In My Own Write

The Bubble Gum Exchange

Despite fragile fillings, aging molars, and a loose crown, I sometimes let the sweet taste of pink bubble gum serve as memory's time machine to transport me back to a scene half a century old. It begins with me hanging head down from the high branch of a box elder tree.

My left foot is caught fast, my breath is exhausted by wailing panic, and I'm staring down thirty feet of trunk into the upturned face of a black man. I watch as he leans his ragged bedroll against the tree, takes off his dirty trainman's cap, and shades his eyes. He squints up at my flopping form framed against a hot June sun glinting through the leaves.

Struck by the novelty of that dark face in that unlikely place, I forget for the moment how I lost my balance while trying to cut, from a too-high branch, the ‘Y' I needed for a perfect slingshot. And how luck turned back my way and wedged a bare foot in a forked branch as I toppled toward hard ground.In the soft, unhurried drawl of somewhere southern, he asked what I was doing so high up in that tree and upside down. My seven-year-old mind churned for a reply, my thoughts spinning between the pain in my ankle, the blood rushing to my head, the acuteness of my peril, and that black face. Not waiting for a reply, he grabbed a lower limb and began to climb, testing his weight on each branch before venturing up to the next.

I smelled the sweet hickory smoke of campfires, the sulfur of locomotive coal soot, and the sourness of old sweat as he encircled my waist with his left arm and freed my foot with his right. He swung me down to a safe branch.

From the present vantage point of this last decade of a century overflowing with the emotional rhetoric and violent realities of race and racism, it may sound unusual if not unbelievable that in 1949, I had never spoken to, or even seen up close, a black man, woman or child. But that distant year was a time of little questioned racial segregation. In our rural reach of America, this was not due so much to prejudice or racism, though there was that, but mostly because our small Ohio town had no black citizens, our county school no black pupils, our German Protestant church no black members, our farms no black workers.

We had no experience, no world view, no way to react to those who seemed so different from the pale, familiar faces of our closed community. To me, black was Amos and Andy on the radio and Jackie Robinson on the sports page. I knew black people lived in some parts of the greater world, but they did not reside in our parts.

So it was a unique creature who examined my bruised, swelling ankle and asked if I was able to walk home. The path along the creek and under the railroad trestle led to the backdoor of my grandfather's store in town less than a mile away. I nodded. From the ground, he retrieved my jackknife, a few pennies, and a piece of Fleer's bubble gum where all had fallen as I hung pocket-side down, and handed them over.

Responding to a sense that one good deed is deserving of another, but not quite knowing what compensation was worth my life, I picked the gum from my possessions and slipped it into his hand. He looked down at the small reward, peeled off the waxed paper wrapper, popped the pink square between his teeth, and grinned.

Then he slung his pack and hurried toward the long line of freight cars beginning to clank and bump to a slow start on the tracks a hundred yards away. I limped slowly behind and saw him toss his bedroll through the open door of an empty green Chesapeake and Ohio boxcar and swing in after it. He stood in the doorway and blew a pink bubble as he and the freight car and then the whole train faded into the coal smoke and steam belching from the laboring locomotive. I waved until the red caboose rattled over the horizon.

If first impressions are vital and lasting, then my initial contact with this alien from a larger universe beyond the boundaries of my own limited world forever shaped my attitude toward every other black person I have since met during my years of college, career, war, and wanderings.

But of almost equal importance, that singular incident occurring as it did at such an impressionable age held me back from joining in the prejudice, bigotry and racism I would often encounter in the years that have stretched between then and now. For a penny's worth of bubble gum, that tree-top rescue fifty years ago saved me from ever having to pay the high intellectual, emotional, and moral tolls levied on those who place undue importance on the origin of kin and color of skin.

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