Twenty-one year-old Alyson is a novice journalist living on the west coast of Florida when she is called by an emergency room nurse in Lake Worth, where her forty-one-year-old mother has overdosed. Again. In 1986, Virgie Soule is a Florida college student volunteer spending the summer in Belle Glade, helping the families of the sugar cane fieldworkers.
When she meets the suave Al Gomez, a Harvard Law grad training to do foreign service work, she falls in love. He too wants to help the sugar cane workers, who lead desperate lives. Together, they become involved in plans for a worker protest over unfair pay. Then Al goes missing two days before the protest, and Virgie tries to find out what happened to him. Meanwhile, she realises that she is pregnant and there are many other things to find out... Most people don't realise slavery was introduced in the West by sugar cane growers looking for free labour.
In the US today, sugar cane fields take up thousands of acres of Florida land. The waste and runoff from the cane fields are the source of serious pollution in Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, and repeated toxic algae blooms in the estuaries and rivers that spill into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. Drinking water for south Florida is contaminated, fish and aquatic life die, wildlife and sea grass are threatened.
