White People (31 page)

Still, right along, I was positive about it. I still am. That’s why I’m bothering to tell this. Her? she knew. It was less anything she did or said, more who she was, I guess. She’d never seen the ocean, a hundred and ten miles from Falls. And yet, you just felt her life. Felt it go right into your own. You were helpless. Instantly you couldn’t separate. You walked into the room and it was like that stove of hers burning when I met her in July. Her life stayed closer to the skin than most people’s.

P
ART OF
what I’m saying is: It seemed unbelievable that such a woman couldn’t come up with fifty cents a week.

S
HE NOW ASKED
would I go make our tea? Today she had a lapful. I did. I found I knew where she stored everything. I noted a ruined gravy boat, trying to regroup itself inside her toothpick bracings. For a second, putting water on to boil, I closed my eyes, imagining blindness—imagining
her
blindness. I admired how she managed to fake vision. She really looked right at you. Odd I’d never noticed any food in her kitchen, nothing but sugar and cream for my tea, nothing past candy makings for her kids. Did she live on tea, on whatever nourishment seeped into her mended cup from all the glue that held the thing together?

I brought Mrs. B her own best one-of-a-kind cup, laurel and nasturtiums painted around it. I was pouring tea as she started talking about slave days. Uh oh. I saw her start relaxing back back into being blind. She finally trusted me enough to let me see she couldn’t see. “This is a trick!” something told me. I knew I shouldn’t listen. I imagined Sam scolding me, “Jesus, kid, you just ask for trouble, you know that? Rule Numero Uno is: always think of your assigned list as the group. Group life, ever heard of it? Then everything’ll go down easy as Jack Daniel’s. But when you start slipping, start thinking, ‘There’s this man and that woman,’ then they’ll really nail you, son. They know this, they plan it.” I shouldn’t pay attention. History’d only make me feel worse, her history would. And yet here she was, cradling the kid in one arm, using her free hand to hold a teacup to her mouth.
(It
now seemed blind too). Between sips, she slowly told. (What was I going to do? mash my hand over her three-toothed mouth? What, was I going to run away or what?) Despising my own politeness, I settled cross-legged on plank flooring beside her busy rocker; the brocade and cinder-block chaise was too far off. OK, but I’d just fake listening.

She’d been born the property of our local mill-owning family. She said she’d got freed while still a child. The day after Sherman marched through our county, burning things, freed slaves killed all the plantation’s livestock. The old groom cut the throats of two white Arabian horses he’d curried and exercised daily. Then, knife in hand, he stood over them, crying, “What
else
do I got?” She remembered everybody’s dancing by torchlight in the Quarter. Ex-slaves raided their mistress’s closets, wore all her gowns. Some of the funny little boys dressed up, tripping on hems. Freed slaves held a Harvest Ball in April, a candlelight party like ones that’d lit the big house before the War. That first night of freedom, three older men asked Vesta Lotte to marry them. Freed, she now felt free to say No three times running. She was eight.

Vesta Lotte, old, rocked on, telling me of huge forest fires that Sherman’s troops had set. She’d watched our town’s first cotton mill burn. She rambled, saying, “Then, right after it surrendered …”

I’d heard other older black people say “After It Surrendered.”
They seemed to speak about some octopus “it” that’d once had ahold of them. They never said “after Lee surrendered”—just this “It.” I wanted to explain to my beloved client—Maybe General Lee did finally bow out in ’65, but it, old it, had not surrendered yet. It still held her, still had us all.

Down here, I studied her men’s work boots, the stick-thin black ankles. On she rocked. Her dignity irked me. I’d paid Eventualities Mrs. B’s last nine dollars and fifty cents. I should be in the position of control here, right? But, just by holding still, by aiming her cataracts straight out toward the roadside’s browned sunflowers (were they blurs to her? were they even visible?) she put me through these hoops of bad feelings, gave me moral insomnia.—In my night-school philosophy course, our teacher had read one line from an Eastern religious book: “Seventy-five righteous men carry the world.” Considering what I imagined soon doing to Mrs. B, I muttered under my breath, “Today … marked down to seventy-four.”

“Why?”
I asked her now, interrupting. I got up onto my knees beside her chair, I set my cup down. I felt tempted to place my butch-waxed head into her lap beside the sick child panting there. “Why
funerals?”
Rude as it sounded, I couldn’t help asking. How could anybody so smart sink all her money into last rites? What—I half-hollered—did she imagine for herself after death? Hunh? —The morticians’ perks would get her into the next world; okay—then what? How did she picture this Heaven?

