Ingenio

Cameron Rowland, 2023

At first glance, this looks like a huge rusted wok. Or a spaceship part. Or something a guy in Brooklyn swears he's gonna turn into a fire pit. It does not look precious. It's a sugar kettle. Nineteenth century. Cast iron, made in England, shipped to Louisiana. Sixteen hundred pounds. Not a symbol of the sugar trade. Not a poetic reference to it. An actual piece of the machine. The title's Spanish. Ingenio. The colonial word for the sugar mill. It means the engine. Rowland wrote the caption. It tells you how the engine ran. Cut cane rots fast, so once the grinding starts, the mill can't stop. Sixteen, eighteen hours a day. Enslaved Black people grew the cane, cut the cane, crushed the cane, and boiled the juice down in a row of kettles like this one. The caption quotes a historian on what kept it going. The whip came around more reliably than the food. The same historian's book lists the punishments. One of them: boiling sugar, emptied over a person's head. The caption's last line: "Sugar was made this way for four hundred years." Sugar has incredible PR. Sugar is cupcakes. Sugar is a tiny spoon. Sugar is your aunt asking if you want one lump or two. This thing drags it back to what it was. Industry. There's a crack down one side, rim to belly. Inside, it's that grey and orange of iron left out in the rain. It sits on its round bottom. No stand. So Rowland's doing research, and comes across a place outside Atlanta selling old sugar kettles. As garden fountains. As fire pits. On the website, some of the owners pose next to them in the yard. Same kettle. But, ya know... different caption.

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