November 22, 2009
“Do I not? Them she lived with would have killed her for a hatpin, let alone a hat.” Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady
When Misty, my writing partner in the Taneka vs. Susie Q book wanted to write about funerals, I was a little surprised. I couldn’t quite imagine that funerals were so different between White and Black folk, but I was wrong. Again, as in all my chapters, I’m going to be accused of stereotyping because White people are divided by class, race and region. What happens in a White southern home is not necessarily going to be true in California and what’s true for an Irish family funeral in Boston isn’t going to be true for a family in Texas. So, dealing with all those generalities, let’s cut to some of the odd issues about White funerals and wills.
One odd thing has to do with wills and White people. I’ve been around a number of White people who’ve died and left wills and often these wills cause an almost immediate war among the people left behind even when there’s very little of substance in the will. White people can get very caught up in who gets the dressers, china, grandmother’s jewelry etc and never speak to their siblings again. In fact, White people will sometimes start this process of creating a strain in the family while they are alive by reminding their children that they are writing their wills and will continue to bring up the wills at opportune moments, in a King Lear like atmosphere to create competition among the children for parental affection. Of course, there’s often a Cordelia who decides to just give a normal amount of affection and sometimes as a result gets cut out of the will.
To be fair, this is only a percentage of White people, but it’s a strange significant percentage worth discussing. My grandfather had a will in which he left money to my aunt and something to his grandchildren, but it was all very fair and no arguments or bizarre coddling of him was necessary. He was Scandinavian and had been a Cornel professor, not exactly a drama king.
My observation of this will business is that it has very little to do with class or how much is being left, it’s just a strange greedy thing that happens partly because the elderly are so invisible in our culture especially in White culture. African Americans, Asians and Latinos often have elder family members living with them, but in White culture this isn’t nearly as common. Maybe the writing of wills and the attention sucking that goes along with it is a way of compensating for feeling invisible. But the result is that after the loved one passes, often the family splits up into the haves and have nots who don’t speak to each other because of the imagined wrongs created by the one who has already passed away.
Now to the funeral itself; I’ve never heard of people waiting to save up money for the funeral. For one thing, White people are big on cremation which only costs $700. I just checked. In fact, when my grandparents and uncle died, they were cremated and we had their memorial services a year later at a time convenient for the whole family to take a family vacation in Minnesota and then in Colorado and celebrate their lives. Now that is a White people thing. It was a wonderful time to see all the relatives and we were past the grieving stage so we could enjoy each other’s company.
The funerals I’ve been to did not involve anyone getting loud or making any wailing sounds. White people don’t like to see each other cry, so crying is kept under control. You aren’t supposed to be carrying on and making a fool of yourself. If you have to do that, you can do that at home. The whole funeral lasted about an hour. Misty is talking about these several hour funerals. I don’t see White people being able to sit still that long. We just don’t have that much patience because we haven’t spent enough time in church so we haven’t developed the knack of it. We would get tired and have to go home. All the preaching would wear us out.
After the funeral, we go to someone’s house where some food is served, and we eat quietly. We say good things about the deceased because it is tradition never to speak ill of the dead. There is a rather normal amount of food, not enough to feed an army, although there will be leftovers. People offer condolences to the loved ones of the deceased very carefully as if they were now made out of shells or fine glass. When they are left alone, they can cry and scream and break things. I’ve never been to a funeral where the food was worth eating or even memorable. Misty writes about great food including chicken, cakes and ribs. None of that is happening at White funerals. She also talks about exchanging phone numbers with people you haven’t seen for years. She’s going to different funerals than I’ve been to. Nobody exchanging information at all at the White funerals I’ve been to, nobody talking or gossiping. It’s not at all like a party. One politely tries not to eat any of the food, sips a little wine, tries to be as polite as possible, depending on how close you are to the bereaved, you may talk with them or offer help, and then you leave.
In other words, like all the differences we’ve come up with between a White and Black world, most Whites are much less tribal and familial. The more Mediterranean blood you have, (and this includes Italians and Jews or their red haired cousins the Irish) the more likely you are to be much more like African Americans in your funeral ceremonies. Demonstrative, hugging, holding, talking, eating, drinking, all that acting like real human beings, that’s just not the kind of behavior you would find among WASPS for the most part or even your basic Midwestern Whites. We grieve in silence. We hold it all in. We go to therapy. We take our Prozac.
African Americans let it out, the good and the bad. As Ralph Ellison says at the end of Invisible Man, “With Louis Armstrong, one half of me says, ‘Open the window and let the foul air out,’ while the other says, it was good green corn before the harvest. Of course, Louis was kidding, he wouldn’t have thrown old Bad Air out, because it would have broken up the music and the dance, when it was the good music that came from the bell of old Bad Air’s horn that counted. Old Bad Air is still there with his music and his dancing and his diversity and I’ll be up and around with mine.” Maybe White people could learn something about music and dancing and diversity and mixing it all up. It’s what real living is all about.
