In many ways, JW’s presentation appealed to this racier side of banking, because it dealt with danger, and not danger in the traditional sense, but existential danger, and its dramatic companion—opportunity. Instead of delivering the usual boring drone on the security features of the new hundred-dollar bill, he was here to talk about crime—specifically, redlining, and how to avoid being accused of it while still maximizing returns.
The room was packed and abuzz with an expectant air. Bankers stole glances at him and then went back to their huddled conversations, their leaned-in, best-new-friends-since-last-night joke-telling, their texts and e-mails about how boring it all was to their honeys back home.
He found a limp dongle of black cords emerging from a hole in the center of the table. He opened his briefcase and pulled out his laptop, unspooled and connected its cables. At forty, he was still in decent shape. He still had his hair, and it was still brown. He wore it swept back and a little to the side, though a few boyish sprigs always seemed to flop over the left edge of his forehead. He had a slight scar above his right eyebrow: a reminder of his teenage years training horses. It gave him a rugged air of adventure that contrasted nicely with his well-tailored banker’s suit and his crisp white shirt. An air of mystery, his wife Carol called it, which was appropriate for talking about crime and its avoidance, something she found sexy. He was quite presentable, all things considered, and to the extent that being a leader creates charisma, he had a special magic about him when he was on the circuit doing presentations. He stuck a USB clicker into the slot on his laptop, touched the room control screen to light the hotel projector, and brought up his presentation:
BANKING IN INDIAN COUNTRY
Presented by John White
North Lake Bank, North Lake, Minnesota
Midwest Community Banking Conference
Dakota Grand Hotel, Minneapolis
He glanced at the clock. It was still a minute early, and more bankers were shuffling in. He had forty minutes. He pulled out his cell phone and checked his e-mail, but his inbox held nothing new apart from the usual junk mail for online gaming sites and reduced-rate mortgages. He set the phone down and cast his blue-gray eyes—Finnish eyes, his mother had called them—out over the audience, waiting patiently and silently as the stragglers found the few remaining seats. It was a full house.
He noted the bankers’ suits from last season. Their briefcases’ pale worn edges. Their creased shoes. How some of the women—late thirties (mojito-drinking karaoke singers, no doubt)—unexpectedly carried needlepoint handbags against their polyester skirts, done in Norwegian or German designs. They were mostly small-town bankers, these clues told him. Rotarians. Lions. Deacons. Community leaders. He saw Charlie Weston from New Ulm, and Bill Heimlich from Redwood Falls, and Ann Wilson from Detroit Lakes, all presidents of small-town community banks. He had once capsized a fishing boat on Rainy Lake with Ken Iverson and his boss, Frank Jorgenson. The three of them were drunk silly on vodka gimlets, and laughed as they found their footing in chest-deep water next to the dock. But those days were long past. He waited until the last of the bankers settled into their seats before he began to speak.
“When I first started in community banking, the only reason for people to visit an Indian reservation was to buy moccasins and blankets. Now, people flock to their casinos in droves, and they make money hand over fist. The playing field has changed, and we community bankers need to up our game. I know many of you have banks in communities near Indian reservations, so today I will show you some tools to help you up that game, while avoiding some of the most common legal pitfalls. But I’m also going to warn you: things are not always as they seem.”
Over the years, JW had honed the drama of this opening with the air of a magician. When he did it well, it grabbed his audience’s attention from the first sentence. He sometimes felt he should have been a teacher, or perhaps a stage actor. He enjoyed playing an audience: reading them and molding the shape and rise of their emotions—these things came to him naturally, as if he were conducting a symphony. He walked along the whiteboard, stepping in and out of the Powerpoint with the confidence of a showman, one hand in his pocket as he changed it to a new slide:
MANAGING RISK ON A RESERVATION
He turned up the front lights enough to bathe himself in a milky wash, highlighting the whiteness of his shirt, his close shave, his shining eyes. The sun was brilliant outside, and it seeped in through the dark vertical blinds. With the audience in shadow, he felt as if he were a thespian under stage lights.
“So who can tell me the biggest risk banks have when lending to Native Americans on a reservation?” As he waited for an answer he took a Styrofoam cup from a stack and poured coffee. Audiences always took their time with this one, which was an important part of his build. For all their raucous private partying, bankers were terrified of the discussion he was proposing, because it was public. They were happy to talk about race—guardedly, with known entities, and in small groups—but they didn’t know how to deal with it in a public forum. He tipped in some creamer and stirred, the black of his coffee going tan. He sipped and watched them adjust to the unnerving idea of discussing it in the open.
One of the bankers in the second row finally shifted and looked around with a sort of cocksure grin. He had reddish tanned skin, gold chains, spiky hair, and a party-ready attitude. He reminded JW of a former high-school football star who had faded to pudge. His demeanor seemed to say “what the hell”: a monkey who found the cage door standing open and decided to plunge through.
“They’re deadbeats?” he volunteered. He grinned and bobbed his head as he looked around for supporters. JW imagined him leading a conga line later, Hawaiian shirt open, his drink raised like a baton. A few of the bankers chuckled noncommittally as they glanced at JW to see how far he would let them go. This was code, a way of asking whether this sort of good-old-boy racism would be tolerated. The woman in the front row shot him an angry glare for even letting it get this far, then rolled her eyes and shook her head to signal her displeasure at the inappropriate remark.
He set his coffee down. It always amazed him how this one question touched things off. Race was still a powder keg, and its frank discussion divided audiences with powerful, emotional reactions, which is of course why he used it. He had once read, when researching for a discussion with his daughter, Julie, who loved science, that much like humans, primates ostracize one another and commit violence and murder, particularly against other tribes. Exploring that impulse was his intent: to stir up these primal feelings and to present people with their own racism (for they all had it), and then to dig deeper and get past it. People didn’t know how to talk about race; there was no safe territory. It was buried under political correctness, as untouchable as a dead pharaoh, its brains pulled out and its body wrapped in cloth and then gold and then stone. Buried away. Long gone and desiccated under a pyramid of laws and regulations and social mores, brick by brick, that now generally forbade its discussion. But it lived still, underground, in small-group conversations, and even more openly now in Tea Party politics. Truth be told, many laws and regulations did go too far, and they created resentments, he thought, because they gave unfair advantages that could sometimes be dangerous to businesses, and to banks in particular. That’s why they were all here today. To work through all that. To separate race from business. To get their heads straight and to clarify intent, a word that contained a universe. He gestured toward the man and began to unwind the mummy.
“That,” he told the audience, “is exactly the kind of thinking they use to outsmart us.”
No one moved. The air conditioning came on, and the window blinds began to shift and clatter, letting in streaks of light that shot over