Word: wilkinson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...SUGAR by Alec Wilkinson (Knopf; $18.95). Every winter roughly 10,000 West Indian men come to harvest sugarcane by hand in South Florida. The author, a staff writer for the New Yorker, decided to see how these migrants earn their pay and came back with a story more bitter than sweet...
...SUGAR by Alec Wilkinson (Knopf; $18.95). Every winter, roughly 10,000 West Indian men go to harvest sugarcane by hand in South Florida. The author decided to see how these migrants earn their pay and came back with a story more bitter than sweet...
...Alec Wilkinson...
...dying fall hardly saps the considerable strengths of Big Sugar, subtitled Seasons in the Cane Fields of Florida. Forget the comparative dangers of cutting sugarcane. Wonder instead why roughly 10,000 West Indian men, chiefly Jamaicans, come to South Florida each winter to do it. That is what Alec Wilkinson, a staff writer for The New Yorker, did when he came across this information in a 1984 newspaper story. Other questions aroused Wilkinson's interest as a reporter. Among them: Is it not odd that a major domestic cash crop should be so heavily dependent on imported black labor? What...
...Wilkinson, who has also written books about police work on Cape Cod and moonshine enforcement in North Carolina, finds and displays much genuine cause for outrage here, but he also brings back a richer, more complex story than he seems willing to acknowledge. Better pay and treatment from the growers might improve the cutters' lot, but nothing will ameliorate the reality of harvesting cane by hand. It is boring, backbreaking work, carried out in oppressive heat, surrounded by the dangers of poisonous snakes, fire ants and whirling, razor-sharp scythes. Some of those who suffer these miseries take pride...