Desert. They pushed through Arizona and New Mexico, and sailed over the Texas prairie.

Twenty-four hours ago, they crossed into Louisiana where the cotton and rice fields stretched away in a lavish patchwork of pale greens and browns, and a hundred miles after that, where the rice and cotton fields yielded to the tropical landscape of sugarcane country.

Now it was the next morning, their first full day in Saint Josephine Parish. They hadn’t seen a house or car since they turned off the Old Spanish Trail, and the road, which crossed over the Bayou Teche, was leading them farther away from town, farther out into the country, and Charley—who’d never seen real sugarcane before yesterday—thought she should have trusted her instincts; thought that if she’d just listened to the small voice that whispered
take the map
, they’d be there by now. Instead, she had listened to her grandmother, Miss Honey, with whom she and Micah now lived. “Put that away,” Miss Honey had said at breakfast that morning as Charley spread the map over the kitchen table. “I know how to get there. Just let me get my purse.” Now here they were—Charley and Micah and Miss Honey—wandering hopelessly, like three blind stooges, through south Louisiana’s cane country, creeping down one ragged back road till it dead-ended in a grass-choked gulley before trying another, while the sun got hotter and the air grew soupier; burning up precious time as they searched for the turnoff that would lead Charley to her fields. She had inherited eight hundred acres of sugarcane land from her father, Ernest. For the last ten months, she had pored over more aerial photos and assessors’ maps than she cared to count, signed documents and placed phone calls. She had planned what she could from a distance. The fields Charley had thought of for almost a year were out there—somewhere. Land she had to get ready for the harvest in October. God help us, she thought.

It was eight forty-five. Charley was supposed to meet Wayne Frasier at nine. The cup of Community Coffee, with its bitter note of chicory, had made her queasy. Maybe it was the coffee, but maybe not, Charley thought, as she remembered how her mother accused her of being a city girl and warned her not to make this move. Charley swore her mother was wrong, but now she thought maybe it was true. She was accustomed to measuring distance in freeway off-ramps, not hectares or miles, weighing things in pounds rather than bushels or tons. The only crop she had ever harvested were the Meyer lemons that hung lazily from the trees along her backyard fence. The only soil she ever tended came in bags from the Home Depot. She exhaled heavily. If she were a country girl, she thought, she could scan the horizon and know which of these godforsaken roads led to her fields. But she wasn’t a country girl. Not even a little.

Charley turned to her window and caught a scent of Louisiana on the June breeze; the aroma of red clay, peppery as cayenne, musty as compost, and beneath it, the hint of mildew and Gulf water. She marveled at how different the landscape was from anything she’d known back in California: the stretch of Highway 5 between Los Angeles and San Francisco with its endless miles of almond and pistachio orchards, vast stretches of orange groves whose blossoms perfumed the air on early-spring mornings, rolling acres of grape vineyards, tomato and cotton fields, and of course, the uninterrupted miles of reeking cattle lots—all of it with the spiny silhouette of the Sierra Nevada, like a promise, along the horizon. Charley imagined Los Angeles, with its traffic and smog and relentless sprawl, and beyond it, the never-ending coastline and immeasurable Pacific, ridiculously beautiful in the honeyed light of a southern California afternoon. Now the vast Pacific had been replaced by an ocean of sugarcane: waist-high stalks and slender, emerald-green leaves with tilled soil between. Cane as far as her eyes could see.

Charley glanced at Miss Honey. Dressed in a butter-yellow polyester dress belted high on her waist, ginger stockings rolled like doughnuts around her ankles, and white orthopedic sandals, she sat in the passenger seat clutching her white leather purse. Charley wanted to ask if they were getting close, but remembered how, yesterday, Miss Honey scolded her for arriving three hours late. “Well, it’s about time. You said noon,” Miss Honey had said, standing on the top porch step. “I started to think y’all had changed your minds”; how Miss Honey had flicked that purple plastic fly swatter as if it were a riding crop, and reprimanded her for cutting her hair. “You used to have long, pretty hair,” she’d said. “Good hair. Now you look like a man.”

