industry—and death is an industry, my young friend, make no mistake about that—one makes one’s money from operating in bulk, from buying in quantity, from centralizing one’s operations. It’s not pretty, but it’s true. Trouble is, no one wants to know that their loved ones are traveling in a cooler-van to some big old converted warehouse where they may have twenty, fifty, a hundred cadavers on the go. No, sir. Folks want to think they’re going to a family concern, somewhere they’ll be treated with respect by someone who’ll tip his hat to them if he sees them in the street.”
Mr. Ibis wore a hat. It was a sober brown hat that matched his sober brown blazer and his sober brown face. Small gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. In Shadow’s memory Mr. Ibis was a short man; whenever he would stand beside him, Shadow would rediscover that Mr. Ibis was well over six feet in height, with a crane-like stoop.
“So when the big companies come in they buy the name of the company, they pay the funeral directors to stay on, they create the apparency of diversity. But that is merely the tip of the gravestone. In reality, they are as local as Burger King. Now, for our own reasons, we are truly an independent. We do all our own embalming, and it’s the finest embalming in the country, although nobody knows it but us. We don’t do cremations, though. We could make more money if we had our own crematorium, but it goes against what we’re good at. What my business partner says is, if the Lord gives you a talent or a skill, you have an obligation to use it as best you can. Don’t you agree?”
“Sounds good to me,” said Shadow.
“The Lord gave my business partner dominion over the dead, just as he gave me skill with words. Fine things, words. I write books of tales, you know. Nothing literary. Just for my own amusement. Accounts of lives.” He paused. By the time Shadow realized that he should have asked if he might be allowed to read one, the moment had passed. “Anyway, what we give them here is continuity: there’s been an Ibis and Jacquel in business here for almost two hundred years. We weren’t always funeral directors, though. We used to be morticians, and before that, undertakers.”
“And before that?”
“Well,” said Mr. Ibis, smiling just a little smugly, “we go back a very long way. Of course, it wasn’t until after the War Between the States that we found our niche here. That was when we became the funeral parlor for the colored folks hereabouts. Before that no one thought of us as colored—foreign maybe, exotic and dark, but not colored. Once the war was done, pretty soon, no one could remember a time when we weren’t perceived as black. My business partner, he’s always had darker skin than mine. It was an easy transition. Mostly you are what they think you are. It’s just strange when they talk about African-Americans. Makes me think of the people from Punt, Ophir, Nubia. We never thought of ourselves as Africans—we were the people of the Nile.”
“So you were Egyptians,” said Shadow.
Mr. Ibis pushed his lower lip upward, then let his head bob from side to side, as if it were on a spring, weighing the pluses and minuses, seeing things from both points of view. “Well, yes and no. ‘Egyptians’ makes me think of the folk who live there now. The ones who built their cities over our graveyards and palaces. Do they look like me?”
Shadow shrugged. He’d seen black guys who looked like Mr. Ibis. He’d seen white guys with tans who looked like Mr. Ibis.
“How was your coffee-cake?” asked the waitress, refilling their coffees.
“Best I ever had,” said Mr. Ibis. “You give my best to your ma.”
“I’ll do that,” she said, and bustled away.
“You don’t want to ask after the health of anyone, if you’re a funeral director. They think maybe you’re scouting for business,” said Mr. Ibis, in an undertone. “Shall we see if your room is ready?”
Their breath steamed in the night air. Christmas lights twinkled in the windows of the stores they passed. “It’s good of you, putting me up,” said Shadow. “I appreciate it.”
“We owe your employer a number of favors. And Lord knows, we have the room. It’s a big old house. There used to be more of us, you know. Now it’s just the three of us. You won’t