12) When I was a child whose payoff for obeying
13) orders was red-and-white-striped candy canes,
15) I knew that sugar was love.
16) The first time someone called me “sweetheart,”
17) I knew sugar was love.
18) And when I tasted my slice of the wedding cake,
19) iced white and washed down with sweet champagne,
20) don’t you know sugar was love.
The answer to WHO is going to tell the story is partially answered in the second stanza of the poem. The speaker narrates in the first-person past tense.
Already by the second stanza, there is subversion to dichotomy. Whereas the first stanza is written in free verse, without rhyme and rhythm, the form of the second stanza is different. It includes repetition and rhyme which reflects the blues form. The blues is based on African American oral tradition traced back to the African oral tradition of griots. There are typically three rhyming lines in a blues stanza, where the first two lines repeat and the third responds. (There are variations on this).
This stanza continues with the theme of generations. On interpretation of the repetition is a subversion of form, mixing both African and non-African form. Another way to interpret the repetition, with respect to the theme of coming of age is the repetition representing social conditioning. In the first two lines the speaker recalls childhood, and the sugary sweetness of a candy cane being approval and the following affirmation in line 15 that "I knew sugar was love." Then the speaker recalls his first romance in youth, and the associations of sweetness and emotions of affection in the use of "sweetheart" as a term of endearment. Again, the speaker affirms in line 17 "sugar was love." Again, there is a cultural symbol of the wedding cake, both as a symbol of decadence in a western wedding, but also as a symbol of purity in the unity of love between the bride and groom. In lines 18, 19, and 20, the speaker of the poem reaches maturity, and addresses the reader "don't you know, sugar was love."
There is also a clear contrast of power in this stanza. sugar becomes a "payoff"
it is unclear from who or where the orders come from, however, obedience results in a candy reward.
The speaker, the child as come to equate "obedience" with candy and candy with love.
Sugar here appears in line 13 in the processed form of a candy cane.
Sugar, by association, becomes a person again, in the term of endearment "sweetheart," which represents a lover or romantic interest.
Again, color is a theme. There is white in the stripe of the candy cane, however, black is not present in this stanza. The color red in the the stripes of the candy cane subverts the black and white dichotomy of the previous stanza and epigraph. The cake however is "iced white." Icing, naturally, being the primarily sugar covering on a cake. This is interesting, because the connotations of "icing" is something superficial, a surface covering used to hide or disguise unpleasantness below the surface. Again, the proximity of the words "white" and "washed" might also allude to superficial covering. "White wash" is cheap paint used to color and disinfect interiors and exteriors often just barely covering flaws, however idiomatically use "to whitewash" means "to censor" or "to cover up a scandal or crime." Whitewashing is also a term used in America to refer to institutionalized racial discrimination, this could also be an allusion in line 19. Another interesting element that enters the poems is status and intoxication. The image of cake, especially of wedding cake, is one of decadence. The word cake recalls the famous quote attributed to Marie Antoinette "Let them eat cake," which was her supposed response upon learning that the French peasants were rioting because they had no bread to eat.
"Enfin je me rappelai le pis-aller d’une grande princesse à qui l’on disait que les paysans n’avaient pas de pain, et qui répondit : Qu’ils mangent de la brioche."
Rousseau (trans. Angela Scholar), Jean-Jacques (2000). Confessions. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 262.
The reference to cake and champagne might be a subtle symbolic representation
of the disconnect between those who have and those who do not.
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