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Grenada- Carl David: The Cane and the Corn

Grenada- Carl David: The Cane and the Corn“Without working, you cannot inherit your part in life.”

Carl David is a taxi driver and our guide while researching the spices on the island Grenada. He left school when 11 years old. He helped his family grow yams, sweet potatoes, corn and sugar cane. Later, he held many jobs, among them a diver, pipe-fitter at the water works, and soldier for revolutionary leader Maurice Bishop. He said the revolution taught him much and made him “sensible.” He said people worked hard back then. They don’t work as hard today.

I was born in 1954. My mother moved to Trinidad and left me in 1955 – I was very small. [At first] I lived with a family. Being that I was not the lady’s child everything I did was wrong. It was very bad and I was forced to run away. Then I was adopted by these people, they were very good, they were my adopted mother and father…My adopted father lived for 99 years.

My mother and father worked on land at the estate – that’s what they did for a living. We never knew the people who owned the estate. There was no “massah”, no head of slaves, lashes, that was abolished in the 1800s. By then, the government owned the land – you paid a tax to the government, something small.

We planted yams, sweet potato, corn, and sugar cane. We made mounds for the sugar cane that were round and long. Each stalk has joints and we cut the cane at the joint and planted it so a group grows out of the joint. We cut the cane every year in the dry season, just before the rainy season. These days the rainy season may be in June, you never know, with global warming, it’s not like before. You plant in June and reap in August.

Sugar cane -Before and After
Sugar Cane -Before and After

We cut on different days: everyone came together and cut one field at a time. Then the young people would put the cut cane in heaps and put it on trucks and we would sell it to the Woodline sugar factory. It was nice cane – very good and very tall. It was soft cane with a good long joint.

We would peel the cane with our teeth. The cane juice would run down our (motions to chest and stomach)… we were half naked in those days. I remember my mother would cut the stalk and hold it up like this, and the juices would run into her mouth. There are different kinds of cane, black cane, green, yellows, crayfish – red and yellow – each one tasted a little different. The sugar cane was soft, you could squeeze it, it was so soft. Not like today. Today it’s hard and not as good.

I never knew my (biological) mother again until 1984. I went to look for her. I didn’t sit down and ask her questions or any of that. I just saw her. That’s all. Now, I have one son – he is a chef – and a life I have enjoyed.


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Abolitionists, Resistance, and the Nation’s First Candy – Part 1

Mrs. Spencer: The Nation’s First Candy Store and Abolitionist

Map of Salem 1820

The fascinating and revealing story of the nation’s first candy begins in 1800 when Mrs. Mary Spencer and her son Thomas were shipwrecked in Salem, Massachusetts, after sailing over from England. As you can imagine, Mary Spencer was destitute, having lost everything she owned in the wreck. The town’s women felt bad for her, and learning she was an excellent cook, raised money to buy her a barrel of sugar.  Cane sugar was expensive at that time, and women didn’t have the means to make money. It’s likely they had to raise the funds through church functions and other means.

Gibralters

With the sugar, Mary Spencer made what she called the “Gibraltar,” the British name for a family of confections. The ingredients—cream of tartar, sugar, lemon or peppermint flavoring, and corn starch—were standard in many sweets and medicines, and similar to an after-dinner mint. She sold the candy from a pail on the steps of the First Church in Salem.

It’s important to remember that at that time women couldn’t vote, rarely owned property, and certainly weren’t entrepreneurs. Regardless, Mary Spencer took the money from her candy and bought a horse and buggy which she used to travel from town to town selling the Gibraltar. She was so successful that, in 1806, she bought a house on Buffum Street in Salem. She lived on the second floor of the house and opened the first candy store on the ground floor. There she sold the nation’s first commercial candy – the Gibralter.

Mrs. Spencer’s success was partly due to her shop’s seaside location and the steady flow of seafaring customers: in war time, sailors and seamen; in peacetime, seamen, traders, merchants, and pirates. The Gibraltar was sturdy enough to withstand humidity from the sea and was cut and wrapped in triangular pieces that easily fit in small spaces on board, where it was carried to China, the Far East, Africa, and the East Indies. But something else was at hand.

As Mary Spencer went from town to town selling the nation’s first commercial candy, she secretly transported escaped slaves who hid in a false bottom beneath her seat. As for her son Thomas: he was a soap box abolitionist, who challenged passers-by to join the resistance movement.

When Mary Spencer died around 1828, Thomas put her body in an easily transportable cooper coffin. After running the company for a few years, he returned to England, where a large sum of money and possibly a title, awaited him. He buried his mother there. George Pepper bought the business from Thomas Spencer and his employee, George Berkinshaw, bought it from him. The Berkinshaw family still owns it today. As for the buggy: it’s housed in the Peabody Essex Museum.

“Jonathan Walker, a sea captain from Maine, was caught transporting escaped slaves to freedom in the Bahamas. He was arrested, imprisoned and branded with the letter “S.S.” on his hand which stood for slave stealer.”

…Stay tuned for Part II