'It's not fair, not right': how America treats its black farmers
On the summer day in 2014 that June Provost found three stray cats dead and lined up side by side in his tractor, the forecast had called for rain. It was hot and overcast, the air like a heavy and suffocating blanket, and the sugarcane was already 6ft high.
Wenceslaus Provost Jr – who has gone by the name June since he can remember – stared in shock at the cats, each one with the tabby markings of strays. He could see no visible lacerations, no insides spilling out. He guessed it had been the work of a BB gun or a strangling.
He looked away, disgusted. As the breeze rattled through the sugarcane leaves, he thought: “This is a warning.”
A year earlier, June and his wife, Angie, had found a chain tied around the steering wheel of a tractor and the hydraulic lines stuffed with mud. But the dead cats were a marked escalation in intimidation. The following day, June found the windows of another tractor shot out. Later that season, someone hid cinderblocks in Angie’s fields to ruin the equipment.
Around that same time, Angie and June noticed vehicles parking near her fields, the drivers watching her work. June recognized one of the drivers as a representative of MA Patout & Son sugar mill, the company he contracted with to harvest and mill his sugarcane.
The whole season became an unrelenting act of apparent sabotage. Motor oil was repeatedly drained from vehicles. Fuel lines were filled with water. There was hardly a week without an incident.
“This was someone trying to stop the operation,” June says. “They knew exactly what to do with a tractor.”
After multiple police reports, June says, a sheriff’s deputy told them: “Someone wants what you have by any means necessary.”
In mid-May, the south Louisiana earth is parched, and the cane is nothing but 2ft-tall grass. Once the rain comes, it will grow like weeds. By August, the sugarcane will tower over grown men, and by late fall, it will be milled into molasses and raw sugar. During milling season, entire towns will smell like syrup. It’s a landscape reminiscent of the one shown in the television drama Queen Sugar – produced by the Oprah Winfrey Network and based on a novel by Natalie Baszile – about a black sugarcane farm
