There's plenty of funerals on Saturdays," Paul says when we are driving back, "you know, people are off and got the time to go." And so, the Saturdays here start early and don't wind up until the late afternoon.
The viewing is nine to eleven with service and burial following. But people won't start showing up until halfway in anyway. The other two funerals -- the one at 52nd and Parrish and the one that Ervina and Robert are directing in Maryland -- have already departed. So now Bruce, a 16-year-old who comes by during the weekends wanting to be a funeral director, Keith, the director of operations, and Paul Terry, the affable namesake of the place, who just came in through the lobby doors, have some time to kill; it's only half past eight.
At the end of the aisle, which separates the chairs into neat rows of four, rests a halfway open, over-sized, cream-colored casket. It is elevated on a decorated pedestal about two feet off the ground and is adorned by floral ornaments on both sides. The body inside is propped up by firm white pillows. The pace of things is unhurried and smooth piano music fills the downstairs halls. "Should be a small one today," Keith says, walking out of the chapel. The family only ordered fifty programs. More flowers are delivered and Bruce arranges them on top of the casket and then continues walking around the place making everything just a bit tidier.
People begin to trickle in through the double doors in the chapel. First, a few other men who saw the obituary and decided to pay their respects and then Keith returns with the family. Finally, the organist, an oversized woman with a broad smile, and the vocalist, a woman of minute proportions, take up their spots. Bruce helps an elderly woman in a pink dress with a walker up the cinderblock stairs in the front. By the time it's half past 10, almost two dozen or so middle-age and elderly African Americans are inside conversing in a hushed tone. Keith is at the front giving out the programs, and people stand in small groups quietly socializing. The first chords of the organ tuning up sound sporadically. Paul walks from one group to another, offering both condolences, his help and a bit of heart-felt laughter.
Through the open door, Paul sees two men approaching and says, "There comes the minister for today's funeral." He escorts them into the lobby where the two men sit down and wait, scripture in hand. The older of the two, Sam Shepherd, has a small portable oxygen tank and breathes heavily between words. His hands are trembling, turning over the program for the funeral.
Glenwood Memorial Garden is outside the city and about a 10 mile drive west of the funeral home. Paul is laidback driving a little above 30 miles per hour, and somehow it doesn't seem too slow considering the occasion. As Keith says a little later, watching the casket being lowered into the ground, everything in this business is slow and deliberate. If Paul has company, he will off-handedly comment on the passing scenery, just so there is some talk in the air. "He used to live right over there," Paul says, pointing to an apartment near 67th and Haverford.
The smell and sight of freshly cut grass flood the senses as we enter the flattened landscape of the cemetery. The three car procession slows down to a crawl on the winding road that leads to a green tent stretched over a disturbed plot of land. The cars come to a stop and the family approaches the seats arranged in the tent's shadow. The casket is carried and set down in front of them. Sergeant Salata, in pressed dark green uniform, drapes a flag over it. He ceremoniously folds and offers it to the sister of the deceased. She thanks him quietly and mutters, "He would have loved this."
Today, Terry Funeral Home is an African American owned and operated business. It has a slick and energetic president and CEO and about a dozen or so employees. It has a dazzling fleet of black limousines, hearses and flower cars. It takes more than 300 calls a year, about 4 times the Philadelphia average for African American funeral homes. Last year, those calls generated more than two million dollars in revenue. It is a profitable modern business with pressed suits, a business vision and cutthroat competitiveness. But before the addition that was built in the back, before the keys were turned over to Mr. Burrell, and before a little 'inc.' was added to the name, Terry Funeral Home was a family owned business, just like any other.
For nearly 60 years, the three story cinderblock house on the corner of 42nd and Haverford was home to the Terry family and their business. It opened its doors to the West Philadelphia community in 1943. In time, Paul S. Terry Sr. was joined by his wife, Francine, and then by his two sons, Paul Jr. and Thompson. In those years, the bottom floor was the funeral parlor and the top two were the family home. Go to the second floor now and you won't recognize it; it is three separate offices and a copy room in the back. But maybe that's the simple lesson of life: give things time and they inevitably change. With the start of the new century, and heart problems creeping up on him, Paul, the last Terry in the business, passed over the reins to Mr. Burrell and allowed the family affair to be transformed into a modern business. The past receded into memories and became a relic of a bygone era. Now, Paul finds himself coming in "to volunteer," manning four to five funerals a week. "I just like serving people," he says. But somehow it is all a bit anachronistic and dated, just like those faded photographs and diplomas that remain forgotten on the wall of the third floor.
Inevitably, they blur together and remain differentiated only in the catalogued memories of the funeral home bureaucracy. Almost every time I was there I would wander the halls of the funeral home, through the spacious main room decorated by water-colors of the south, through the dimly lit chapel and into the backrooms, where there were always about a half-dozen bodies, sometimes more, sometimes less, lying immobile, unattended to, on tables and in caskets. Some were covered with sheets, others dressed in suits or just there exposed. Each one had a singular trajectory of a lived life, but for each the journey from life to six feet under will be remarkably ordinary, clinical and the same.
The call will come in about the death. The death certificate will be verified. The body will be picked up in a hearse. It will lie in the backroom on a metal table. The paperwork will be arranged, the programs printed, the bills paid. Then it will be embalmed and carefully dressed and groomed. It will be displayed in the chapel for friends and family during the viewing. The procession of limousines will take it to the cemetery, where it will be lowered to rest. As Ervina says, "It's a long day for even one funeral." But oftentimes, busy Saturdays are filled with two, three or four funerals.
I walked in on my first embalmment by accident. You could say I stumbled on it. I was looking around in the backroom, which usually is the store room for the six or so bodies that lie in preparation. The longest Terry has gone without a body, during Mr. Burrell's four years, has been six hours. There is a small desk in the corner with a few haphazardly arranged items, not more than a few steps away from the bodies. This is Rob's office.