More minutes passed. A weather-beaten farmhouse set back from the road, a cluster of small wooden shacks in the distance that looked strangely familiar. Were they driving in circles?

“I’m sorry, Miss Honey,” Charley said. “But are you sure this is the right way?”

“Of course I’m sure,” Miss Honey said. “If that man Frasier said your place was off the Old Spanish Trail, then this is the way. This used to be an Indian road.”

Micah, who had been fiddling with an ancient Polaroid camera Miss Honey had given her, reached over the backseat and tapped Miss Honey’s shoulder. “You can’t say Indian. It’s Native American. Indian is offensive.”

“Oh, really?” Miss Honey said without turning around. “Do you know any Indians?”

“Native Americans,” Micah corrected. “Indians live in India.”

Miss Honey laughed, though Charley thought it wasn’t a laugh of delight or amusement. “Well, the Native Americans
I
know like to be called Indians,” Miss Honey said, fingering her purse strap. “Bunch of ’em live in the woods behind my house.” She turned to Charley. “They built a big casino with a Mexican restaurant and a fancy steak house over in Charenton. Lights up the whole sky at night.”

Charley nodded, and was about to suggest they go gambling sometime, feed the slots or take their chances at blackjack, when Miss Honey said, “Nothing over there but a pack of jackals if you ask me. Jackals and sinners.”

They drove on.

Out in the fields, a gaggle of laborers followed doggedly behind a tractor. Up ahead, the remnants of an old sugar mill—brick smokestacks, rusted corrugated siding, dust-caked windows—loomed over the cane.

Miss Honey dabbed her neck with a wad of tissue and smoothed her gray candy curls. “I can’t stand riding in a car with no air-conditioning.”

Charley nodded and added
tune-up
to the list of chores she’d tackle as soon as they got back to Miss Honey’s and she was able to unpack.

“Baby,” Miss Honey said, “look in that cooler and hand me a Coke.” She raised her hand, palm side up, to her shoulder. Charley recognized the gesture. Her father held his hands the same way, right down to the fingers curved as though he were gripping a ball. “Hand me a boiled egg,” he’d say during their cross-country drives to Saint Josephine when she was a girl. Or, “Reach in there and give me a couple of those cookies,” and she’d root around in the cooler he’d packed until she found what he asked for, excited to put just the right thing in her daddy’s hand.

Micah handed a bottle of Coke over the seat and Miss Honey twisted off the cap. She drew a small square packet from her purse, tore it open, and poured the contents—a tablespoon of powder the color and consistency of cornstarch—into the bottle. She swirled the mixture until a head of hissing foam rose along the glass.

“What’s that?” Micah asked.

Miss Honey took a swig. “Stanback. I take it for my headaches.”

Charley was no chemist, but she considered the properties of Coke—water, corn syrup, a healthy dose of caffeine—and guessed at the Stanback—aspirin for the pain, a little sugar to cut the bitterness, some type of amphetamine for an extra boost—and figured the combination would give quite a buzz. She wondered, as Miss Honey nursed the concoction, closed her eyes, and leaned back against the headrest, if her grandmother wasn’t mildly addicted.

Micah leaned over the seat. “Can I try some?”

“Don’t even think about it,” Charley said, and both Micah and Miss Honey looked at her as if she’d just blurted out a string of swearwords. “I mean—I’m sure Miss Honey needs her medicine. There’s water in the cooler if you’re thirsty.”

“Why your father bought land way out here is beyond me,” Miss Honey said, a moment later. “If he wanted to own a business he should have bought something in town. Russell Monroe has been trying to sell his barbershop for two years. I know he’d have let it go for nothing. And I hear some rich white fella from New Orleans just bought the old bank building on Main Street. Gonna turn it into a snazzy hotel.” She waved a dismissing hand toward the window. “There’s no one out here but a bunch of crackers.”

