Cane Country Images

My friend, Chandra McCormick, and I rode into Louisiana cane country looking for the people in her photographs. Chandra, a documentary photographer, had shown me pictures of sugarcane workers she had taken over the past 10 years. These were friends she had come to know during trips to cane country, and I too wanted to meet these people who projected quiet images of dignity and elegance in the photographs.

River Road follows the Mississippi River northwestward into St. James, Ascension, St. John the Baptist, and St. Charles parishes. We rode past cane plantations and through the deserted quarters that once housed cane workers. Row houses with long-faded paint, or no paint at all, sit vacant now; the alleys between them which once teemed with children at play are hushed and still.

At Port Allen in West Baton Rouge Parish, we turned off toward Allendale plantation. The lone “matriarch” of the quarters at Allendale, Juanita Matthews, with one of her grandchildren on her hip, told us that Ringo and Rose were dead. They had been the couple with whom Chandra stayed on her visits. The old harmonica-playing man and his son who lived two doors away were also dead, she said. All the others had moved on, too. Some moved to nearby small communities; some to housing projects and subsidized housing. Some went to the cities. She told us 11 of her own 12 children are “grown and gone.”

Our visit coincided with the first cutting of the cane and the beginning of “grinding time” when the cane is trucked to the refineries for processing. Juanita Matthews’ husband runs tractors and machines. Often he will not get home until late night after dropping off workers in nearby parishes. The shucks burned from the cane before it is trucked away leave a sweet smoky pungency that blends with river smells to create wafts of damp, thick air. The same air undoubtedly holds unregulated airborne chemicals from nearby chemical processing plants in this area also known as “Cancer Alley.” Grinding time used to be high time in the quarters. People were working, and they knew they had a payday coming. They would have money to provide for their families and money to celebrate. They would cut cane from sunup to sundown. Then the parties of blues playing and singing would go from house to house for days.

Rose and Ringo had been “scrappers.” Scrappers went to the fields after the machines, scrapped the cane left behind, and packed it into waiting trucks. Chandra remembers that a few years ago, scrappers lived — sometimes several generations to a house — in the dozen or so row houses the workers rented on the Allendale plantation. Even after the advent of two-row machines and as late as 1992, scrappers worked the cane fields. Today, three-row cutting machines brought in by the corporate farmers gather nearly all the cane they can use. These “Big Farmers,” as the local workers call them, see the expense of scrappers as superfluous.

“Nobody scraps anymore,” Juanita Matthews told us, “the machines do it all.” Matthews started working in the cane fields when she was 14. Now, at 58, having been diagnosed with hypertension, she stays at home and keeps her grandchildren.

When I asked Matthews if she had ever thought of leaving, she said, “I lived in Baton Rouge for a couple of years, but I didn’t like it. I like it better here in the country where I feel freer, more secure. My [grand]children can go outdoors, and I don’t have to worry about what they will see when they open the door. I just like it better.”