The Sugar Planter's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

navigation canals. The mules, several of them chained together, pulling the loaded punts to the factory. Then the grinding season, when the factory groans and chugs day and night, a dark lurking monster turning the once-green canes to gold. Sugar is our gold. Corentyne gold, we call it. Corentyne gold, Essequibo gold, Demerara gold. Each county in British Guiana produces its own version of sugar wealth. After the harvest the once-glorious fields remain behind, denuded, ugly, disfigured by endless miles of hacked-off stumps black from the burning. But then comes the flood-fallowing and new life, when the young green shoots, the ratoons, grow out from fields now glistening with water, and the coolie women bend low in the water as they weed. And every few years, the planting of new canes.
    This was our world: sweet, romantic, magnificent. Yes, I know there is a dark side to it, and I know that Winnie saw herself as some kind of heroine, taking the side of the sugar-workers. And I know that Papa, my beloved Papa, had done wrong. But surely blood is thicker than water! In choosing the wrong side Winnie has betrayed us all, and it is left to me to save our kingdom.

    T he absurd thing is that , after Papa’s trial and conviction, Winnie got some notion into her head that Clarence and I were not enough; that she , as the elder sister, was needed to direct the business. That I was too young, and needed help, her help. She, whose head was filled with nothing but fluff!
    Well, perhaps I shouldn’t say that. By the time of the trial Winnie had started to fancy herself as some kind of a revolutionary, the romantic bubbles in her head replaced by dissident fervour and communist ideas. But of course it was only to impress George and the other darkies and our coolie labourers. Apparently she was now their heroine, and tried to establish herself as such on the plantation.
    How circumstances can change! She and I had once been the best of friends but now – now we were tottering towards outright enmity. We agreed on nothing. The first thing Winnie wanted to do was build new homes for the coolies. It’s not that I did not want to do that – after all, building new homes, replacing that dreadful shantytown the labourers called home, squalid logies in stinking mud lanes, had been my aim too, right from the beginning. We agreed in principle. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and once I understood the economics of plantation running, I realised that there were other priorities. Just for the time being, of course. Charity could come later.
    Winnie was rather emotional about the whole thing.
    Tears in her eyes, she pleaded with me: ‘Yoyo,’ she said, ‘remember Nanny! How could you forget Nanny?’
    â€˜Of course I haven’t forgotten Nanny!’ How unfair of her to bring up the question of Nanny! Nanny, my beloved nurse, who had spent her last days in the squalor of the logies. It was in fact Nanny’s predicament that had catapulted the two of us into this whole sordid affair. We had lived in a dream world of frocks and parties before then. ‘Don’t bother your pretty little heads,’ Papa had told us, ‘enjoy your lives, and leave the estate to me.’ And we obeyed. But then we found out how Nanny lived. How could I not care? How could I close my heart to the misery of Nanny’s living quarters? I had vowed to change it all; but once I took charge I understood a little better that change would take time, and anyway, it was far too late to benefit Nanny herself, and frankly, my interest had waned. There was time for everything, lots of time. Winnie, however, now that Papa was in prison, wanted change now. Immediately.
    And that is why I did not want her back on the plantation; but she came anyway, sticking her nose into matters that didn’t concern her.
    â€˜Let me see the account books,’ she said that day. ‘I’m sure there must be money left over to build new