White People

by Allan Gurganus

  Grinning, they’d ask me in. Mill employees opened their iceboxes, brought me good things. I chattered my whole memorized routine. Neighbors acted proud of me. But I felt like a circus dog and some stuffy teacher, mixed. Like a crook. When I finished, my hosts sighed, said this book set sure sounded great. Then they admitted what we’d all known all along: they just couldn’t afford it. I’d spent forty minutes ignoring this. They looked troubled as I backed out, smiling. “Hey,” I called. “It’s copacetic, really. You’ll save for the down payment. You’ll get Knowledge on time—it’ll mean more to you.” Then I knocked at the next door. I stood praying for an empty house.

  One day I came trudging over the Mill’s suspension bridge—the weight of world knowledge was giving me a hernia. My third week of no sales. One middle-class kid had already won a trip to Mexico. “This boy’s going places,” our sales manager said. “Whereas Jerry’s going home and napping every afternoon, right, Jer?” I threw my whole kit in the river. The case flew open. Out volumes shot: “Cat” through “Graph.” “Uterine” through “Xanadu.” All human learning (illustrated) lay sogged and ruined on the rocks below. And I loved it. I stayed to watch the current wash every book over the dam that ran the cotton mill that made the cloth that fattened accounts of the owners who’d kept my parents broke and wheezy forty years. Bye bye, Knowledge. I couldn’t afford it.

  (IN HERE, I tried selling a vegetable shredder. “Make a rose out of a radish and in no time.” This is all I’ll say about those two weeks of bloody fingertips and living off my demonstration salads.)

  HERE COMES Funeral Insurance. Okay, I answered an ad. The head honcho says, “Son, I’m not promising you the moon.” I loved him for that. He was so sad you had to trust him. On his desk, a photo of one pale disappointed-looking wife. There were six pictures of two kids shown being sweet but runty at three different ages in three different ways. I felt for the guy.

  He kept his shoes propped on a dented desk. A bronze plaque there spelled Windlass Insurance for Funerary Eventualities, Cleveland. My new boss flashed me a nonpersonal salesman wink; he offered me a snort of whiskey from his pint bottle. I said No. I was under legal age. With Sam’s legs crossed, with his eyes roaming the ceiling’s waterstains, he rocked back and told. Admitting everything, his voice grew both more pained and more upbeat.

  “Black people come from Africa. No news, right? But all Africans are big on funerals. It’s how your dying tribe-people announce the respect they deserve in their next life, see? I’m not buying into this, understand—just laying out why a person who’s got no dinner will cough up fifty cents to three bucks per Saturday for a flashy coffin and last party.

  “Now, times, you might get to feeling—nice boy like you, college material—like maybe you’re stealing from them. You take that attitude, you’ll wind up like … like me. No, you’ve got to accept how another type of person believes. Especially when there’s such a profit in it. And remember, Our Founder was a black man. Richest colored family in Ohio, I’m told. Plus, for all we know, they could be right, Jerry. If there is the so-called next world, they’ll turn up in it, brass bands to announce them. And us poor white guys who sold them the tickets, we’ll be deep-fat-frying underneath forever. That’d sure get a person’s attention, wouldn’t it? Coming to in Hell? For being Bad here?

  “What I’m saying: You’ve got to work it out for yourself, and quick. Here’s your premium book. Take plenty of change. Four bits to three bucks per week might sound like nothing to a crackerjack like you. But, with most of Colored Town paying, it adds up. And, Jerry, they do get it back when they break the bank. Soon as some next-of-kin comes in here with the legal death certificate, I pay off like clockwork. So, yeah, it’s honest … I see that look on your face. Only thing, buddy, if they miss two weeks running, they forfeit. They lose the present policy and any other Windlass ones they’ve paid up. I don’t care if they’ve put in thousands, and several of your older clients will have: if they let one, then two (count them) two big Saturdays roll by, their pile becomes the company’s.

  “You getting this? See, that’s the catch. I warned them during my own feistier collecting days, I’d go, ‘Hey, no remuneral, no funeral. No bucks, no box.’ They’d laugh but they got my meaning. Your client misses two back-to-back Saturdays, it’s hello potter’s field. Could be worse. I mean, they won’t be around to suffer through it.