I wondered, did Saturday coins seem installments on some future boat fare? Did VLB think of her own afterlife as a long-awaited china mending, or maybe as Old Africa itself? Waiting for her answer, I imagined a jungle shore of flowers seen from some rocking boat: Home. I sat straighter, readying myself for her answer. Since I was bankrolling this voyage, I felt I had a right to hear. Pumping her for news of after—death kind of thrilled me. I figured, “Hey, if anybody knows the score, it’s Vesta Lotte Battle here.” I was nineteen. I admired her. She owed me.

I almost thought of her as mine.

I
KEPT STILL
, poised on my knees beside an active rocking chair. This was happening one quiet January Saturday on a side street in Falls, NC’s worst possible neighborhood. The only steady noise: squabbles among the large black-owned dogs moping near my Nash, peeing on its whitewalls, waiting to chase me. “Roses,” Mrs. Battle answered, husky, without hesitation. “Dozens. Roses. Thousands maybe.”

(Somehow I’d pictured her paradise blooming shields, zinnias, spears, sunflowers. The beauty of roses seemed patented as Whitie’s.) “So,” I rushed her. “Roses for starters. What else?”

Time passed as youngsters curled into deeper napping. The baby in Mrs. B’s lap made suckling noises, dreaming.

“And plane tickets for all my grown children so’s they can come on back down here for it. Around-trips, too. A lined red casket be nice. Oh, and some big white town cars … I wouldn’t mind.” Hearing this, I felt sickened some, and slowed. I understood: For her, the funeral itself was a kind of heaven. She hadn’t dared picture anything more glamorous than a decent middle-class send-off. “And marble markers with two rock lambs on top, or, if they out of lambs, maybe a couple baby angels’d do.” Bobbing back and forth, clucking at the sick child, Mrs. Battle kept mulling over her list of funeral needs. She stared out a bright window and finally shrugged. In a voice too resigned to sound bitter, she said nowhere, “I ain’t asking much.”

I wondered aloud how many children would be heading south. “I mean ‘eventually’ of course.” (I’ve always been more tactful than was needed, a disease.)

“Nineteen. Plus them ones what they lives with or be married to. It mount up.”

I nodded. You had to admit: the transportation costs alone could really set a person back.

We just kept still for twenty minutes more. First I felt real gloomy, and next, slow, I got extra mad. Not at her now. But for her. For us. Resting by her creaking rocker, sipping lukewarm tea, it struck
me: Vesta Lotte Battle’s former owners still mostly owned my own broken-down wheezing parents. I wanted to kill somebody then, to go kill the people put in charge of us all.

“Okay.” I finally stood, stiff, feeling old myself. I cleared her tea things, brushed at the seat of my pressed pants. “Okay,” I sounded huffy, wronged. “But I warn you I’m only good for one more week. I know you understand how much I think of you. But, look, I’ve carried you, I’ve covered for you. I’m doing this fast-and-loose bookkeeping so my boss won’t nab you. Finally, even for people like us, there are limits, you know. You know?” She gave me one dry shoulder-heave. The dark voice went, “I reckon you’ll do what you wants.” (Sam had told me, “There’s always one that gets you. Really gets you.” Odd, the worse I am at describing the power of Vesta Lotte Battle, the surer I am of it, the deeper I still feel it—right up under the rib cage.)

That very week I sent a telegram to Detroit: “Mother’s funeral in jeopardy
STOP
of default
STOP
act quickly please
STOP
a friend
STOP
.” I promised myself this’d have to be the final Christian act for soft-headed non-pre-law really un-Princeton Jerry. My sleep was suffering, gone spotty and shallow. I did well in my night-school business courses. I aced Philosophy but started feeling sneaky about my unnatural straight A average. For somebody nineteen, somebody American and intending to be self-made, I was growing pretty cynical pretty early. Funerary Eventualities had started eating me alive. On a night-school pop quiz, one question asked, “Define ‘Business Ethics.’” I wrote, “‘Business Ethics’ is a contradiction in terms.”

Then I erased this.

So I’d pass.

