Sugar Shock

A Subtlety, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby
by Kara Walker
Image credit Time Out New York

It's an old phrase common in my diabetes-riddled family, generally misused to refer to an insulin reaction [real "sugar shock" is when your blood sugar skyrockets to dangerous levels, but it's become colloquially misapplied to refer to hypoglycemic shock, when your blood sugar drops precipitously].

This morning, it's a kick in the gut.

Go read my Spirit Sister's post, here, about the brilliant Kara Walker's new installation at the soon-to-be-demolished Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn.

My emotions this morning are whirling, roiling ball of memory and happiness and nausea and disgust all lodged in my gut, like that of a six-year-old's Halloween hangover on November first. But this won't pass with a few hours' time.

We have a love/hate relationship with sugar in this household anyway. Indians and diabetics — what could possibly go wrong? As it happens, we have no refined sugar in the house, and never do; we use raw sugar, maple sugar when we can get it, occasionally brown sugar, or more often, agave syrup. Much healthier. 

We now keep molasses on hand for the horses as needed, but I confess to occasionally licking it off my fingers. Molasses, for me, is one of those substances braided into my memory: One of the things we could afford in childhood, even at times when refined sugar was out of reach; something used occasionally on those rare celebratory days when my mother made pancakes; the ingredient that made my sister's molasses cookies, which she so dearly loved, so savory-sweet; the association with the horses of our childhood. The taste, the smell, the texture: like maple sugar and maple syrup, for me, molasses, at the most limbic level, is a mix of warm, safe, happy sensations.

And then came adulthood, and college, and learning about the canefields. More colonialism and capitalism, likewise braided tightly together, this time into a lash with which to torture and torment human beings who were seen not merely as not fully human, but as mere things, tools to be used in an agricultural assembly line.

Even then, I didn't get anything approaching the real story, but I got enough of it to know that sugar in any form wasn't quite as sweet anymore.

Interesting, innit? For so long, the apex of sugar, the type most sought-after, was refined sugar. White sugar. Just as, for the dominant culture (and for our own peoples far too much of the time, being immersed as they were, dipped and coated like candy, in the racism that has been wholly a part of that culture since before the country was "founded"), whiteness was the apex, the goal, the brass ring to be reached, the self-actualization of the entire society.

And now, we've come to learn just how toxic, how much of a killer, refined white sugar is to the human body. All human bodies.

So much like the sickeningly-sweet false promises of assimilation.

Some weeks ago, on a trip to the local organic grocery, I picked up another bottle of molasses for the horses. Keep in mind that this is the "liberal" grocery in this "liberal" town. I was in a hurry, didn't feel like digging my reading glasses out of my bag, and could read the price-points on the shelf just fine. One brand was substantially less expensive than the other two, and so I grabbed it and continued shopping.

Sometime later, Wings said to me, "Why did you buy molasses that has "Plantation" as a brand name?"

Whaaaa . . . ?

I went to check. Sure enough, there at the top of the label, in stylized block letters:  "PLANTATION." As though this is somehow a good thing.

On the next trip to the grocery store, we got a different brand. Wasteful as it seems, we threw out the old bottle. There wasn't much left anyway, and it's the sort of thing you can't un-know, nor un-see every time you look at it.

And Wings is complaining to the store's management.