  “And listen. Jer. No exceptions to our two-week rule, none. Because, Jerry, they’ll beg you. Hold firm. Way I see it, anybody who can’t come up with fifty cents a week on this plane, they don’t deserve the four-star treatment in the next, you know?—No, I lied. That’s not the way I see it. The way I see it is: I wish I hadn’t washed out of dental school. The Organic Chemistry, Jerry. The goddamn Organic Chemistry, I had a sick feeling about it from the first. Like a drink? That’s right, you said No. So here’s your book, names, addresses, amounts paid to date. See—our clients they’ve got nothing else—they’re hoping for a better shot next go-round. Your middle-class black people wouldn’t touch funeral insurance with somebody else’s ten-foot pole.

  “Jerry, I recommend a early start on Saturday. They mostly get paid Friday night. They’ve mostly spent every penny by Sunday morning. And, son, they want to pay. So, do everybody a favor, especially yourself, grab it while it’s in their hot hands. And if you need leverage, mention … you know.”

  “What?” I had to ask. “Please.”

  “It. A beaverboard box held together with thumbtacks. No flowers but what the neighbors pick. Not a single whitewalled Packard graveside. One attention-getter is—saying their hearse’ll be from the City Sanitation Department. Face it: we’ve got a heartless business going here. And, Jer? the minute they smell heart on you, you’re down the toilet, Jerry. They’ll let Number One week slide by. Then here goes Numero Duo, and they’ll start blaming you. And you’ll believe them. Next they’ll try and bribe you—homebrewed liquor, catfish, anything. I had one woman promise me her daughter. Girl couldn’t have been older than twelve. I’m a family man, Jerry. But these people are fighting for their souls in the next life—you can understand, it matters to them. They’ll do anything, anything, if you won’t squeal and cut them off from their picture of heaven. But Jerry?—cut them off.

  “The minute I got promoted from door-to-door, I swore I’d tell each new collector the whole rancid truth. You just got it straight-up, kiddo. Now head on out there. They’ll love your argyle sweater vest—new, is it? Me, I plan to sit right here and get legless drunk. Hearing the deal spelled out again, it breaks me fourteen ways, it does. When I think of what a decent dental practice can net per year for a hardworking guy, when I remember certain pet clients who almost got the full treatment on the next plane, but … hey, this I’m giving you is a pep talk mostly. This is our business here. It’s the food in our mouths.—Go, Jerry, go.”

  MY TERRITORY was a town of shacks. With dogs at every one. Dogs trained to attack Whitie. I, apparently, was Whitie. I bought a used car on credit. Had no choice. I couldn’t walk for all the hounds—spotty small ones, ribby yellow lion-sized things—each underfed, many dingy—all taking it extra personally. Under my new J.C. Penney slacks, I soon wore three pair of woolen knee socks. I hoped the layers might soften my share of nips. I sprinted from my black Nash up onto a rickety front porch. I knocked, panting, whipping out the book. One very old woman seemed to peek from every door. Toothless, blue-black, her shy grin looked mischievous, a small head wrapped in the brightest kerchief. At some doorways, her hands might be coated with flour. At others she held a broom or some white man’s half-ironed white business shirt. She wore male work boots four sizes too large, the toes curled up like elf shoes. Sometimes she smoked a pipe (this was in the Forties). Her long skirt dragged the floor, pulling along string, dustballs. She asked, “What they want now. You ain’t the one from before—you a young one, ain’t you?” and she chuckled at me. I smiled and swallowed.

  I mentioned her upcoming funeral, its e
xpenses, the weekly installment due today. Overdressed for my job, I admitted working my way through college. This had melted hearts among my parents’ Milltown friends. But in this zone called Baby Africa, it didn’t help.

  “Working through a what? Well, child, we all gots to get through something, seem like.”

  Some customers asked if I owned the Funeral Home. Others asked if my daddy did. I tried explaining the concept of insurance. I failed. For one thing, my clients called it Surrance or Assurance or The Assurance. I gently corrected them. One woman frowned. “That what I say.…‘Assurance.’” These old ladies seemed to be banking on a last sure thing. Assurance meant heavenly pin money. Shouldn’t it have tipped them off? Buying certainty from a confused, fresh-faced kid, nineteen, and about as poor as them?

  “Fine morning.” I kept grinning even in a downpour.

  “Who you supposed to be?” Some giggled, pointing at my snappy-dresser’s getup, then toward a pack of mongrels waiting, patrolling the mud yard. In the seam of a half-opened door, my clients’ eyes would narrow. “Oh, is you … the Assurance?” It was our password and secret.

