According to dictionaries of American and African American slang, a "bluegum" is a black person whose lips and/or gums look blue. The word appears in The Sound and the Fury in the folklore story Versh tells about the Compsons before the Civil War. After one of their slaves becomes a "bluegum," the pregnant women he looks at deliver children who are "bluegum chillen," and after "about a dozen" of these children are born, they eat him (69).
There is a lot of uncertainty about this man from what Versh calls the "old time" - i.e. slavery times (69). He appears in the story about Grandfather Compson and one of his slaves that Dilsey told Versh, as Versh repeats it to Benjy (who of course cannot understand it at all). According to the story, because Benjy's Grandfather changed the man's name (a common practice during slavery), the man became both a preacher and a "bluegum" (69).
