Debit Man ~ A Story for Christmas and 2020

Ben Reach and Sam Nixon MD had long enjoyed a secret Christmas season ritual. It required the conspiratorial help of The Debit Man, a man even shorter than Ben Reach but the only Caucasian who had the information Ben and Sam required to fulfill their annual ritual.

What is a Debit Man? If you must ask that question you did not grow up among Poor People in the South in Ben and Sam’s era.

A Debit Man is a collector door-to-door of weekly life insurance premiums for insurers issuing Debit Life Insurance, sometimes called Industrial Life Insurance. And what is Debit Life Insurance? Insurance bought to assure the money to buy a funeral. Premiums small, payable weekly. So the Debit Man was a weekly visitor to his policy holders’ homes or places of work or places of leisure-pool hall, laundromat, bus stop, wherever the policyholder wanted to meet him to assure for another week the availability of a funeral.

Poor Folk of the era had a dread of death without the dignity of a prearranged proper funeral. Hence the market for debit life insurance, in policy amounts as small as $500, but more frequently in denominations of $1000, $2000, $3000 or $5000. The Debit Man had as an unofficial partner the funeral director for his policy holders. That partner was often the source of information the Debit Man needed to do his job and to secure additional customers, and vice versa. The Debit Man and the funeral director washed one another’s hands, so to speak. And they were the source of the intelligence Ben and Sam needed as Christmas approached.

What was it that Ben and Sam needed to know before Christmas?

The Curmudgeons shared a client-patient of great wealth and a greater desire for privacy. A decade ago he had come to his lawyer and personal physician and said, “Boys, as you know my wife died this year. I want each Christmas for as long as I live to make a transforming difference for good in a desperately poor family’s life in my wife’s honor. For example, suppose there is a poor high school senior with a great high school academic record who wants badly to become a physician to serve his or her community or a researcher to develop new cures for bad illnesses? I can anonymously assure him or her a full-ride scholarship through college and med school and residencies to make it possible to fulfill the dream. There is no limit to what I can spend each year, I just want each year’s project to be a memorable tribute to my wife’s memory.”

One year The Debit Man had identified to Ben and Sam as a candidate for the full-ride scholarship the granddaughter of a shooting plantation employee, Mose Green, mule driver of the shooting wagon on Bent Elm Plantation. She would attend first the University of Georgia for undergraduate studies, then Emory University for Medical School, then Harvard for Residency and research fellowship studies and finally a faculty position. This huge success prompted the Curmudgeons to go to several plantation owner friends and suggest they grant anonymous scholarships to children and grandchildren of employees. They offered (also anonymously) intelligence to the owners, gathered through The Debit Man and his co-conspirator the funeral director, about worthy scholarship candidates. Somehow miraculously all this remained secret as far as Ben’s and Sam’s and their secretive client-patient was concerned.

Ben and Sam met with The Debit Man in Ben’s office every Monday before Thanksgiving. The Debit Man liked Crown Royal and Coca Cola and they were always awaiting his arrival. He would pour his own, then sit at the table with Ben and Sam, each with a dram of The Macallan before him, and read from pages in the back of his Debit Book the information they needed about worthy candidates for the scholarships Ben and Sam had lined up, all anonymous as to source. Then Christmas Week Ben and Sam would ride in Ben’s pickup to the homes of the scholarship recipients and explain what the boy or girl of the house had to look forward to. Always the first question to the Curmudgeons was, “Who is making this possible.” To which the universal answer was, “Someone who knows you have earned it and are worthy of it, but you must not ask further, just be prepared to do the same for someone else who needs help when and if you are able.”

The Debit Man and his assistant the funeral director were discreet but deadly accurate. And the Debit Man was no sissy. In a shoulder holster he carried a snub nosed revolver 38 caliber which he knew how to use. Why? Because he was a natural target for thieves, for when he finished his weekly rounds he carried considerable cash, all-be-it in small denominations.

Yes, the Debit Man though small of statue was not to be reckoned with. He was lethal and took pains to have that fact known in the places he traveled weekly to collect the premiums on debit life insurance.