sugar cane

 The movie Sugar Cane Alley or black shack alley (which was apparently too vulgar for the theatres), is set on the Caribbean isle of Martinique, where slavery was huge. A boy, Jose, has lost his parents and is being raised by his grandmother, Ma ’Tine. Ma ‘Tine does not want him to share the same life as her and the other people in the village by beginning to work in the sugar cane fields. Instead, she sends him off to school. During school he is met with a challenge, one of his teachers thinks he cheated on one of his papers, the teacher thinks it is too good to be written by a boy his age, but after discovering his background he realizes that he did not cheat and that he is actually very gifted. His grandmother dies of what we can assume was a heart attack. The movie ends with Jose going back to school, leaving the sugar cane fields in the past.