The Haitian Connection in Connie May Fowler’s Sugar Cage

Abstract

SUZANNE W. JONES University of Richmond The Haitian Connection in Connie May Fowler’s Sugar Cage IN HER FIRST NOVEL, SUGAR CAGE (1992), CONNIE MAY FOWLER, A WHITE Floridian with Cherokee ancestry and an early exposure to Voodoo, employs some of the narrative conventions of magical realism as a way around the impasse of Southern race relations in Florida in the 1960s. Her otherwise modernist narrative technique of nine first-person narrators emphasizes the isolation of her characters at the same time that the variety of viewpoints encourages readers to see both the interracial and international connections that elude or confuse her characters. The culturalandtransnationalcomplexitiessheexplores,especiallyasregards the importation of African and Haitian belief systems and Florida’s reliance on Haitian migrant workers, make magical realism an interesting, if perhaps contested, connective tissue between black and white worlds in Florida.1 In exploring the historical circumstances that produced South American magical realism, circumstances similar to those in the US South, Antonio Benítez-Rojo argues that Caribbean revolutionary discourses, which reacted to slavery, colonialism, and the plantation economy, inform the genre. He believes that such discourses when “passing into the genres of literature” attempt “to decenter the 1 Differing views, such as those by Arnold Krupat and Richard Fleck, about whether the term “magical realism” should be applied to Native American fiction are pertinent to Fowler’s depiction of Voodoo rituals in Sugar Cage. At the root of the debate is a question about whether the term “magical realism” devalues what westerners would identify as “magic” in such texts, thereby denying what constitutes a nonwestern reality (and so making realism a more accurate descriptor for such fiction) or whether magical realism functions as Lois Zamora and Wendy Faris argue, “as a cultural corrective, requiring readers to scrutinize accepted realistic conventions of causality, materiality, motivation” (3). Lee Schweninger presents a helpful overview of the debate in “Myth Launching and Moon Landings.” He focuses on whether the alternative “realities” in Native American fiction should be seen as parallel (and so in keeping with the conventions of realism), braided, or fused. Applying these categories to Fowler’s Sugar Cage, the answer seems to vary: her presentation of Voodoo rituals suggests a parallel coexisting reality, the clairvoyance of Inez and Soleil Marie hints at braided natural and supernatural aspects of reality, while the fantastic ending of the novel represents a fused reality employed as a “cultural corrective.” 84 Suzanne W. Jones violence of their origins with their own excess, looking for legitimation in their own illegitimacy” (212-13). In a large cast of characters, Fowler’s most compelling focus is on a young interracial couple and an old African American cleaning woman, but the novel’s many subplots manifest a palpable desire to reach a sphere of “effective equality” which Benítez-Rojo attributes to creole cultures, “where the racial, social, and cultural differences that conquest, colonization, and slavery created would coexist without violence” (52). This is just the place that several of Fowler’s characters reach by the conclusion of Sugar Cage, crossing color lines, belief systems, and national boundaries to make personal connections, although hardly to effect institutional changes. Set in the seedy central Florida town of Tiama, “Prison Capital of the World,” the novel begins in 1945, spans more than two decades, and examines the race relations of two generations of Southerners. By including a migrant worker of mixed Haitian and Seminole Indian ancestry in her story of Southern race relations, Fowler complicates the received biracial history of the South and presents the interracial romance between Soleil Marie BeauvoirandEmoryLooneyasamodelforinterpersonaltransformation. At the same time, she shows how agribusiness has produced a neo-plantation system that exploits migrant workers of color and lingers to the present day. At one time or another all nine narrators of Sugar Cage are imprisoned within their own narrow perspectives, and their individual stories are about moving beyond these “cages.” Fowler creates two exceptions, characters who because of their prescience and supernatural powers take the novel into the realm of magical realism: Soleil Marie Beauvoir, a racially mixed Haitian-Seminole cane field worker, and Inez Temple, a poor African American cleaning woman. Voodoo provides a spiritual and cultural link...