The "possum hunters" who find the bones of the "bluegum" man who had been eaten by "them bluegum chillen" are not explicitly identified as black in the story Versh tells Benjy (69), but given the African American folk context of the tale and the stereotypical association of possums and blacks, that seems likely. When Quentin hunts possum in his section of the novel, it is with Versh Gibson and Louis Hatcher, both black.
In the story that Versh tells about the "old time," this is the slave he calls "family woman" - i.e. she is pregnant; when she looks the "bluegum" man "in the eye in the full of the moon," all the "chillen" she gives birth to are "born bluegum" (69).
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).
