The Lamplighter by Jackie Kay

Author:Jackie Kay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Scene 8: Sugar

FX:

(During the scene we hear the sound of sugar cane being cut and the sound of a sugar mill.)

MARY:

Mrs Hannah Glasse’s first cookery book in England. The Art of Cookery made plain and easy.

BLACK HARRIOT:

Take three quarters of a pound of best moist sugar to make a cake the Spanish way.

CONSTANCE:

Rum had a wonderful history of success in Britain, so did jam. La dolce vita!

BLACK HARRIOT:

This is the dawning of the Age of Sugar.

LAMPLIGHTER:

My story is the story of sugar.

MACBEAN:

The owner of Worthy Park, Jamaica declared, ‘The white man cannot labour under a burning sun without certain death, though the Negro can in all climates with impunity.’

LAMPLIGHTER:

My story is the story of sugar.

My story is not sweet.

MACBEAN:

The careful benevolence of providence has provided the Negroes with thick skins.

MARY:

I carried manure in baskets, weighing eighty pounds, on my head. The holes dug for the cane were deep and wide.

LAMPLIGHTER:

The sun baked the heavy soils.

The sun baked my skin.

The cakes were baked. The cakes were baking. The cakes had been baked. The cakes will be baked.

BLACK HARRIOT:

Pound cake! A pound of floor. A pound of butter. A pound of sugar. One dozen eggs.

MARY:

The cut cane was heavy and cumbersome.

CONSTANCE:

20 tons of cane to produce one ton of sugar.

MARY:

At Worthy Park, 89 of the 133 field slaves were women.

LAMPLIGHTER:

We did the planting, cutting, burning, carrying, loading, slicing and stripping.

MACBEAN:

The long sweep of Jamaica’s fertile southern coast was pitted with plantations.

MARY:

I was always hungry. I never stopped being hungry especially in the summer. We got breakfast at nine when we’d been up since four. When the belly is hollow, when the ground feels like it is moving up to meet you, when the emptiness inside you is like something moving. You are all the time imagining food.

LAMPLIGHTER:

One time I run away

Crawling through the tall sugar cane

Watching out for snakes

I get as far as the forest in the hills.

Dogs are sent after me.

When the people catch me

They flog me

Till my back is so crisscross

It looks like cut cane

MACBEAN:

The posterior is made bare and the offender is extended prone on the ground. The driver, with his long and heavy whip, inflicts the lashes under the eye of the overseer.

LAMPLIGHTER:

My story is the story of sugar.

BLACK HARRIOT:

In 1775 the British West Indies Colonies produces 100,000 tons of sugar

CONSTANCE:

Syllabubs and fancys, junkets and ices, milk puddings, suet puddings.

LAMPLIGHTER:

I cut the cane. After I cut the cane, the cane is crushed in the sugar mills and processed in the noisy factories and boiling houses.

MACBEAN:

As we pass along the shore, the Plantations appear to us one above the other like several stories in stately buildings which afforded us a large proportion of delight.

BLACK HARRIOT:

My story is the story of sugar.

I was stolen for sugar.

I gave my body up for sugar.

I nearly died for sugar.

Sugar is my family tree.

I have no sugar daddy.

CONSTANCE:

They took my little girl

when she was three years old

already old enough to be my soul

mate, to shadow me in the sun

all day and ask a hundred whys.

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