White People

by Allan Gurganus

  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.

  FROM 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.

  SHE 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.

  Only stubborn habits keep you moving. Like this making tea. I watched her hands. They went right to each decanter, no nonsense, no waste. She’d started paying for her funeral decades before I got myself born. All those slow years, all these quick-arriving Saturdays.

  She handed me a sky-blue teacup, then scuffed deeper into her narrow home, searching for my fifty cents. Should I follow a client into her bedroom or wait out on her porch? I figured: any place but the yard. Sixteen dogs were waiting in the yard.—Now, as ever in these small houses, I felt huge and I was. Sparrow-sized black ladies kept handing their coins up to me. In a tiny wizened hand, one quarter can look almost saucer-sized and made of mirror.

  “You children so rude,” the old voice hollered back. “Give Assurance some eats.”

  Kids surrounded me, their clownish mouths caked with sugar, egg whites. “Every kindness is a form of graft,” I heard Sam’s voice. But smiled. Kids held their hands up toward me. Candy was their hands, taffy wrapping to the wrists. One dark girl took my teacup, set it down then touched my hand. Over and under my ruddy right paw, she pressed her hands, mittened in white goo. I laughed, it felt odd, but good. I made a face. Kids hooted. I saw they’d been waiting. “How do it taste?” a cracked voice asked behind me. I really jumped. Vesta Lotte Battle made a sharp gasping sound I later guessed to be a laugh. I smiled, held one finger to my mouth, nibbled my knuckle, “Mmm. Thank you. It’s taffy all right.”

  “We knows that,” the dark girl stepped forward, ready to give me a teasing shove. Fearing for my new cardigan, I hopped back fast. They all roared. I laughed too. Somehow I didn’t mind. I knew I looked ridiculous to them.

  They showed me the pleasure in the joke—the joke of me, I mean. Then things felt easier. “More,” I said, “please, I want more.” Up hands shot. I faked munching on ten kids’ extended palms, I grazed along fingers. Then everybody seemed satisfied, even bored. They went back to work. “Now can I wash?,” I turned toward my client. My client was Mrs. Vesta Lotte Battle. By then I surely knew her name. She nodded, pointed me to her sink. It had no faucets, just a well you pumped. I pumped. I scrubbed hard, taffy still under my fingernails.

  My hostess had returned to seeking her money, my money. I waited in the front room. This was taking forever. I heard two drawers open, a jar got shaken, some furniture was moved. Then, posture spoiled, Vesta Lotte Battle came creaking back toward me. She was bent nearly end-to-end, shrimp-wise. Her white hair grew in mossy coin-sized lumps under the headcloth. Both her hands were lifted, cupping nickels, pennies, and the one dime laid—proud—on top.

  Every toasty coin she dropped into my big clean college hand, I counted aloud for her and with some cheer. Seemed the least I could do. But the brighter I sounded the worse I felt. Older children stopped to watch this payoff. I felt ashamed. “It’s no popularity contest,” Sam had advised me.

  Since 1912, Vesta Lotte Battle had paid. While employed as a housemaid uphill, her weekly dues ran dollars higher. Now she had four completed policies, all ripe for forfeit if she missed just two current payments. She was in to Eventualities to the tune of nearly five thousand bucks. And on this particular taffy-making Saturday, she turned up twenty-one cents short. “Uh oh,” I said. It was all I could think of.

  “Let’s see here. You had the twenty-nine but you’re missing the twenty-one, correct? Look, just this time, all right, Mrs. Battle? We’ll see you next week for the full amount, okay? But falling behind and all, it’s just not copacetic.”

  “Copper-who?”

  “It’s just not … smart. No tardiness again, all right? All right.”

  “One thing,” her voice sounded even smokier. “I ain’t no ‘Mrs.’”

&nb
sp; “Fine. So, we’ll see you for the makeup payment next week same time same station, okay? Okay. But, please, have it, Mrs. Battle.”

  Her shoulders lifted then dropped one at a time. She said, “Vesta Lotte Battle tries.” It was a statement, not a promise—she made me know this.

  Again she stood so straight, the clouded eyes aimed right at me. Her dignity was perfect. Right from the first, her poise just totally slayed me. It seemed some law of nature. Then she closed her unpainted door on me. Doing so, she proved: the rented hut, the tea I’d sipped, the candy nibbled, this houseful of borrowed kids, the life itself … insured or not—all these, she proved, were hers, not mine.