Life
DID
an article about the heir to the Funerary fortune. Dad saved it for me, “You think this magazine is just pictures but they cover most everything, Jerry, what’ve I been telling you?” The heir, a Shaker Heights resident, was shown wearing his bathing suit. A coffe-and-cream-toned gent, he looked plump and sleek as a neutered seal. He was a millionaire many times over, his daughter sang opera, he’d
been photographed beside his Olympic swimming pool. It was shaped like a clock—diving boards at the 12 and 6! Well, that helped me be firm. This week was it.

I rushed off to knock at Vesta Lotte Battle’s door. I’d brought along a jar of my mother’s excellent blackberry jam. I hoped this might sweeten and sort of humanize my bad news. I’d prepared a little speech. It incorporated a quote from Plato—one memorized for my
Book of Knowledge
spiel.

I planned to tell Mrs. B: her dignity seemed so safe, really, so beyond me or anybody, it was something that Time had given her and nobody could take away. This royal quality of hers consoled me and, in my remarks, I planned to mention it as praiseworthy. I’d add: since she seemed so secure about her long life, why this worry over burial? Why sweat the small stuff? I would point out necessary facts. Superstition seemed to me Vesta Lotte Battle’s single fault. Maybe my nineteen-year-old perspective would finally help the woman see her life more clearly? Maybe it’d help her mind this less—being cut off and so forth.

I pushed open her door. No one had answered. There she stood, poking her own rocking chair idly to and fro. She’d been waiting for me. She’d sent her usual kids home. I grinned. I held out her jar of world-class jam. I’d bought a nice plaid ribbon, I’d tied it around the lid. “I’m afraid,” I started, “I’m afraid this’ll have to be your last free week. I believe we both knew this’d have to happen, right? From the day we met, even with our getting to be friendly and all, we’ve basically known it, right?”

“Word come,” she fixed her ruined eyes on me, she offered me one yellow bit of paper. “Pearl dead.”

Then Mrs. Battle pretended to reread her telegram. She was holding the thing upside down. She was holding the goddamn thing upside down. “No,” I said. “You made it up. No.”

I rushed over and flopped into her rocker. I clutched the jam against my chest, arms crossed over it, head down, chair bobbling back and forth, panting like my one job was to guard this gift I’d brought, this bribe. “No,” my eyes wouldn’t focus right. “A trick,” I said, “I mean: a trick on both of us.”

I heard Mrs. B step nearer, she touched my shoulder, trying to cheer me. Then her right hand crooked under my arm, she coached me into standing. Her palms pressed the small of my back, leading me toward her overheated kitchen for our usual tea. Her head came no higher than my elbow.

I stood beside her scrubbed oak table. I set down the jam, then leaned here, my hands flat, my full weight tilted forward. On her mending table, somebody’s gold-rimmed fruit bowl dangerous in three hundred pieces.

I listened as, blind, efficient, she filled the teapot at her pump, doing everything so well. I kept staring at the scoured tabletop, saying, “What are we going to do here? Pearl was our only hope. Now I bet we’re going to lose it. Help me, Mrs. Battle. Help me think this out for us. Really. Oh boy, what are we going to do here? God, what are we going to
do
with you?”

A dry brown hand pushed one mended apple-green cup into my vision, a scrap of steam, a perfect cup of tea.

“S
OMETHING’S WRONG
,” Sam said. “Black circles creeping under your eyes. You’re not taking this to heart? You
are
keeping the old heart well out of this, right, Jer?”

“‘Heart’?” I looked up, trying to grin. “What’s a … ‘heart’? I never heard of one of those. ‘Heart’? What, is it something like a flashlight?”

“‘Flashlight’! Got to remember that.” He showed me his kids’ new school photos: the girl wore thick white hair ribbons that made her thin hair look transparent. Sam kissed her picture. “And this boy of mine’s going to set the world on fire. You watch.” Sam needed my opinion about a paint color—he planned improving his office here in maybe two or three years’ time. Nursing the bourbon bottle, he said he only drank during
our
appointments. He didn’t know, something about me got him. Sam asked how
I’d
done in organic chem? I sat looking at this man, he might’ve been speaking Latin, his face looked orange, solid orange to me.

Now I see I was in the middle of something like what’s known
today as a mini-breakdown. Then we called it the blues. We called it Having Black Circles Under Your Eyes For A While. The Whiteboy-With-Blackness-Under-His-BabyBlues-Blues. (And the whiter the person is, the more deadly his case can be. Cotton starts out white but if you breathe white cotton for years enough, it gives you something called Brown Lung. You figure it.)