Charley felt her shirt clinging wetly to the knobs of her spine, and debated whether to tell Miss Honey how yesterday, soon after they crossed into the parish, she saw another car, a pickup, approaching fast in her rearview mirror. It rode her bumper, then slid parallel.

“Don’t look,” Charley had told Micah, though she couldn’t help but look herself. The passenger, a white kid in a backwards baseball cap, stared at her for several long seconds, surveyed her car, then turned to the driver, who leaned forward. Charley turned her gaze back to the road, but the driver kept pace with her, even though he was driving in the opposite lane. She held her breath. Her hands shook. Finally, the pickup pulled ahead, glided in front of her, and for what felt like forever, she couldn’t see anything but the lettering on the tailgate, the silhouettes of two naked ladies on the mud flaps. She eased her foot off the brake and fell back. The truck gunned its motor and seconds later it was gone, the glow of its brake lights disappearing as it rounded the curve. Were they in danger? Who could say, but for a moment, Charley wondered what her father had been thinking to leave her a sugarcane farm in south
bumfuck
Louisiana.

“You never know why people do what they do,” Charley said now, speaking louder so Micah would hear. “You just have to assume they’re doing their best.” And then she repeated the lines she’d been saying for the last ten months, the lines that had become her mantra: “I think this move will be good for us. An adventure. A fresh start.” Charley wasn’t saying this just for Micah’s sake, she was saying it for her own. Because the truth was, she needed this farm. It was the opportunity she’d been hoping for. Until now, her life hadn’t gone the way she planned. She loved her job teaching art to inner-city kids, but it barely paid the bills or ate into the mountain of grad school loans. She drove a car that should have been scrapped for parts, and lived in a house she’d never own. She was thirty-four, and widowed, and may just have been a terrible mother. She needed this farm, wherever it was. She needed a second chance. She needed momentum. And a good shove.

“I reckon.” Miss Honey dabbed her neck with her tissue again. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad y’all are here. It’s been too long. But sometimes, you go looking for adventure, all you find is disaster.”

“What do you mean, ‘disaster’?” Micah said. “What’s going to happen?”

“It’s just a saying,” Charley said, but for good measure she decided not to mention the pickup or how, for the rest of the drive, she pulled over every time a truck came up behind them.

•   •   •

The paved road they’d been following led to a dirt path—a generous way to describe the strip of trampled ground deeply rutted with tread marks and grass growing up between. A wooden stake with the carved letter L leaned to one side.

Charley felt a rush of excitement, a warm tingling that spread over her arms and down her spine, causing her to feel a little light-headed. “This is it.”

Dust billowed behind the Volvo until the path ended at a bank of trees. Woods stood tall and impassable to the left, but up ahead to the right sprawled open space. Charley’s heart raced as she imagined what was out there: fields so splendidly verdant she’d feel short of breath just looking at them. Her father left the door open and she had stepped through it.

Charley parked. Then she, Micah, and Miss Honey made their way over the clotted ground.

“Holy moly!” Micah cried. “It’s huge!” She took a picture with the ancient Polaroid, then hurled a stick far into the tangle of weeds and creeping vines.

“My God,” Charley muttered. “This can’t be.” Across the field, wide and long as ten city blocks, stunted cane stalks dotted the earth, their straggly leaves a starved shade of pale green with deeply sunburned edges. Grass and weeds grew thick and matted between the rows, which were preposterously rutted with tire tracks. Even to Charley’s untrained eye, it was clear no one had been out there in months. Where were the neatly tilled rows, the lush cane plants high as a man’s shoulder? Where was the moist soil, dark and rich as ground French Roast? Under a morning sky coated with clouds gray as concrete, Charley stared out over fields that should have looked like the hundreds of lush acres she passed on the drive down, but didn’t.