  “After while, crocodile,” I spoke to the door’s pine planking, windblown silver as a coin. People were just starting to say, “See you later, alligator.” Locally I was one of the first. I considered myself something of a pacesetter.

  PART OF my Windlass Insurance earnings paid night-school tuition. The rest meant grocery or doctor money for my folks. I made A’s in my classes, but breathing was getting lots harder for Dad. I bought him this expensive humidifier. We got him inhalers and sprays, anything.

  The folks sometimes asked about my route, they called it. They remembered my paperboy years. To them, this job seemed easy as peddling Herald Travelers off a bike. I couldn’t explain the terrible difference. You stop delivering somebody’s morning paper, they go and buy one at the store. For Assurance, my clients couldn’t turn to anybody but me. I never told my parents what this job really meant. My folks fretted enough. Just recently, an old friend sent me a snapshot of them dressed for church and sitting on our porch. She is in his lap and laughing, and they’re both much handsomer than I’d let them be in memory. He wears a high white collar and has long good hands, and except for the cheap porch furniture, these two people might be Lord and Lady Somebody, larking it up for a reporter. Their good looks, recognized this late, only make me sadder. They could’ve done anything.

  When I was fifteen, I presented Dad a Christmas subscription to Life magazine. It continued ever after, best thing I ever gave him. He wore his bifocals only once a week when sitting down with the new issue. You’d think he had just received the Dead Sea Scrolls by mail for a first scholarly look-see. He turned pages one by one from the top corner. “They’ve got pretty much everything in here,” he’d say. And if I lumbered in from work, Mom would hush me, smiling with strange pride. “Let’s be a little quiet. He’s reading.”

  THE FIRST TIME one of my customers, a retired bricklayer, fell behind payment-wise, I said something semi-stern, and he wept at me, then dropped onto arthritic knees. He pressed his wet face against my creased chinos.

  “Please,” I pulled him back up. “Don’t do this to yourself. Nothing’s worth this.” I’d started seeing that these old folks were paying me for more than fancy burials. They were shelling out for the right to go on living for another week.

  I should add how the last ingredient of my Saturdays was—along with old ladies (like Mrs. Battle herself) and many grandkids in hand-me-downs and cornrow braids (like Mrs. B’s clan)—about a million Jesuses.

  Every ashtray, each souvenir candy dish, the baby rattles, all hand fans (compliments of the three leading black funeral parlors), spoon rests, pillow covers, and, once, a whole couch—showed pastel pictures of a mild-looking soap-faced shepherd. He wore clean, pressed 100% cotton-looking robes. He had the sugar-water stare of a bad actress dolled up to play some fairy godmother. In Kress’s frames, he held several sheep and one crook. I figured, maybe he gave my clients hope; whatever helped them, I was for that. But I worried: candle-white himself, he was shown clutching multicolored kids. From lithos and oleographs, he knocked on castle doors, he lifted lanterns, he carried blond infants over rickety footbridges. Promises, promises. He always turned up, central, in each rental box. Sometimes alongside His picture, I’d find one of President Roosevelt, a cleaner-shaven and plumper gent but still looking like some Jesus second-cousin, worthy.

  I waited, half on clients’ porches, partly in their front rooms, not wanting to seem too interested, hoping not to seem jaded either. I counted front rooms’ Jesuses. I pretended not to notice my clients fishing fifty cents to three bucks out of nut-brown face powder or from behind clocks, from underneath the tubular legs of heavy beds where people who’d been sired and born, later died. Out coins came, wedged between the heel and sole of a work shoe. Quarters were egged into daylight from deep private panels of mended bras worn by my insured. Right in front of me, slack bodices got plundered. Old ladies didn’t seem to mind my seeing where they squirreled their cash. (Maybe they knew I’d get it anyway?)

  Their most regular hiding spots, of course, were Jesus places. Coins got taped behind tea-towel resurrections, tucked back of window-sized calendars that showed Christ walking the waters, sandaled footprints denting foamy whitecaps. I felt seasick, waiting for my money, waiting.

  Already I’d started picturing my own hands putting all of Vesta Lotte Battle’s redeemed funds—a chef’s salad worth of crisp green—into her outstretched leather palms, bony hands that, so glad, trembled.

