Book: The Cost of Sugar
Author: Cynthia McLeod
Country: Suriname
Format: e-book
Pages: 296
Publication: 1987
I came across this book through a suggestion by readers who joined my Read the World Challenge on StoryGraph. At the time, I knew very little about Suriname (a country on the north coast of South America) and even less about its history and literature.
The Cost of Sugar is set in 18th-century Suriname, during the height of Dutch colonial rule. The story revolves around two sisters, Sarith and Elza, daughters of a wealthy Jewish planter family. Like all plantation owners of the time, their family relied heavily on enslaved labor—not only to plant, harvest, and process sugar cane, but also to attend to their daily needs and whims inside the house.
The novel follows the sisters through their youth, as they search for love, marriage, and family. Over time, their differences become strikingly clear. While Elza seeks love and stability, Sarith pursues status and wealth, often with cruelty.
That’s the personal story, but the book is far from a romance. Against this backdrop, McLeod paints a vivid portrait of Surinamese society, exposing the high human cost of the sugar trade. She captures, with rare nuance, the complexity of relationships between enslaved people and enslavers, especially within the Big House—something I haven’t seen portrayed this clearly in other books or films about slavery.
“As far as female company was concerned, if Rutger needed a woman, the administrator could provide a pretty mulatto girl. Almost all whites had a mulatto woman as mistress or concubine. This satisfied the needs of the man and carried absolutely no responsibility.”
The Cost of Sugar, Cynthia McLeod
Suriname’s society, positioned at the crossroads of South America and the Caribbean, resembled the power dynamics in places like Northeastern Brazil. A few white families owned vast plantations, worked entirely by an enslaved Black workforce kidnapped from Africa.
What many people don’t realize is that, beyond brutal physical punishments, enslavers also maintained control by imposing hierarchies among the enslaved. Those considered “trustworthy” or “well-behaved” were assigned to domestic service in the Big House—as servants, errand boys, nannies, or personal attendants. This work meant somewhat less grueling physical labor, and sometimes access to influence, protection, and even bonds of affection with the white family.
Yes, affection. Many white children were raised almost exclusively by Black nannies who tended not only to their physical needs but also to their emotional lives. These bonds were real. As surreal as it sounds, many nannies deeply loved the children in their care, and in turn, those children sometimes protected and cherished them as adults.
“Could he ever have explained to someone else what this slave had meant to him throughout his life? How she had loved his children, cared for his wife; how she, despite her own sorrow, had consoled him when his wife died; how she had cared for his children with all the love that was within her, and how she was always there for them, from early morning to deep in the night?”
The Cost of Sugar, Cynthia McLeod
But this came at a terrible cost. The love and care these women poured into their enslavers’ children was diverted from their own, who were left behind or neglected out of necessity. This complexity is one of the most insidious legacies of slavery in South America—a legacy still visible today. (The Brazilian film The Second Mother illustrates this dynamic beautifully, if you want to explore it further.)
So domestic workers did enjoy some level of protection and even authority inside the Big House. But at the end of the day, as becomes clear in some passages of the book, they were still enslaved, deprived of freedom and treated as property. This is one of the baffling aspects that McLeod illustrates so well – the causal, friendly and often loving way in which the masters treated the slaves, often referring to them as the heartbeat of the house, while they’re still keeping them captive.
“Shocked, the basya took a step back. “No misi,” he said, shaking his head. In his view this was impossible. How could he whip Ashana – Ashana who was as it were head of the household, with almost more authority than the misi herself. Ashana, who had never ever been whipped?”
The Cost of Sugar, Cynthia McLeod
Another fascinating element of the book is its portrayal of resistance. McLeod highlights the Maroons, or Boni Negroes—formerly enslaved people who escaped into the jungle and built armed communities with their own economic and social structures.
Reading this, I couldn’t help but draw parallels to Isabel Allende’s The Island Beneath the Sea, which portrays the Haitian Revolution around the same period. These stories are interconnected, each part of a larger history of resistance, survival, and the long shadow of colonialism.
The Cost of Sugar is not an easy read, but it is an essential one. Cynthia McLeod exposes not only the brutality of slavery but also the contradictions and human entanglements that made the system so enduring. There were a few things that I disliked in the book, though. I wish more voices were given to Mini Mini, Ashana and the other servants of the house.
Interestingly enough, they brought that more into focus when they shooted the film based on the book. The trailer is below.
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