A Not-For-Bedtime Story About a Box of Chocolates

You can “See” it as heavenly or heartbreaking

Photo by Scarlett Alt on Unsplash

Have you ever received a box of See’s chocolates? Do you remember the taste of deep caramelized brown sugar? The decadence of dark chocolate? The velvety ambrosia of butterscotch?

I have a different memory of See’s Candies.

In a long single-file line, my 4th-grade class in Atlanta, Georgia, entered the See’s Candy factory through a door that led to a catwalk above … Lord God help me!

Looking down eight terrifying feet, I stared into an abyss: three colossal caldrons, each eight feet across and as tall as I was. Within their bellies churned a boiling, surging, ash-gray miasma. They exhaled a suffocating plume of deep red and black smoke and a hot, sickening stench — a grotesque fusion of burning cotton candy and scorched grease. The only illumination was the eerie, blood-red glow bleeding from that inferno.

Through the haze, I could just discern the silhouettes of Black men surrounding each vat, trapped in a rhythmic, endless torment: stirring, stirring, stirring with long wooden paddles.

By the time I had trudged 10 feet into the building, my school dress was soaked in sweat, my chest hurt, and I was wheezing. By the time we were halfway round the building, I was so faint that I had to hold onto the railing to keep going.

Even at that age, by the time I finally exited the building, I realized I would now know hell if I ever encountered it again.

Later, I realized that I, a white woman, would never know the kind of hell that those Black men endured.

Atlanta averages 90 degrees in the summer. That candy factory was probably more than 110 degrees. Maybe sometimes up to 130. For up to 12 hours a day in that kind of heat, those silhouettes I saw — real Black men, real human beings — hauled 100-pound sacks of sugar and cocoa and drums of chemical flavorings, stood over caldrons stirring a mixture as heavy as wet cement, and faced constant danger at the end of each shift cleaning still-hot, grease-choked machinery. Safety gear? Sometimes some inadequate rubber gloves, sometimes nothing.

All those jobs in the early 1950s were classified as “low-skill base labor.” They paid the absolute minimum the law allowed, typically 50% to 60% of what any white man would be paid — though no white man would be forced into that kind of job.

What must it have been like at that time for Black men in the South? Going to such a job day after day. Arriving home exhausted at the end of the day with barely enough for black-eyed peas, grits, and cornbread made with lard and water. Saving up grocery change in a jar for when the “rent man” came knocking on the door.

Never even having enough to buy a box of chocolates they spent the day making.

A human, not an AI text generator, wrote this story. (Get your own No-AI Badge.)

For more stories about race, inequality, labor rights, and the systems that shape our lives, follow Fourth Wave. Also check out our Livestreams and sign up for our Newsletter. Let’s grow the community! Have you got a story or poem that focuses on women or other targeted groups? Submit to the Wave!