  “So they tell me, ma’am.” I smiled hard. “Yep, looks like we’ve got ourselves another winner of a Saturday morning going here, hunh?”

  The insured snorted, then eased me into a dark room I didn’t want to know about.

  “Seem like it always Saturday,” my customer mumbled and shook her head. I followed her in. It was my duty to.

  THE SAME stooped old lady led me through sixty-five overheated homes. Even mid-July, a fire burned in the grate. White picket fencing was stacked, neat, her kindling. In bare wooden rooms hot as the tropics, rooms with shades drawn, a kerosene lamp helped. Some rooms were poor and filthy, some poor and tidy, but each held this ancient woman surrounded by two dozen grandkids. Children sometimes hid when I knocked but, slow, once I was inside, they seeped from behind doors, wiggled out from under beds. Their bellies looked swollen due to lacks. They swarmed around their grannie, tugged at her long skirts, begged for treats she didn’t own and couldn’t buy.

  The roadsides of my route bristled with zinnias, with sunflowers thirteen feet high. To my eyes, these bright jagged hedges looked African. They seemed cut by a hand-crank can opener out of tin. When I later learned that our white ladies’ Garden Club had done the planting, I couldn’t believe it. I always figured the seeds of these plants had crossed the ocean in warm hands of slaves chained deep inside ships.

  I BOUGHT new clothes, trusting these might spiff up my errand. But Saturday after Saturday stayed the same blur: me kicking at my dog escort, me admiring the stiff flowers running defense along dirt roads, me knocking on the door, me sporting my brush-cut hairdo and mailorder bow tie, me grinning out my winning wasted good manners on people manners couldn’t save.

  It only made me smile the wider. My mouth stayed full of spit.

  The door moaned open two inches. Heat, escaping like a sound, pretty much wilted me. Older children squinted in a stripe of daylight. Behind the largest kids and not much taller, easing onto tiptoes, the funeral’s guest of honor, her face weather-beaten/permanent as any turtle’s. She cupped a hand over her eyes. Sun hurt her. From so shadowy a hut the sun itself must’ve seemed just another big blond Caucasian visitor, come to collect.

  “Oh, it you. It the boy back for Assurance.” I got squired indoors then. I didn’t want this. Into shacks, lean-tos, quonset huts, through the smell of frying fat, toward backrooms of Mom and Pop grocery stores (mostly only Moms present). Through shanties, former stables, leaky bungalows no bigger than my parents’ company dive. In I went—ducking under low doorways—in against my better judgment. The nervier farmed-out grandkids and great-grandkids touched my pale hands (“They hot!”). Others trailed me, stroking my new shirt: our latest miracle fabric, rayon (“It look squeaky”). I let myself be led as kids commented, “Ain’t he pink?” For a Whitie, I was sure a shy Whitie. Did they believe I couldn’t understand our mother tongue? Did they think that, even understanding, I wouldn’t care how others saw me?—Downtown I’d overheard redneck white men speak loud about some passing black girl of real beauty. “Roy, is that the most purple dress you ever seen in your life, boy? My, but that’d be a fine little purple dress to take home late tonight, hunh, Roy?”

  Now I stood in a dark hall and listened as children discussed Assurance’s hair color, his two-tone shoes and rosy size. Trapped, I did what any embarrassed nineteen-year-old would do: grinned till the ears hurt. I pretended not to hear. It was what the beauty in the purple dress had done. It was all I could think of.

  My customers feared me. I tried acting regular, I said Please and Thank you very much. But, given our setup, I couldn’t be just regular. Fact is, from the start, this job scared me so bad. I couldn’t afford to quit it yet. But, boy, I tell you I was already counting the Saturdays.

  WINDLASS FUNERARY EVENTUALITIES INC. had been founded in Cleveland some ninety years before. It seemed that several of my collectees had been paying since the outfit’s opening day. Behind some names, four completed policies’d piled up. I found amazing shameful dollar totals.

  One month into the job, nobody knew my name. I’d stayed “Assurance.” And my clients still looked pretty much alike to me. Maybe it sounds bad but, hey, they were alike. Me: their Saturday white boy. Them: all one old black woman. People started having names when I deciphered the last collector’s rotten handwriting. One morning, it yielded like a busted code. Then the ladies began standing out from one another. Oh, man, I couldn’t believe some of the tallies!

