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For 20 years, Robert Shelton punched the clock at Brooklyn's
cavernous sugar refinery. He served as a docent at Kara Walker's art exhibit
there, sharing with visitors the story of his life.
Text | Leigh Raiford and Robin J. Hayes for theatlantic.com
Published | July 3, 2014
2737-42. That was the number Robert Shelton punched into a
clock at the Domino Sugar factory for 20 years. “As long as you live. You never
forget. That’s my number,” Shelton says. And when he returned to the refinery
in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for only the second time since the factory closed in
2004, this time as a volunteer for Creative Time’s installation of Kara
Walker’s “A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” “I had tears in my eyes
because it brings back the memories.”
Memories of working the dangerous kiln on a shop floor that
regularly reached 140 degrees. Of a hazardous but well-paid union job that
enabled Shelton to stop working three jobs, buy his first car, and move his
family out of the Roosevelt Housing Projects and into a Bedford-Stuyvesant
brownstone. Of friendships made with the diverse group of Polish,
Italian, Caribbean immigrants and other African Americans who also worked at
the refinery. Of ongoing labor conflict with Domino Sugar Corporation that
resulted in the longest strike in the history of New York City.
Today, with its original brickwork, soaring ceilings, stunning
sunlight, and East River views it's not surprising that the site will soon be a
35-story residential and commercial “megaproject” in the now very desirable
Williamsburg neighborhood. The only other time Shelton has been back to the
factory since 2004 was a couple of years ago to advocate for affordable housing
in the development. "We don’t want luxury apartments," Shelton says.
"Why should someone who has a lot of money come from upstate or from
Connecticut and benefit rather than people who have lived there all their life?
It has been a long delay because the developers only want to give a small
percentage…for regular people like me.”
Shelton is the only volunteer on the floor of the provocative
installation who ever worked at Domino’s sugar refinery. Of the several
“interpreters” who are on hand to answer visitor questions, his is the only
intimate connection to the factory. He found out about the exhibit through an
article in the New York Times and knew immediately he wanted to be
involved.
Commissioned by Creative Time arts organization, Walker’s
“marvelous sugar baby,” a massive “mammy sphinx” fashioned from 40 tons of
compressed white sugar, and the coterie of molasses-covered serving boys, have
been seen by thousands of visitors over the course of its nine-week run.
“A Subtlety” powerfully brings the history and feeling of slavery into
the present. Like much of Walker’s similarly themed work, it produces “a giddy
discomfort” in the viewer. The Mammy Sphinx wears only a head scarf. Her
breasts and labia are massive and exposed, signaling both productive and
reproductive labor.
In the vibrant public conversation that has surrounded this
exhibit, the factory itself—its history and especially its workers—have become
mere backdrop, a focus on plantation slavery unfortunately muting the history
of the industrial urban workers who produced the commodity in factories. It's a
history that spanned decades, beginning before the Civil War: The factory
complex on the Brooklyn waterfront that now hosts Walker's exhibit originally
opened in 1856. By 1870, it was processing more than half of the sugar consumed
in the United States, was rebuilt in 1882 after a fire, and continued to refine
sugar until its doors closed in 2004.
Robert Shelton’s story sheds light on this forgotten narrative.
Read complete story here.
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