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12/22/2025

The Candy Lady Was the System
Across Black America, a front-room business became a neighborhood’s smallest, steadiest institution—priced in quarters and governed by respect.

For many Black Americans, “the Candy Lady” is a memory so universal it can feel folkloric—one of those childhood references that prompts a smile before you’ve even decided you’re smiling. Yet if you treat the Candy Lady as nostalgia, you miss what she reveals: a neighborhood institution built at the scale of the living room.

She sold candy, yes. She sold chips and pickles and juice and sometimes baked goods bought in bulk and resold as individual portions. She sold frozen cups—Kool-Aid or fruit drink poured into plastic sleeves and frozen solid—called different names in different places, but recognized everywhere as the price of surviving summer. And she sold something else, less sentimental and more consequential: predictability.

The Candy Lady was a micro-economy calibrated to scarcity and a safety system that didn’t call itself one. In neighborhoods shaped by segregation, underinvestment, food deserts, and over-policing, the Candy Lady’s enterprise often filled gaps the formal economy left behind. She made childhood more navigable: one less hungry hour, one less unsupervised stretch, one more adult who knew your name and knew how to enforce a rule without calling the state.

Read the full article at https://www.kolumnmagazine.com/2025/12/21/the-candy-lady-was-the-system/