White People (33 page)

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.

S
O 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.

T
HIS 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.

M
Y
’39 N
ASH
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.

S
HE 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:

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 that 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.

A
T 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.

Everyone but me. Straight-backed, massive. I refused. No way. Bumped from either side, I muttered at the woman beside me. Cheerful behind her tears, she yelled, “Tell it, bro!” She was just encouraging me. I explained how a person could sure use a little more room here. She nodded. My complaints just swelled the hymn. Everybody took me for a singer. Glum, feeling semi-hateful, I got coached by “Blessed Assurance.” On it rolled. First I hummed along just to be polite. (With me it’s a disease.)

Jostled from left and right, I tested a chanting note here, a word there. A person almost had to. Pretty soon, though you still fought it (for the sake of principle), you did sort of catch on, you soon nearly liked it. But, wait, no. I stiffened my spine, wanting to prove something. What? Maybe to keep things controlled on behalf of these wild emotional people noisemaking around me.
Somebody
had
to stay in charge, right? It was a favor that you paid others who’d lost it. There were rules.

I asked myself what she’d advise me—what Vesta Lotte Battle’d say? (“Hey, you, un-hitch a inch. What you keeping back? You hiding something, boy?”)—I soon joined somewhat in. I trusted her. I wanted to do well. Maybe I was overly conscientious at it—but, hey, after all, Whitie does what Whitie can!

My shoulders soon felt safe between others’ rolling massaging shoulders holding mine up from either side. I wanted to blend in for once. I hated being the go-getter all alone out front. I longed to seem the same as everybody else.

Maybe too quick for safety, I felt enclosed, half-pardoned. I felt explained. All this was what I’d been so homesick for, and without ever having lived it!

Soon you were pretty much loving it. I was. It felt like dancing sitting down. Like fainting with your eyes open. Like singing in the shower but with others singing in their showers nearby, others who, like you, didn’t sound so hot on their own, but pooled became an angel choir that exhales, not carbon dioxide, but perfect pitch. I felt like telling everybody why I’d come, like singing why.

Our group stopped in one ragged rush. I was loud—alone—amazingly off-key for a long long second. Nobody blamed me or much noticed as I sucked air, swallowed “Fool!,” curled my toes. Others were now standing one by one. Fanning themselves with Jesus fans, they talked about the corpse.

“She been a mighty good neighbor, Lila,” the woman near me rose. “One time, remember when my William cut his foot so bad on that soda bottle? well, she look after all my other little ones the whole night till we walk back home from the doctor’s out Middlesex way. Then Lila say, Don’t you be coming in here waking up these babies in the middle of no night, you let them sleep. She kept mine over to her house till they all awake and then she fed them a mighty fine breakfast, sent them back on home to me. Too, Lila done give my momma eighty cents, one time she couldn’t pay.”