Census Enumeration and The Cursed Shirt

A Story of Fear and Redemption

The first thing that must be understood is that I am not a coward. Over the course of my life, I've experienced real dangers - I've been run over by a car (on two separate occasions), I've been attacked by an angry, machete-wielding mob, I've been savaged by wild fish, I've survived internet dating - my point is, I know what real danger is and I'm not any more afraid of it than the next man.

Nevertheless, I have to confess to feelings of profound misgiving as I stand on this porch, notebook in hand, searching for the doorbell.

The problem with working for the Census is not one of REAL danger. In spite of the stories that have been going around about census workers like myself having guns pulled on them or being torn apart by angry dogs, the actual threat of real, physical peril is almost nonexistent. People are generally pretty polite about being interviewed for the national census. They just don't like it very much.

Article 1, Section 3 of the Constitution calls for a census to be made every ten years to determine the population of the United States. This is done primarily to determine congressional representation for each state, but also to gather other important information that various government agencies need in order to perform their duties.

It is this other information that causes most of the trouble. It would be impractical for various government agencies to conduct independent surveys to find out, say, the average commute-time of people living in rural South Dakota, or the percentage of the population of Washington DC who are disabled - particularly when a nationwide census is being conducted anyway, so a great many very personal questions end up being asked on the census forms that are sent out to households around the country.

Now, not even the United States government is foolish enough to believe that the general populous will submit to a lot of personal questions, so when the census forms are sent out, there is a sort of compromise made. Most of the forms are very simple - asking only the names, ages and dates of birth of the people who live in each house. Only one form in six is the infamous Long Form with its 31 pages of questions, but even that number is enough to offend a LOT of people. A great many people never return their census forms. When that happens, the Census Bureau has to send out workers called census enumerators to each nonresponsive house to collect the information in person.

Which is where I come in.

On one hand, census enumeration is a pretty cushy job. The work itself isn't hard, the hours are good and it pays well. The downside is that you end up spending a lot of time going from house to house - usually during the dinner hour - asking people a lot of nosy questions. This generally leads to a lot of low-level hostility that doesn't bother you much at first, but adds up with each house you visit until you are a nervous wreck every time you knock on a door. NOBODY is ever glad to see you; I guarantee that you could stick your head into doorways and call out, "Syphilis Inspector!" and get a better reception than you do as a census worker.

The house I'm visiting now seems pretty hopeful though. I've decided to start surveying houses in the center of town today and work my way outward - for whatever reason, people seem less hostile and suspicious inside city limits than they do farther out in the countryside. Even in town, a surprising number of houses are like little pockets of the Ozarks plopped down in New England - with tiny yards full of dog poop and used auto parts - but this one looks pretty nice. I double-check the address on the door against my list, then press the doorbell.

Nothing happens.

This is fairly common and a little frustrating. Standing outside the house, you can never be sure if the bell has rung inside or not. It would be foolish to stand here on the porch all afternoon ringing a doorbell if nobody is home, but it would be equally foolish to turn around and walk away from a house full of people if the problem is a broken doorbell. So I do what I generally end up doing anyway; I knock on the storm door. This sets off the house's auxiliary doorbell - a small, hyperactive dog who announces to the neighborhood that HEY! HEY!!! THERE'S A STRANGER AT THE DOOR! YES, YOU HEARD ME - A STRANGER! AT THE DOOR! RIGHT NOW!!!

The door is answered a minute or two later by a very tired-looking woman with a baby on her hip and a telephone tucked under her chin. I identify myself and ask her if I'm at the right address. She nods suspiciously and continues talking on the phone, motioning to me to go ahead and ask her the questions on the form. She doesn't interrupt her other conversation however and continues talking in a constant stream, weaving the census information into the general thread of her conversation, feeding me answers almost at random, interspersed with the sound of the barking dog.

"No, no, I'm not sure what we're doing this weekend, I'll have to wait and see - BARK, BARK - there's three of us in this house - the car's acting up again; I'm not sure what it is but it sounds expensive - BARK, BARK - October 12th, 1972 - uh huh, uh huh... - no, it's Jones*: J,O,N,E,S - no, not you: I have a census guy here...

* Obviously, not her real name.

Fortunately, she has a short form, so there are only five or six questions to be filled out and the interview goes pretty quickly. I get the names, dates of birth and race of everybody living in the house, and fill in the contact information in case the Census Bureau needs to get back in touch with her. I already know her address, so I fill that in myself, which just leaves one more question. I ask her what her telephone number is.