I heard voices behind the backdoor, and I stepped across the courtyard into a second, more-clinical, backroom, where all decorations were either white-tile or metallic. There was Rob, in a light blue medical suit, with a comically-fitting shower cap and latex gloves, stewing up a bright orange fluid in a prolonged circular glass canister. He was working on a body lying on a metal stretcher, an embalming table, as a surgeon -- precisely severing layers of tissue near the main artery in the neck.
This is the business of deception. Behind every serene, perfectly groomed body, lies an endless path of unnatural bodily alterations. Behind every market vision and every ounce of service quality provided upstairs, lies the dirty grit work that makes the funeral business so repugnant to the outsider.
The naked body of a late middle-aged oversized black woman doesn't seem real, even with the ever-darker gradually escaping red fluid slivering down the naked metal and then disappearing into the sink.
He covers her genitals with a moist white rag.
Robert inserts cotton swabs beside the gums and then sews her mouth with thick white thread. If I hadn't seen the procedure, I wouldn't have guessed that it happened, and would have attributed the forcibly taut lips to their natural arrangement.
He then, without much gentility, shaves her noticeable facial hair.
Her eyes are already glued shut. Applying additional pressure to the scalpel in the neck, he withdraws the remaining blood from the artery, draining the body of the last remnants of what once was a vital fluid. He then proceeds to thoroughly rinse the body with fresh water, clearing it of the remaining blood and shaving cream.
This body needs to be handled according to the protocol, just like any other one. The only people that are kept in mind are those that will see it. It is only a carcass that needs to be made presentable.
He says she died yesterday.
The procedure is gruesome for the untrained eye, and the six-point embalmment that has to be performed after an autopsy is even more so. But rinse and repeat the ritual 300 times a year, and one gets quickly desensitized enough to joke with others in the room while placing the clamp to allow the corrosive-looking embalming fluid to fill the now-naked veins.
Embalmment isn't required by law, but it is needed, they say. The body doesn't decompose as quickly. But it is a beautifying ritual that makes the decaying seem revitalized; making the dead resemble the living, for this one last time, so that our memories can capture these pleasantly distorted images for perpetuity.
Mr. Burrell is a funeral director by training, but in practice, he is a CEO and a very modern one at that. His lexicon has evolved, now being comprised of terms like service-driven business, market-share, net-worth and reputation.
Sitting in his office and listening to him recount his black-tie fundraiser for Morehouse, I felt that distinction even more acutely. Opening the mail at his desk, he told me that people just don't know how good the service can be. That day he had some time to show me the neighborhood, the battleground teeming with unworthy competition. We went out to his car, an always washed and clean black BMW. We would visit a score of other funeral homes: Hawkins, Francis, Wood, Kimble; drive along the famous 52nd Street, discuss race relations, and in the next 40 minutes or so, I got to understand the nature of his 'vision' and also why the competition, that according to him all look like corner delis, doesn't like him very much, to say it politely. But he spoke in long monologues spurred on only infrequently by my questions:
"One of the things that funeral homes in Philadelphia don't have are large chapel spaces and parking. Now this ain't no park. How many people can you get on a lot like this? I mean there are some funeral homes in North Philly where people park in the median, in the middle of the street. That's crazy. And we plan to change the face of the industry."
The pitch of his voice absorbs his outrage and his excitement, often hitting piercingly high levels and rapidly descending back to normal. This awkward variation that reoccurred time and time again seemed to provide a natural emphasis, a dormant kind of animation bursting out that made me question whether traditional ways of speaking were just too monotonous.
"This guy is probably the most aggressive person that's out in West Philadelphia. Let me tell you what his philosophy is that he is going after volume... Let me just tell you how insignificant it is: There is a funeral home up in North Philly that did a 110 more funerals than we did, they did $400,000 less in revenue... We did two million dollars in sales. There is not a black funeral home in this town thas's doin' two million dollars a year in sale. Not one!
"When I tell people that we are going to build a funeral home they think that we are going to add on to that lot right next door. They have no conception. They can't possibly conceive of what I am talking about.
"The whole idea with most funeral homes in Philadelphia, they are like territorial, you know where we are going to take this west Philadelphia and you stay on that ... man, look that ain't the way I view business. I mean we have these billboards up and we had one of the funeral directors up in north Philly called Mr. Terry at home and told him, said um um 'You know, Paul, you've been in business for 65 years, you don't need a billboard up.' And I told Paul to call him back and I said Paul, you tell him 'Coca-Cola has been selling Cokes forever, but you see a Coke commercial everyday.' So the mindset, the mentality of the business people in the industry is just like something that I can't even imagine. And that's why it's going to be devastating on them.
"Business is business. I mean my goal is to take market-share. Now I am going to be ethical, and I am going to be professional. But, business is business ... Let me tell you how aggressive I am, so you saw a billboard one block from Wood. Let me show you something else. I like competition. I love competition. I thrive on competition.
"I'm always one who believes in setting the standard and when we roll people know exactly who it is. And that is our fleet. I am firm that if you don't take care of business, the business won't take care of business.
He had a grand vision of expansion, as he said, for the sake of his grandchildren. He wanted to bring the Southern funeral spirit up North and to provide the quality of service that would leave people stunned and awe-struck. He had bought two acres of land on 49th and Haverford, seven blocks away, and is planning to expand his empire to even greater heights of domination. The two million dollar investment, simply put, is the future of Terry Funeral Home. If everything goes according to plan, the vision should be become reality in early 2006. As he said, "Everybody wants to eat. I want everybody to eat. I just want to eat more than everybody else. It ain't personal, its business"
