A Thinly-Confected Memory

When my mind is idle, as it often is now, rather than count sheep I recapitulate memories, most but not all of which are authentic.  (If the memories don't come from my "lived experience," they certainly come from my unlived experience, which surely is entitled to a voice as well?)

This is an old man's game.  When my father was a child, circa 1926, he might have listened raptly while old men of his day reminisced about their child labors in the Merrimack Valley, working not in textile mills but rather in factories that made shoes for the Army of the Potomac, some of which no doubt still lie buried in the fields outside Petersburg, Virginia and in the accursed Wilderness.

One hundred years later, my memory paints two identical pictures.  They show mounds, small mountains really, of raw sugar.  The mounds sit inside the walls of two manufactories that I would often pass on excursions to see my mother's family in Woburn, Massachusetts.  One, owned and operated by the New England Confectionery Company in East Cambridge, was at the time the largest candy factory in the world.  It spat out millions of multi-colored, multiflavored Necco Wafers per year.  The other, in Everett, bore the proud logo of the Charlston Chew, a popular confection of chocolate-covered vanilla nougat.  These products had national reach; you were as likely to be sucking on Necco Wafers as a child in Des Moines or Bakersfield, California as in Eastern Massachusetts.

But where did all of that sugar come from?  Almost certainly, I surmise, from Cuba, at least in the days before Fidel's revolution.  And how much of the journey from there to here was taken by ship, and how much by railroad car from a place like New Orleans or Miami?

And so we can draw a thin, fading historical line that passes directly through the environs of Boston.  It starts with a bent-low campesino in the interior of Cuba, whacking away at cane with a machete under a broad-brimmed hat.  It ends with a dentist in suburban Des Moines, empowered financially to buy a bass boat because the teeth of his little patients have been corrupted, over and over, by New England-made confections.  In those days we were all, it seems, in this together, even though we hadn't the slightest clue what this was.