White People

by Allan Gurganus

  The woman in the box was over seventy, she wore a mostly emptied amethyst necklace. On her chest a gold pin-watch read FORD MOTORS, a perfect attendance prize. Her age shocked me. I’d always pictured Pearl as just a bit older than me. I now saw: that would’ve made Vesta Lotte Battle a mother at seventy-three or so.

  In the makeshift coffin, Pearl’s head had shifted to one side, she faced pine planks like a person choosing to look punished, refusing even a last chance at formality.

  The coffin was then closed, boys nailed it shut. Nails kept doubling over and this looked so ugly it grieved me. Strong young boys lowered Pearl’s crate by ropes. Mourners themselves started heaping in the dirt. Garden spades and shovels seemed brought from home, no professional gravedigger waited in sight.

  The girl who’d once pressed my hand between her candied palms now led Mrs. B away, detouring to avoid me. I walked over anyway. I was helpless not to. My mouth and lips felt novocained (I later realized I’d been mercilessly biting them without noticing). I felt foolish and exposed here, rude. But I still needed something from the old lady. My old lady, I still thought of her, but knew I had no right.

  She must have seen a pink blur fumble nearer. VLB resisted ten children who tried dragging her past me. When she stopped, kids eased back, but their chins stayed lifted, hands knotting into fists. I didn’t blame them. I knew how I must look out here. They’d taught me. I kept swallowing to keep from smiling. I gulped down a beefy-yeasty-copperpenny taste that turned out to be blood.

  Mrs. Battle—grieving like this, far from her familiar house—seemed disoriented. Her skin had lost its grapey luster; she now looked floured in fine ash—her eyes’ fronts too. Daylight showed a face composed entirely of cracks depending on splits and folds; her hands stayed out in front of her, long fingers opening and closing, combing air. She groped my way, lightly, almost fondly. Plain daylight showed her to be so tiny, malnourished maybe. Sun made her look just like … a blind person! Completely blind. Somehow she seemed less dignified out here and less unique. I have to say: it made things easier on me just then.—I’m telling you everything. That’s our deal.

  She faltered quite close, finally touching my sleeve, but jerking back like from a shock. “Ah,” her voice recognized me. “You, Assurance?”

  “Yes ma’am.” I studied my new shoes.

  “You did come. I knew it. I done told them. And we thanks you. Pearl’d be glad.—Look, not to worry bout all that other, hear? We doing just fine. Fact is, been missing you more than we miss it, Assurance. You steadily helped me to find my Pearl, get her on back here. Don’t go fretting none, child, you tried.—You gone be fine. I’m gone be fine.”

  Then she turned and moved away from me supported by neighbor kids’ spindly arms and legs.

  I waited till everybody left. The wind got worse. I stood at Pearl’s grave. Handprints and shoe marks had packed the earth. Wind had tipped the coffee can. Water made mud of the grave’s foot end. I squatted and crammed hydrangeas back into their tin and set it upright. Last year’s hydrangeas had dried brown but still showed most of their strong first blue. You know the color of hydrangeas—that heavenly blue so raw it comes close to seeming in bad taste.

  I drove out into the country and passed a rural mailbox I’d always admired and meant to check on. I did that now for no good reason. It was a life-sized Uncle Sam enameled red, white, and blue—meat-pink for his face and hands. The eyes were rhinestone buttons salvaged off some woman’s coat. His vest buttons were dimes glued on and varnished. While I stood looking, the proud owner stepped out of a tractor shed, then headed over to tell me how he’d got the idea and to accept my compliments. I panicked, saw myself as one of those guys, like Dad, who’ll jaw for forty minutes with complete strangers over nothing. I hopped back into my Nash and squalled away.

  I drove to Lucas’ All-Round Store, needing staples for my folks. Mom loved angel food cake. With a little teasing encouragement from me, she could sit at our kitchen table and pull off a bit of white fluff at a time till she’d eaten it, whole. The embarrassment was part of her joy. “I ate that? I ate it?” And somehow she never gained. So I got her a big Merita angel cake and, for Dad, the giant economy size of Vick’s Vap-O-Rub. (On his worst coughing nights, he sometimos clipped one finger in and swallowed gobs of it till I had to leave the room.)