  “Vesta Lotte Battle, 14 Sunflower Street—commenced payment on policy #1, Mar. 2, 1912, four policies complete, collected to date: $4,360.50.”

  DURING a major rainstorm, my old Nash had its first blowout. My parents had never owned a car. I didn’t know how to change a flat. When I bought the used sedan, I’d been feeling cocky, grown, too vain to ask the salesman for instructions, please. Everybody else knew. I figured ownership itself would teach a guy. After all, new babies don’t get lessons in breathing—it’s something you pick up—on-the-job experience.

  So this particular Saturday morning I’m trying to collect during what seems the start of a respectable hurricane. I’m tooling along Sunflower when here comes a bad bad thumping. My Nash gimps, then tilts. I was near Mrs. Battle’s house but hardly knew her then. This early in my coin-collecting days, she still seemed like all the others.—The good old days.

  Out loud, hoping to sound like an expert, I said, “I believe your problem is in the front-right-tire area, Jerry.” “No lie,” the live-in cynic answered. I climbed out, immediately kicking at the curs. Blinded by driving wet, dogs still lunged my way. Some now hid under the chassis where—safe and dry—they snapped at soggy passing argyle ankles. I took an umbrella from the trunk, lost it to wind, watched it disappear over a hedge of sunflowers whipping everywhichaway. “So,” I said, already drenched. I undamped the spare and a trusty jack. Now what?

  I should mention being watched. Four dozen black faces lined up on many porches, faces interested in weather, willing to look at anything and now all aimed—neutral—my way. I should admit: I don’t think Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy could’ve filled an hour with more stupid accidents than I managed in this downpour. The car fell off its jack three times. People on porches didn’t laugh outright, no, it was a deeper kind of pleasure. They fairly shivered with it and I couldn’t blame them. I noticed how one of my clients, an obese widow, had huffed up onto an iron milk crate. She hoped for a clearer view of my misfortune above her peonies the wind kept scalping.

  I knew that if I walked up to any of the dry people on their cozy porches and asked for help, I’d get help. That was the deal. But I couldn’t ask. I was too young a man, too car-proud to admit being broken down on a street of walkers who mostly owed me money. So I just kept at it, on my hands and knees. I settled in mud—flat on my back under the Nash—trying to hold off attacking dogs by swinging a tire iron badly needed els
ewhere. Once I struggled to my feet again, my own umbrella swooped back over sunflowers and hit me in the neck. I’m still not sure somebody didn’t throw it. Spectators now lifted their babies. Old people in wheelchairs were being rolled out to see. I’d turned the color of the mud, then the color of the tires and was standing here considering sobbing.

  “Get out the way, you.” A husky voice spoke loud enough to outlive the gale. I looked behind me at this dark old woman, scarecrow thin, hands pressed on hips, acting furious with me. She’d been watching from a porch and was not amused. She seemed to hate incompetence and the pleasure my incompetence was giving to her neighbors. Seven blinking kids, black and white, surrounded her. They also seemed to be clucking, disgusted, shaking their heads. “Don’t want any favors,” said I. “Just show me how.” Kids snatched my tire iron and lug wrench. Kids jerked the spare away from me like planning to roll the thing off and put it up for adoption after years of my mistreating it. Children worked around me like trained elves, the old woman snapping orders, pointing to a porch where I should go wait. Kids had just slipped the flat into my trunk when I noticed the spare already locked in place. I studied this through slanting blue water. Dogs, tails wagging, now sniffed at kids, forgetting me. “How can I thank you?” I hollered over the squall, wondering if I should offer money, all while following my helpers. Then I was going up some porch steps. I worried for this old woman, soaked at her age. But she ordered, “Get out them soggy clothes, you.” Everybody else disappeared into the house. I was handed laundered flour sacks. I saw I should use these as towels. Kids brought me a stained silk maroon dressing robe—antique, some hand-me-down. I changed, in one corner of a small front room. It was stacked with consignment ironing. I dared not strip on the much-watched front porch. Next, hot tea appeared. Then we were all settled on this strange woman’s porch, we were dry. We all sat sipping similar green tea from cups, no two alike. Everybody was silent. We could watch the rain let up or continue, it didn’t much matter now. My car out there looked clean and new. My clothes had been spread to dry in the kitchen’s open oven. Sitting in this borrowed robe, I smelled like an old house.