White People (27 page)

I
SOLD
funeral insurance to North Carolina black people. I myself am not black. Like everybody else who was alive fifty-nine years ago, I was so young then, you know? I still feel bad about what went on. My wife says: telling somebody might help. Here lately, worry over this takes a percentage of my sleep right off the top. —So I’m telling you, okay?

See, I only did it to put myself through college. I knew it wasn’t right. But my parents worked the swing shift at the cotton mill. We went through everything they earned before they earned it. I grew up in one of those employee row houses. Our place stood near the cotton loading ramp. Our shrubs were always tagged with fluff blown off stacked bales. My room’s window screens looked flannel as my kiddie pajamas. Mornings, the view might show six white windblown hunks, big as cakes. You didn’t understand you’d steadily breathed such fibers—not till, like Dad, you started coughing at age forty and died at fifty-one.—I had to earn everything myself. First I tried peddling the
Book of Knowledge
. Seemed like a good thing to sell. I attended every single training session. This sharp salesman showed us how to let the “T” volume fall open at the Taj Mahal. Our company had spent a little extra on that full-page picture. In a living room the size of a shipping crate, I stood before my seated parents. I practiced. They nodded. I still remember, “One flick of the finger
takes us from ‘Rome’ to … ‘Rockets’!” Before I hiked off with my wares, Mom would pack a bag lunch, then wave from our fuzzy porch, “Jerry? Say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you very much.’ They like that.”

O
THER SALESKIDS
owned cars. I had to walk from house to house lugging my sample kit: twenty-six letters’ worth of knowledge gets heavy pretty fast. My arms and back grew stronger but my spirits sort of caved in. Our sales manager assigned me to the Mill district—he claimed I had inside ties. The only thing worse than facing strangers door-to-door is finding people you know there.

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: “
C
at” through “
G
raph.” “
U
terine” through “
X
anadu.” 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.

(I
N 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.)

H
ERE 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.”

M
Y 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 expenses, 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?