This seems to catch her by surprise, because she stops talking for a moment. Even the dog goes silent. She gives me a deeply suspicious look.

"Our telephone number?" she asks.

"Yes, please," I say.

She glares at me again. "We don't have a telephone," she says, then shuts the door.

All in all, I rate this as a fairly successful interview. I make a note to myself to look the number up later in the phone book and walk back to my car to move on to the next interview.

Unfortunately, this one doesn't go nearly so smoothly. It's out in the countryside and I know I'm in trouble from the moment I enter this lady's kitchen. There is an icy silence as I sit down at her kitchen table and pull a Long Form from my bag.

"What's THAT?" she asks, eyeing the book-length form, icicles dripping from each word.

I clear my throat nervously. "It's your census form. Congratulations - you got the Long Form!" I say, nervously trying to inject some levity into the situation.

This turns out to be a mistake, because she fixes me with a glare that could crack granite.

"You don't need to know anything more than how many people live here," she spits (ignoring completely the fact that I personally don't need to know ANY of this information). At this point, I must be showing a certain degree of discomfort, because she does relent fractionally. "OK," she says, unbending ever so slightly, "I'll tell you our names, ages and birthdays, but NOTHING else!"

This is a fairly common reaction and I'm grateful to be getting any data from her at all, so I duly write down the names of Mrs. Smith*, her husband and their two grandchildren as well as their dates of birth. Having gotten this far unscathed, I decide to press my luck and ask the next question on the form.

* Obviously, not her real name either.

"So," I ask in what I hope is a conversational tone of voice, "are any of you Hispanic?"

Just why I ask this particular question is a mystery. U.S. Census rules require me to complete a certain number of questions on each form in order to have it count as "completed". If I don't complete that minimum number on this form, the same rules require me to come back to this house six more times before I can write it off as a lost cause. Since THAT patently is not going to happen, I should be pushing on questions that I can't answer on my own. This woman and her husband are obviously not Hispanic. Statistically speaking, they and their grandchildren - indeed, anyone living in Northern New England - are more than 95% likely to be non-Hispanic Caucasians. Even by those standards however, this woman is the least Hispanic-looking person I've ever met. It is a silly question to ask.

Mrs. Smith obviously agrees with that assessment. "Why does the Government need to know THAT!?" she demands.

I'm not the brightest man in the world, but even I can tell that this is a rhetorical question and refrain from delivering a lecture on statistical demographics and its role in a democratic society. This is just as well, because she has built up a good head of steam and is venting with a vengeance now.

"It's bad enough that you people bleed us dry every year," she says, foam starting to appear at the corners of her mouth, "without sticking your noses into our business like this. I'm an American - I was born right here in this town. So was my husband - We're not Russians or anything. This stuff isn't the Government's business - it's OUR business!"

By now, I've shrunk as far backwards into my chair as humanly possible, trying to escape the worst of Mrs. Smith's indignation. It's a fairly futile exercise at this point though, because she's really getting into the spirit of the thing now and is letting me have it with both barrels.

"I don't NEED this!" she hisses. ("Oh, you either?" I think about replying, but think better of it.) "I'm disabled - I can only leave the house for an hour or so each day. Why's the Government picking on me? My husband's a Vietnam vet - why are they bothering him? I've got two grandchildren living in this house with A.D.D.; I don't need this!" she repeats.

I'm slowly shifting my feet around the chair, getting ready to make a break for it, when all of a sudden, I realize that she's actually telling me almost everything I need to know. I sit back, listen to her vent and try desperately to remember what she's saying. This turns out to be a pretty good tactic. It's obviously been a long time since she's had anyone listen to her this attentively and she practically hemorrhages information. Over the course of the next five minutes, I learn that she owns her own house, that it's paid off in full, how much she pays in property taxes and utilities and that she's an ethnic Norwegian.

Eventually, she runs out of breath and sinks exhausted into the chair across the table from me. She looks at me almost gratefully for a moment before remembering that I'm the enemy. Then she gives me a glare, and says pointedly, "I have to cook dinner."

The sheer quantity of empty pizza boxes stacked around the kitchen makes that seem unlikely, but I've obviously been dismissed, so I thank her for her time and bolt out the door, clutching her census form in a death grip and race-walk to my car. I'm in the car, buckled up and out of the driveway in what has to be record time. I drive about half a mile down the road, where I'm sure I can't be seen from the house, pull over and fill out Mrs. Smith's census form.