  HERE RECENTLY, dredging all this up, I’ve decided: if a person’s emotional life were only rational—if it just “came out” like algebra does—then none of us would ever need good listeners or psychiatrists, would we? We’d do nicely with our accountants. We’d bring our man a whole year of receipts, evidence, and pain. We’d spend two hours together in a nice office and, at the end, our hired guy could just poke the Tally button and we, his client, would feel clean again and solid, solvent. Nice work if you can get it.

  After Pearl’s burial, I dropped off my folks’ supplies, explaining I was headed for our Public Library to hit the books. Instead—pretending I didn’t know what I was up to—I drove along Sunflower, switched off my ignition and headlights, coasted to a halt three houses down from Mrs. Battle’s.

  I sat screened by dried sunflower stalks rustling in the breeze, I looked toward her kerosene-lit home. I heard kids in there talking loud, once a wave of laughing broke. Her narrow body, half-doubled, crisscrossed the room from ironing board to stove and back, for tea, for hotter irons. I knew hers was just a little bent black nail of a body, but she threw such large blue shadows. I slumped out here feeling like a spy or a spurned lover, like some hick planning a stepladder elopement. I knew if I walked up and knocked at her screen door, she’d greet me, “Look children, our Boy Assurance’s back.” Kids might act snooty but she’d go make me tea in a mended cup so fine you could hold it up and—even against a kerosene lantern’s glow—read imprinted on the bottom, its maker’s name.

  I watched her shack, pretending to guard it. Dumb thoughts: What if it caught fire? Then I’d carry her out, lug all the kids to safety. I was big: I could, I could carry most of them at once.

  Why was I waiting? Did I hope she’d sense me here and suddenly pop up like when my tire blew? Maybe I could take her for a car ride tonight, go find her and the kids ice cream someplace. On me, of course. Maybe have two cords of firewood sent? I soon disgusted myself and drove home. I stayed up extra late, studying. Days, I didn’t get much time for schoolwork. I think I told you I was working a couple other jobs. Managing a soda fountain and, after hours, cleaning two laundromats for this hermit bachelor who owned much of Falls while spending absolutely nothing. Plus I had the four night-school courses a week.

  Working late that night, I heard Dad hacking in a new way, more shrill, yappier. I stood up from the card table that was my desk. I eased along our short hall and waited outside my folks’ room. The cough came again. Only, it was my mother coughing. Her case had never seemed as bad as his. Whenever Momma got to hacking, she always laughed, claiming it was just a kind of sympathy vote for his shortwindedness. They’d worked cleaning the same looming machines for thirty-some years. What made me believe she’d found a purer air supply than his? Did I think Justice made things easier for the ladies? I leaned there in our dark hallway—beaverboard paneling bowed under my weight. I’d always understood that Dad, after thirty-seven years, had pulled enough fiber into his plugged lungs so you could maybe weave a long-sleeve shirt from it. But Mom? That night, I started knowing she’d inhaled enough to make one lacy deadly blouse. I stood here listening, though this just meant asking for more trouble. It seemed to me then: Staying alive is learning to make meals out of setbacks. Eating them, eating them up.

  SO IT’S six weeks after the Detroit police wired us news of Pearl’s death, two weeks after Pearl’s burial and I’m driving Sunflower, still collecting. I’m half past Vesta Lotte Battle’s clean shanty when I see this fresh white wreath nailed to her front door. Poor Pearl, I thought. Lined along VLB’s weathered porch, a dozen children, black white brown, all wearing play clothes, all sitting
very still. They’re eating the usual pale taffy but, today, kids gobble it like taking some group poison.

  Then, slow, two blocks and a thousand sunflowers later, I understand: my favorite, the old lady herself, is dead.

  I drove on, forgetting waiting clients—I speeded right through town, hands choking the wheel. It felt like some hypodermic had just wedged under my breastbone, sucking. What’d been leached out was my breath’s continuing interest in itself, breath know-how. Your wind has to be ambitious minute to minute—has to have a renewable interest in continuing. Installments.

