White People (28 page)

“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.

T
HE 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 h
ot!”)
. 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.

W
INDLASS
F
UNERARY
E
VENTUALITIES
I
NC
. 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.”

D
URING
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 elsewhere. 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.

To be here with this group of helpful strangers—kids lined like a choir, plus the old woman—to see how all the neighbors on their porches, especially the fat one next door, now gaped, not at the car, but over here at our congregation staring straight out, sipping warm tea on this cool blue day, well, I felt rescued. It was a strange pleasure of the sort that makes you shudder at the time. When rain slacked some, I dashed inside, dressed fast and, half-apologizing, backed off her porch with an overload of talky etiquette that makes me cringe now to recall. Soon as I got in my car, I grabbed the premium book, checked her address, found the name, Vesta Lotte Battle.

The next Saturday I turned up to collect her regular fifty cents, nobody mentioned lending me a hand. Of course, with me being such a kid (one whose sin was and is the Sin of Pride), I never brought up my clumsiness, their help. No. Just let it pass. Soon everybody forgot this favor. Everybody but me.

F
ROM THEN ON
, forever, 14 Sunflower Street was
Vesta Lotte Battle, $4,360.50
. This woman now looked quite specific while passing me ten hand-temperature nickels at a time. I wanted to tell her, “Look, ma’am, it’s going on 1950. For the amount you’ve laid by, you could
hire Duke Ellington’s orchestra. You might get your own parade, the Goodyear blimp. Maybe even Mrs. Roosevelt.”

Like other homes on my list, Vesta L. Battle’s had its fair share of religious pictures; some were decaled onto varnished conch shells. But here I started noticing the unlikenesses. Mrs. Battle’s place was furnished with fine if ruined furniture. Possible leftovers from some great plantation house. Her andirons were life-sized bronze greyhounds. The huge horsehair loveseat had a back of pretty jigsaw curves, but one cinder block and many bricks held up its crippled end. Vesta Lotte Battle was the first of my insured to start looking different from all others. I never forgot her. Times, I still try.

S
HE ALWAYS WORE
a used amethyst necklace—four of its six stones missing. Early in our acquaintance, I boldly asked her age. She shrugged. “Courthouse burned. Someplace uphill of ninety some, I reckon.” She had cataracts. These meant that her whole head gleamed with the same flat blue-gray color. Like a concord grape’s—that beautiful powdery blue you only find on the freshest ones. Greeting me, she stood so straight. But her face hung loose off its moorings, drooping free of her like more unpressed hired-out laundry, needing work. She always aimed her front toward my voice, not me. She seemed to pay me too much attention. Only slowly did I understand how blind she was.

Her house milled with stray kids, poor whites mixed with darker Sunflower neighbors. First time I visited after my flat tire, fifteen kids were making taffy in her kitchen. They wore whole gloves of pale sticky stuff. They kept saying “Yukk” and “Oogh.” Two, happy with strands slacked between them, did a little dance. They backed apart—then, palms forward, rushed each other.

Mrs. Battle led me into this taffy workshop. “Look, you all, it the Boy come for Assurance.” Her voice crackled, seeming even less stay-press than her shriveled face. Mrs. Battle’s tone sounded smoked, flaky and layered, like the pane of isinglass I noticed glowing in her kitchen stove. She’d left off ironing a white shirt. It rested, arms drooping from a board, flattened by a set of irons she heated
on her wood stove. To hold the sprinkling water, she used a Coke bottle plugged with a red celluloid-and-cork nozzle bought at Kress’s for ten cents. Momma had the same one. The old woman now offered me hot tea. I nodded, wondering how much she earned per shirt. Candy makers cleared counter space for her.

I worried: accepting tea might be my first client-collector mistake. I hadn’t asked for her tire help, either. Sam warned me: “Take nothing from anybody.” But a person can’t consider every kindness a form of bribe, can a person? Maybe I was a night-school Business Major, but I wasn’t
always
counting. “Tea sounds great, ma’am.” I watched her—slowed, so old—go through the ritual. Her hands knew everything’s whereabouts. This lady, I told myself, trying to keep things logical, she’s in too far to ever back out of her Insurance now. She can’t live much longer, can she? Vesta Lotte Battle had entered that oldness beyond plain old age. She’d hit the part where you dry out, you’ve become a kind of living mummy sketch of who you were. They’ve stopped checking your meter. You’ve gone from Rocket back to Rome. Everything you could lose, you have. Lost.