Fear can be a wonderful mental stimulant. Considering that I can hardly remember my own address or phone number most of the time, I seem to have committed most of Mrs. Smith's life-story to memory remarkably well. It takes me about ten minutes to complete her form. I slump back in my seat, mopping my forehead, sure that another couple of interviews like this one will finish me off. I give myself another few minutes to regroup, then reach for my list to see where my next interview is.

It's not there. With a cold feeling at the base of my spine, I realize that I've left my bag in Mrs. Smith's kitchen. The long, frightening trip back to the house to recover it may haunt my dreams for years to come.

Fortunately, the rest of my visits this afternoon aren't quite so harrowing - a mixed bag of short forms and houses with nobody at home. After another hour or so, I head back into town to turn in my paperwork, where my supervisors have good news and bad news for me.

The good news is that they are very pleased with the number and quality of the forms I've been able to complete. I've been distressed up to this point that I've only been able to get a dozen or so forms filled out on any given day - and then only on a particularly good day - but it turns out that all the enumerators are having trouble.

Part of the problem is that we have a particularly difficult area to cover. Due to an administrative foul-up, a large block of previously collected data was somehow lost a month or so ago - thus, many of the houses on our lists have already been surveyed once but now need to be surveyed again. In addition, our particular section is located on the boundary of two administrative regions and several areas have been accidentally assigned to two separate teams. Thus, some houses have already been visited not once, but three or even four times by the time we visit them to conduct our interviews. Not surprisingly, the people who live in these houses are starting to lose their sense of humor about the whole census process. One of the other enumerators claims to have had a gun pulled on him on several occasions, but as he also has strongly held beliefs about black helicopters and alien abductions, the rest of us are skeptical.

As it turns out, he's not the only enumerator with a less than vice-like grip on reality. My supervisors tell me that they've had to fire one of my colleagues. It seems that one of the other guys was actually a white supremacist and was threatening the people on his list. As a duly appointed government representative, he had told them, it was within his purview to have them arrested if they didn't cooperate with him - all this while wearing white-laced jackboots and aviator sunglasses. Needless to say, as soon as this was brought to the attention of our supervisors, he was fired on the spot. The problem is, he'd been doing this for several days before anyone found out about it and that has presentented us with a bit of a problem: the people he'd threatened hadn't disclosed any information to him and we still need that data. Somebody has to go back to those houses and reinterview the residents.

Guess who gets to do that.

Feeling the icy fingers of Doom clutched around my small intestines, I take the file and walk back to my car like a zombie. I drive home and mix myself several very stiff drinks.

I try not to dwell on this situation for the next several days. I have enough outstanding forms of my own to occupy me for awhile and I manage to put the "Nazi Forms" on hold. Eventually though, I run out of excuses.

It is as I get out of the shower and start to get dressed that the full impact of the situation hits me. I've done a pretty good job so far of not thinking about these ugly cases, but now that I'm plotting out my day in detail, it becomes clear to me that I'm just not going to be able to handle this. There is just too much hostility waiting for me - a huge purple wall of ill-will and resentment looming above me, waiting to crush me as soon as I ring the first doorbell.

I'd be all right, I think to myself as I open my closet door, if I only had some sort of protection - some sort of juju of my own to counteract the ugly juju that's waiting for me outside. If I had some sort of supernatural power of my own, I'd probably be OK.

I stand in the closet doorway, staring at a rack of shirts and brooding for a good minute or so, until a flash of blue catches my eye. I part the clothes in front of me to reveal a blue, short-sleeved shirt hidden in the back of the closet.

I feel a weight come off my shoulders and smile grimly. Maybe -just maybe - I have some juju of my own after all.

I bought the Cursed Shirt about two years ago. The local Salvation Army was moving across town and was selling everything in their store for a dollar per item, so I took my niece and nephew and a couple of their friends to the thrift store for the afternoon. It was the middle of Summer and their parents were thrilled to get rid of them for a few hours. Each kid had three dollars to spend and they had a blast going through the racks of clothing, picking out stuff that their parents wouldn't have bought for them at gun point (bustiers and Harley Davidson t-shirts for instance). While they were busy, I had a chance to walk around and look at clothing myself.

It was the color of the shirt that caught my eye - a sort of robin's-egg blue. It was a nice shirt - short-sleeved, Summer-weight and virtually new. And, of course, it was only a dollar. So I bought it. I remember making a joke at the time that this shirt would be just the thinking to wear if I ever turned gay and moved to Miami, but it was a nice shirt and I was actually rather pleased with myself to have gotten such a bargain.