  The roadway was turning yellow from the edges inward when I finally pulled over, parked in the open countryside. A meadowlark balanced on a cattail gone to seed. And all at once I remembered. How. To breathe. The gratitude. I sat in the Nash gasping like a diver who’s just found—by accident—the top, his life again.

  THIS MUCH was clear: I had to do something—for the dead Mrs. B, for my living folks, my customers, for everybody else—meaning myself. OK. Right there in the car, I decided to attend one. A funeral, a black funeral. I needed to see an ideal one. I discovered: Mrs. Battle’s had been held two days before. Nobody’d let me know.

  I checked Monday morning’s Herald Traveler for a likely name and church. I called in sick to my laundromat-cleaning and soda-jerk jobs. I’d never done that before. The church I picked was just off Sunflower Street. I had to drive right past the Battle home. A staked ‘FOR RENT’ sign was already pounded into her front yard. Browned sunflowers had been cleared, the hanging enameled teapot was gone. I hoped Vesta Lotte Battle’s kids had claimed the thing before some realtor removed it as an eyesore. Riding by, I grumbled: real-estate agents sure didn’t waste any time, the bloodsuckers. I kept trying to forget my parents’ new caliber of rattling. They now seemed to alternate the need to breathe—him then her, her then him—like taking turns, sex-wise, waiting for each others’ pleasure.

  Nothing reminds you of how fragile it all is—nothing like living with two mild and often funny people who, if offered any riches on earth, would choose to get one deep single breath again.

  To myself, aloud, after passing her shack, I said, “Vesta Lotte Battle, Vesta Lotte Battle. Pray For Us Left Here.” I am no believer … still, you never know. I’m a percentage player. Besides, I missed her more than seemed quite rational or possible. I was just nineteen but already knew that Mrs. Battle was only starting up for me.

  When you suddenly hear news of a friend’s death, you sometimes want to call up one particular person who’ll listen and help you through the worst first brunt of it. And so you’re rushing to the home of the single person who might really help you get through this when, en route, of course, you find: the only one you want to be with now, she’s the one who died.

  MY ’39 NASH coasted still before a ramshackle church. Off Sunflower, on Atlantic Avenue, the Afro-Baptist Free Will Full-Gospel Church appeared bandaged in three kinds of tar-paper brick. Its roof showed crude dribbled asphalt mending. Set on the highest peak, one upainted steeple tilted. The place looked home-crafted as some three-tiered dollhouse, doghouse, or outhouse. Even in early April, church windowboxes spilled great purple clouds of petunias. From one box, a sunflower had sprouted. Though it looked totally out of place—a windblown seed—though it’d already lifted a few feet high, straining toward the rusty gutters, it’d been allowed to live.

  Parked in one low Hollywoodish line, hired white limos gleamed with sunlight, hurt your eyes. An empty hearse bloomed big ostrich plumes and small American flags from either silver fender. Black morticians loitered in white suits and dark glasses. The undertakers smoked, polished their cars, stood in proud jumpy groups. They acted like Secret Service guys outside a civic building where some bigwig official is appearing. They waited, smug and antsy, for their boss: Today’s highest paying black body in Falls, NC.

  Turns out I was one of three whites in a large loud congregation. I kept straightening my black tie. Elders welcomed me with great ceremony and graciousness that made me feel even more a worm, a spy. Why was I here? Respect. Paying respects, paying. Came time to view the corpse. Almost immediately it happened, people filed toward the box. All the people on my row stood. Somebody nudged me from the left. I rose, not quite meaning it. Like in drill formation, we marched toward the knotty-pine altar and a coffin propped over velvet-draped sawhorses.

  This happened on a Monday. Somehow, my premium book and a few rolls of quarters had been stored in my car’s glove compartment, left there from Saturday rounds. I didn’t want to leave them outside: this neighborhood was dicey (being the neighborhood where I collected). I’d brought the things in with me and now took them toward somebody’s open coffin. The insurance ledger was imitation black alligator, hinged so it flipped open like a paperboy’s record book. It bulged now in my jacket pocket. I took it out and held it, hoping it’d appear to be some prayerbook maybe. Sweating like I was, I nearly dropped the slippery thing, then grabbed it, gulping. Imagine my list of names toppling into the box with this stiffening stranger.

