Project Purple

25 - The Tallyman

"I'm in toilets," noted Buford, the keeper of the food tally, who worked in bathroom accessories at Home Depot.

"The Washlet really is evolutionary; it's the evolution of clean."

Buford would mimic his floor room sales pitch in unkind ways, using his falsetto 'white voice' in place of his own deep baritone. Or he would pinch his tongue between thumb and forefinger as he recited lines like:

"What I have the pleasure of showing people is not only innovative and luxurious, it's also the most effective way of cleaning ourselves."

Buford enjoyed mocking his job, and always concluding the disparagement with a deep, infectious belly laugh. He was a big man, too, with ropy hands and an almost giant-like stride when he walked. Buford was eager to be productive in his labors, but he also enjoyed laughter and the companionship of those around him.

He adored what he called their 'valley of paradise', and he loved to gaze at the huge spruce trees, which towered all around, pyramid-shaped with long, drooping branches and sprouting glossy, yellow-green twigs, needles, and cylindrical cones.

Buford spent a good deal of those early months as the 'waste management Czar', shoveling out the men's' and women's' squatters, and then recycling the waste onto the crops. When others came by to chat, he would use unaffected language like, "haul up a stump," or "uncork your jug for awhile" - But he would continue his shoveling as he talked amiably with anyone about all subjects, and would rarely stop work until it was mealtime.

Buford was also the only colonist to warm to the Buckskinner's unmitigated candor and unrelenting opinions, and the friendship that formed between these two men was a strong one. The Tallyman always enjoyed watching the nimble Buckskinner taunt the others, as the political squaring off had started as early as the training.

"Obama got my vote-the first time, anyway," the Buckskinner said with bright-eyed conviction that first night at the quad table. "Might as well let a nigger try it."

He followed with a deadpan look at Buford, waiting. And the others sat stunned into silence, slapped across their faces by this barefaced provocateur.

Buford liked whites. Coming back from a Toto Washlet workshop a few years back, he had become the de facto expert on the Japanese toilets. His manager was a small, insecure guy named Cook.

"Just call me Cookie," the manager would say with his facial tic and an irritating hyena-like laugh. And he laughed all the time at all the wrong things. And Cookie, in a roundabout way, blamed Buford for the lack of consumer interest in the new Toto Washlet line.

"They don't want some fairy wand up their asses," Buford admitted to his wife, "even if it is streamlined. They just want paper. That's the American way."

He needed the job, and he detested the brittle familiarity which Cookie and the other white bosses showed him. Everything about Cookie, who he called Cracker when Buford was out of the store, rang false.

But Buford didn't care if a white was a racist or not.

"It's the nature of the dominant culture to demean their minorities," he reasoned to his wife. Buford had a studious perspective on racial-relations. He had read a lot about this, and he said it helped him to understand the white mind.

As a young man he was angry; he had heard the lurid tales of his grandfather's fatal encounter with a lynching mob. But he believed that he had come to understand, and accept, that whites couldn't help themselves; it was programming, and whites could no more stop thinking themselves better than blacks than they could accept the Toto extension wand up their rosy bottoms.