The Sugar Planter's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

herself at me, laughing, covered in flour as she was. At first I drew back, but then I couldn’t help it – how could I reject Winnie’s embrace? I let those floury arms close around me, and I let that floury face nudge mine, and I felt her lips on my cheek, and I knew heaven.
    â€˜I love your ma, George! We’ve had a lovely day! I met so many people and we went to Bourda Market and bought tons of provisions and she’s teaching me to cook!’
    â€˜As I just saw!’ I said.
    â€˜Come! Look!’
    She pulled me into the tiny space we called a kitchen – there was just about standing room for the three of us. On the second burner of the stove stood a big black pot, covered. Winnie picked up a dishcloth, folded it to make a pad and lifted the cover. A cloud of heavenly-scented steam rose from the innards of the pot.
    â€˜Chicken curry!’ said Winnie, and I could hear the pride in her voice. ‘I made it all by myself – every bit of it! I skinned the chicken and boned and quartered it and chopped the vegetables and everything! I can cook! I can’t believe I can cook!’
    â€˜She need more practice wit’ dem rotis, though!’ said Ma, and though she was pretending to grumble I could hear the approval in her voice. Everything was going to be fine.

5
    Yoyo
    I should have been pleased to see Mama, but I wasn’t. Not really. Mama had deserted us: sailed away to Europe, leaving us in Papa’s care. She stayed away for years, never writing to us, wallowing in some kind of gloom that stripped her of every motherly emotion. Now, apparently, she was healed. Winnie lured her back from Austria, met her at the harbour and brought her back to Promised Land with all sorts of radical ideas about how to run a plantation. All these people who know nothing, nothing, about the business, breathing down my neck! It was enough to send a sane girl to the madhouse. But I must keep my sanity, for the sake of Promised Land.
    I love my home. I love the Corentyne Coast, the land so flat it seems to last for ever, the ocean lapping at our northern border, the vast sky. Most of all, I love the house.

    O ur house in Promised Land is a palace, a fairytale castle made of wooden lace. It’s constructed of sturdy greenheart in the Dutch Colonial style, just like those magnificent mansions in Georgetown’s Main Street. It sparkles white in the sunlight. Its filigree fretwork, the lattices on the outside walls, the curlicues on the jutting Demerara windows let in the cool Atlantic breeze, which flows throughout the house, up and down stairs, over the walls and through the windows, so that it is never hot.
    I know that Winnie, too, loves this house, this land. How can anyone who grew up here ever leave? We have sugar in our blood, we girls. And Winnie has destroyed it all. Or tried to.
    How are the mighty fallen! Our father, he who now languishes in a prison, was once a sugar king. Kathleen, Winnie and I were raised as sugar princesses. Our realm is magical: a sunlit, wind-blown bubble of sweetness. Sugar is our livelihood, sugar establishes the seasons, sugar is our world. We grew up basking in sweetness and light.
    The rhythm of sugar dictates this world, and any child growing up here knows each season by the sights, sounds and smells of the sugar cycle. Full growth, when the canes are high and wave against the sky, the greenness stretching for miles. Then the burning of the trash, when fire and smoke consume the fields and the air smells of scalded, syrupy, smoky cane juice, intoxicating in its pungency. At harvest, half-naked coolies wielding cutlasses swarm the fields, shouting and swearing as they slash their way through the canes, felling those giant scorched denuded canes. Then comes the time to load the punts. Those same cane-cutters, their bodies now smudged black with soot, ash and cane juice, bent low with the weight of the bundles on their backs, carrying the canes to the