  SHE LOOKED to be about thirty-eight. All in lilac, a cocktail dress. Pinkish feathers curled around her head like some nightclub’s idea of a halo. Her coffin was lined in white glove leather, the sides were plugged with gleaming chrome buttons; it was framed in oiled walnut—the thing smelled just like a brand-new Cadillac convertible. Giddy, for a moment, I wanted to climb in. I don’t know why. I hadn’t eaten much that day. Since Mrs. Battle died on me without a proper good-bye, I’d started feeling really tired, like I’d forgot to do something important.

  The stranger’s chest was massed with purple orchids. Flowers picked up the exact color of her dress. I wondered if the orchids might be painted. But, no, I could see that they were real. Huge curling bugle-nosed orchids seemed to crouch there on her breastbone—beautiful but someway wicked—like they were guarding her while feeding on the body. Above her luxurious coffin, along the empty choir loft’s edge, dozens, maybe hundreds, of Easter lilies. Tin collection plates hid behind flowerpots. The lilies washed Afro-Baptist with so sweet a smell it burned your sinuses and eyes.

  Stepping back towards my seat, I heard quarters jingling, one roll unpeeling in my pocket. I winced. Trying to tamp the sound, I grinned.

  Soon as we settled, the huge choir swooped in. Lined up like a jury, they nearly outnumbered us mourners. Openmouthed, they arrived singing something called “Blessed Assurance.” The scary appropriateness of this (for me, I mean) changed and deepened verse to verse. It went from seeming a wild coincidence to feeling almost expected, natural. I sat telling myself certain mumbo-jumbo things like: “You have chosen the right place. Today is the day you were intended to be here.” I didn’t really know what all this meant. I still don’t.

  Many small children belted out the hymn from behind spiky white lilies. Some of the kids might’ve been among Mrs. Battle’s household regulars but I wasn’t sure. (When a boy is nineteen, little kids all look alike for a while.) Over flowers you could see the dark cloudy hair of tallest children, heads tipping side to side as mouths moved:

  “Blessed Assurance, Jesus is mine!

  Oh, what a foretaste of glory di-vine!

  Heir of salvation, purchase of God,

  Born of His Spirit, washed in His Blood

  —This is my story, this is my song,

  Praising my Savior all the day long.”

  When human voices’ pure pure sound rushed out carrying such words, I felt drunk, half-faint. I’d settled near the back. I could only bear to watch my own pale hands. I studied wrists’ yellow hair shining in daylight. I thought odd things, “Strange, how no American coin is gold-colored.” I looked at my long fingers’ freckled backs, I turned over wet pink palms. These hands seemed to belong to one plump and silly boy. But my eyes, staring down on hands from what felt like a great and sickening height seemed the eyes of an old man, one teetering at some cliff’s brink, a tired old person considering jumping.

  Music swayed the choir t
hat sang it. Each hymn swung singers toward a wilder kind of seasick. The people were one thing, their singing was another but, combined, these jumped past making an equal third. Everything seemed swollen past proportion, quantum. Some choir members turned in place—hard for me to watch, impossible to ignore—they spun around and around, white sleeves flaring like cheap wings. The choir loft was stairstepped in rows. At any moment three or four singers would be whirling, self-contained, white robes cheerfully slapping robes of those beside them.

  AT FOOTBALL GAMES when your team is winning, everybody in your bleachers starts leaning side to side and shouting one thing—it was like that now. This was a funeral but the peppy choir still considered us the winning side.

  I disagreed. I fought the row’s rock and sway. I considered leaving. I felt out of my depth here. But I knew that, in climbing over six weeping strangers singing in my pew, I’d have to say, “Excuse me. So sorry. Thank you, oops, pardon.” I couldn’t bear to let manners make a fool of me again. Not here. Instead I fought this tilting. Everybody moved but me. I now turned into some blond Princeton boy, chilly with a vengeance. Soon the volume grew. They sure were working on me. Everyone nearby sang in three-part harmony—sang like conservatory grads—so skilled, their diction glassy, right. Soon it seemed the church building itself was tipping, a screened box that pans for gold, searching for some glint among the mud. It kept rocking us, helpless as pebbles shifting in the sieve—it kept us rattling back and forth, almost auditioning.