Sugarcane as History in Paule Marshall's "To Da-Duh, in Memoriam" - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Martin Japtok

Martin Japtok teaches English and African American Studies at West Virginia State College. His essays have appeared in AAR, MELUS, The Southern Literary Journal, Literature and Medicine, and elsewhere. His edited essay collection Postcolonial Perspectives on Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the U.S. is forthcoming from Africa World Press.

Notes

(1.) To give an example from Jamaica: "By 1703, Jamaica had 45,000 slaves. By 1778, it had 205,300. Yet, between 1703 and 1775, the island had imported 469,893 slaves, or well over two slaves for each one added to the population" (Segal 40).

(2.) In 1936, Puerto Rico, for example, "was the second largest market for American wheat growers and millers; it bought more rice from the United States than all other countries combined" (Williams 449).

(3.) "The thirteen British colonies on the North American mainland were settled mainly by people of English, Scottish, and Irish origin. Their liking for sweetness predated their settlement of the Americas. As early as 1603, foreign visitors to England had commented on the immoderate English liking for sweet things.... In the mid-seventeenth century, British working people began to be accustomed to drinking tea, sweetened with molasses or sugar. Though the first English colonists were not people who could have afforded much sugar or tea in England, they were to become important users in the New World" (Mintz 125).

(4.) I am indebted to my colleague Litchfield O'Brian Thompson for this information and his support and encouragement in my research for this essay.

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---. "To Da-Duh, in Memoriam." 1967. Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century African-American Short Stories. Ed. Clarence Major. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. 275-83.

Mintz, Sidney W. "Pleasure, Profit, and Satiation." Seeds of Change: A Quincentenilal Commemoration. Ed. Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis. Washington: Smithsonian Institution P, 1991. 112-29.