  But instead it was me back at her orderly shanty, smiling, “Now, you see, you’ve fallen three weeks behind. We can’t have this, ma’am. Really. Three.”

  She’d brought me tea in a mended bone-china cup with goldfish handpainted on it. The saucer (whole) was a different pattern but yellow bone-china too. I kept standing. So did she. Her French mantel clock, marble gilt and stopped years ago, showed a bronze blindfolded woman holding up a scale. All Mrs. B’s furniture was missing limbs or spines or cushions—bricks and broomsticks were busy being everything’s crutch—but the room looked beautiful anyhow. Especially if you squinted some. Vesta Battle had spent her life working for the owners of the cotton Mill. It showed in how she handled the tea things, how she asked, “You wanting one lump or two, Assurance?”

  “I was saying, ‘You’re three weeks overdue.’ No sugar. One—maybe one—thank you, but listen, Mrs. Battle. Seriously. You’ve paid in so much. I just can’t have you lose it. You let the latest policy go, they’ll grab all your others. You signed, you agreed to this. I mean I’ve already absorbed that first twenty-one cents from a month back. Okay. I’ll let that slide—I wasn’t exactly overjoyed about advancing you that but I did. Since then I’ve paid your last three weeks my own self. Look, I’m poor too or else I wouldn’t keep this job, believe me.—Now, maybe that dollar seventy-one doesn’t sound like much to you … (no, I’m sorry, of course it’s a lot to you or else you’d have paid. I see that). But, think, here I am, already lying to my boss. I’m paying out of my own pocket. And for your funeral, ma’am. I’d rather give you food money any day. Let’s reason together, all right? It can’t go on, can it. Are you even listening? I mean this. Can you hear me?”

  Reserved, blue-brown, old the way trees are, she settled, hunched across from me and stated facts. Her eldest daughter, living in Detroit, usually mailed checks home. The last postal money order was five weeks overdue. Mrs. Battle admitted to worrying: maybe something bad had happened. Plus, she’d never much liked her daughter’s man. He fought with the line boss at Ford. He hit Pearl way too much. Didn’t seem much hope of finding what’d gone wrong.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere!” I said. “We can do something now, see? Action’s always best. Just phone her.”

  No telephone here and no number in Detroit. Besides, Vesta Lotte Battle said she didn’t trust phones, never planned to touch one; if lightning hit a wire any place between Detroit and here, the shock rode wires into your ear or mouth. Phones were still too new.

  “Oh,” I said. “Well then write her, for God’s sake.” My advice was growing loud. Kids peeked out of the kitchen then went back to chattering. I smiled noplace. Mrs. Battle sat studying her palm’s worn lines.

  “Look,” I said. “Do you have her address, Pearl’s? Let me jot it down. I’ll write the letter myself. You mind? My eyes are better than yours.” She
went for it but had no paper in the place, none that wasn’t either a Bible page or some form of printed Jesus. I’d started feeling ill at the sight of Him, meek and mild Saturday-to-Saturday from home to home. FDR seemed lots likelier to offer my clients a fair shake and a moment’s assurance. I tore a back page from my ledger. I copied the Detroit address. Mrs. B didn’t offer me a stamp or envelope. Okay, I had my own. That same Saturday I mailed the letter. My tone tried balancing the businesslike with a tenderer jokey type of human lightness. Even at my age now, I still feel superstitious about mailing certain things. Back then, too. Before dropping Pearl’s letter into the slot, I remember kissing all four corners of it—for luck. I waited and hoped.

  INSURANCE WAS just one of my three part-time jobs. Mrs. Battle was only one of my insurance customers. Like her, others’d stopped seeming all that much alike now. That was just it: the more vivid each dark person became, the blanker, blander, and whiter I felt. A plug of stray cotton: cake-sized. Again I knocked at buckled doors, once more I answered challenges from inside: “It’s Assurance. Open up. Hi. Just Assurance back again, ma’am.” I’d stopped pointing out the difference between in-and as-surance. They only let me in if I spoke our word.

  My ninth week on the job, all clients permanently broke down into themselves. There was the one missing two fingers, the one who always tried to give me geranium clippings for my mom, the plump one in the bed, the pretty young one in the wicker wheelchair, the old one in her metal wheelchair who wore a cowgirl hat, the one with the wig, the one who told the same three easy riddles each week, the one, the one …