The shirt started to reveal its evil nature a few days later.

It was a nice evening and I decided to walk down the block and have a drink at a restaurant where a friend of mine was tending bar. It was a warm night, so I decided to wear my new shirt.

I'd been sitting at the bar for a few minutes when I was approached by a middle-aged man who asked if he could join me. I was pleased for the opportunity of some company, so I told him to have a seat.

He spent the next half hour or so hitting on me unmercifully.

This usually isn't a problem for me. I'm not gay, but I don't get upset when, on rare occasions, I'm propositioned by another man. It has happened a few times over the years, and invariably, once I've explained that I'm not interested, the gentlemen in question have been happy to move on to other, more comfortable subjects.

Unfortunately, this particular guy wasn't a gentleman and wouldn't take no for an answer. Over the course of the next 20 minutes, he trotted out every cheesy pick-up line I'd ever heard -and several that were new to me. This was amusing for about five minutes, then swifly became annoying. Finally, I explained carefully and calmly - but in no uncertain terms - that I was not interested in continuing this conversation, much less exporing his unique perspectives on the uses of barbecue sauce. He looked me over sadly and said, "You know - you must be the most repressed person I've ever met in my life."

It was at this point that I called for my check and fled the bar. (I later found out that this man had been harassing other customers earlier in the evening and when I arrived, my buddy the bartender had steered him in my direction - a good joke in the abstract, but I wasn't laughing at the time.)

A few days later, I decided to try for another drink at a different bar and, tempting fate, wore the same shirt.

Sitting at the bar, I fell into a really good conversation with the couple next to me. We bought each other a round of drinks and we'd been talking for quite a while when the woman turned to me - I don't recall at the moment what the topic of discussion was - and said, "Well, let me ask you - you're gay - what do you think of such-and-such?"

I fixed her with an icy stare.

"What?" she asked, taken a bit aback by my sudden change in demeanor.

"It's the shirt, isn't it?" I replied.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

I explained that I was not - am not - gay.

"But it's OK to be gay," she said defensively. "I've got an uncle who's gay."

I assured her that yes, it was OK to be gay, and that I was very happy for both her and her uncle, but that I didn't happen to be gay myself. She remained unconvinced however, and I ultimately had to depose several women I knew in the bar to testify to my rampant heterosexuality.

I tried wearing the blue shirt on several other occasions after that, but inevitably got such odd looks while wearing it that I ended up retiring it to the back of my closet. My friends and I called it the Cursed Shirt and it was the butt of jokes for months afterward until it was eventually forgotten.

Until now.

Now, standing in my closet doorway, looking for a some sort of talisman to counter the malignant census hostility waiting for me, I feel the Cursed Shirt calling to me.

I'm surprised at the idea for a moment, then it occurs to me that a curse can be juju of a very powerful sort. The question, however, is this - just how powerful is the shirt's curse? Powerful enough to fight the evil influence of the Nazi Forms? Really, there's only one way to tell.

At this point, I don't have a lot of options. In any case, I think, the shirt certainly seems to throw off a lot of non-threatening vibes.

It's probably my imagination, but I feel a small tingle of electricity as my fingers touch the fabric.

An hour later, dressed in the Cursed Shirt, I mount the steps to a farmhouse, take a deep breath and knock on the door. After a moment, a voice calls out from inside the house.

"Who is it?"

"Yes, Hello," I call out. "My name is John Fladd. I'm with the Census Bureau..."

Before I can go any farther, I am interrupted by a stream of profanity. "God DAMN it!" a very, very angry voice cries out. The sound of stomping feet approaches the door. "I told you people never to come around here again! I've had just about enough..." The angry, angry man who lives at this house throws open his front door to see a census enumerator standing on his porch carrying a clipboard and wearing a robin's-egg blue shirt.

Whatever he has been expecting, I'm obviously not it, and it takes him by surprise. He tries to regroup his thoughts. "I've had just... er... just about enough of... um...," he says hesitantly, staring at me and my ridiculous blue shirt. "Um..."

He falls silent for several seconds, staring at me in confusion. Finally, he sighs, closes his eyes and rubs his temples, then with infinite weariness, speaks again.

"All right. What can I do for you?"

� 2000 HippoPress.com

Comic Strips - Boondocks � 2000 Aaron McGruder

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