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What's in that letter? She Delivers -- and She WorriesBy Rick Horowitz
As even the mail turns suddenly dangerous, we hear from the president and the attorney general and the postmaster general; they're issuing warnings and speculating about where this or that trouble-filled envelope might have come from. And we hear from some of the people, famous and otherwise, at the other end of the mail chain; they're describing what they did and how they felt when they first noticed the potentially lethal contents of a seemingly innocent piece of correspondence. But what about the people in between? What about the people who move the mail along from the time it's dropped into some mailbox somewhere until it arrives at its destination? Postal Service executives and spokesmen are speaking publicly, these major players with the major titles, but we haven't heard much from the letter carriers themselves. How are they dealing with all this? "I'm kind of afraid, yeah," admits Benita Franklin, a local carrier who agreed to talk to me about the current situation -- but only after the swift completion of her appointed rounds, and only after asking that her real name not be used. Ordinary postal employees, she says, have been told not to speak to the media. (Thus her pseudonym, in honor of the United States' first and most famous postmaster general.) Benita Franklin is afraid of what she might be toting door to door in her mailbag these days. Those fears haven't been eased, it seems, by what she considers a less than effective -- and less than sympathetic -- response from her Postal Service bosses. "They're keeping us in the dark," she says. "'Just shut up and do your job.'" Franklin's been walking a route for more than a decade, but she's never been through a time like this one. She delivers "12 feet of mail a day," she says, "about seven feet of flats -- magazines and stuff -- and about five feet of letters." ("Feet" of mail? "That's how we talk," she says.) And somewhere in that stack, she well understands, there may be something deadly. She's been told to be on the lookout for "suspicious" letters, and she doesn't believe she's seen any yet -- but what makes a letter "suspicious" anyway? The guidance she's gotten from her employers has been less than detailed, she suggests, and not especially useful. She's supposed to worry less, for instance, if a letter has a return address. And she does worry less. Then again, the anthrax-laden letter sent to Sen. Tom Daschle had a return address, just the way it's supposed to. But it turned out to be a bogus address. "I don't think they know what's going on," she says. She's not happy about it, or about what she sees as the Postal Service's business-as-usual approach in the first days of the crisis. "If they would just let us know, or reassure us..." She also worries about the prospect of terrorists creating havoc on an even wider scale. "What if they start putting it inside a package?" she wonders. "What if they start putting it inside something that can leak on the route?" She knows how roughly some packages are handled by the clerks in the central post office. If the terrorists, whoever they are, were to put a supply of something deadly inside something "like an egg," it could break during handling, and infest mail going to a dozen or more local post offices, where it's then handled by dozens of local clerks... "Then we handle it, then we pass it along to people..." She has other worries, too. Can anthrax be spread through a building's ventilation system? She's not sure. And what does "not contagious" mean? She hears that anthrax is "not contagious," but what if it's on someone clothes -- can't someone else be exposed to it and become infected that way? "How can you tell me that I'm not gonna get it?" she asks. "You don't know." Each morning, she says, she wakes up wondering, "Is something gonna happen to me today?" She holds up her hands for inspection. "I get three or four cuts a day," she says; those cuts, she fears, could be entryways for anthrax spores. She's heard that the postmaster general has now pledged to get gloves to every Postal Service employee who handles the mail. She's somewhat relieved -- but only somewhat. Says Benita Franklin, letter carrier and public servant, "He'd better hurry his butt up." Posted 10/18/01.
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Rick Horowitz
