He'd better be known to the people doing the distribution or they'd tell him if someone had a chance they'd take some over but right now it was line up or nothing.
A black guy walking up to a line of distributors from a very white church might get the same perusal. If, however, he was neatly dressed and well spoken, and especially if he offered to help, he was likely to be trusted. He might be given food for more than just himself if there was extra.
Yes, there were those that used that to their advantage. But by and large judging on the basis of culture for trust works.
It was not only white churches that got largess from military units who were, increasingly and against orders, turning away from downtown areas. Any random association that seemed functional and valid might get a drop of food and medicines. A fucking mosque in St. Louis was eventually considered the best place to drop shipments. They handled them evenhandedly and very efficiently. Charity is one of the few things that Islamics get right.
Larger associations formed, very very much "back channel."
Example:
A white church in suburban Boston was running low on food. Suddenly, a convoy destined for the center of Boston "broke down" nearby and had to unload most of its supplies. Convenient?
A black church in Arkansas had received a similar largesse, in part because the first sergeant of the National Guard company doing the delivery had family in the church and they were not interested in going into the portion of Little Rock they were destined for.
The two churches, widely separated, were "sister missions" to each other. That is, there was some reciprocation of ministers and support. That mostly came down to the more wealthy church having, over the years, given financial support to the less wealthy. And, yes, that is white and black. And even after the Plague they had kept in contact through several means.
In this case bread upon the waters, as Jesus said, worked out. The XO of the National Guard company had been a member of 10th ID. He called one of his old bosses and mentioned that he'd heard there was a church group doing good works but struggling near Boston. 10th ID was working the Boston area. Voila "breakdown."
Bread upon the waters. Random associations.
Where there was not direct interference, it was random associations that started to rebuild the country. The economy was just screwed. But that didn't mean people didn't work and businesses didn't function to some extent. It was strange. There was a labor shortage and at the same time high unemployment. It was like the cost of goods. There were many hands that wanted to work and companies that were opening or managed to hang on and stay open that needed to fill the slots left open by deaths. It took time, though, to get those two together.
Communications never went down completely. There were times when it was impossible to get a phone call through to certain areas. And the Internet was a spotty thing. Not so much because of the trunks but because of local providers, functionality thereof.
But commo was spotty and screwed up. And there would be various scares of a new plague breaking out. It did in places. Miami had a cholera outbreak, more deaths. L.A. . . . Well, despite the best efforts of Warrick, or possibly because of them, L.A. was fucked. Cholera, resistant tuberculosis, typhus, they all broke out. And then there's the water situation. But that's a sideline I'll see about covering later.
And whenever there was a scare, the phone lines went down. All the connections weren't in place and as soon as anyone who still had access to a working phone heard a rumor, or a news report, which was often the same rumor, that a new plague had broken out they called friends or relatives in the area. And commo went down.
So let's look at an example.
Let's go back to the suburban family. The father was a guy working at a local fueling center. Now, this is a pump farm where the trucks that fuel gas stations go to fill up. Sometimes they're owned by one oil company but fill up all the trucks in the area, regardless of whose gas it's supposed to be. Not usually, but it happens.
Anyway, working one those places is a semi-skilled job. At the very least, a knowledge of the basic safety and emergency response is useful.
By and large, such places stayed up. Fuel was central and critical. They might not be going to a dozen gas stations anymore, but they were providing fuel to somebody. The military bought from such stations, fueling their fuel trucks at them.
But they'd taken hits in personnel. One in three, more or less at random. And as things started to reform, they were getting more and more trucks wanting fuel. Sometimes they ran out; it had to come from somewhere and the distribution system was in chaos. But the bottomline was, they needed bodies.
Say that the first family was in suburban Cincinnatti and the fueling station was, too. The husband was dead and buried under pansies. They get to the point they need a new fuel guy. Everyone's working overtime, for sometimes no pay but the company is making sure they get food, and they're getting worn out. They need another body. A warm one. Not the guy under pansies.
So they put out the word. They need a trained fuel technician.
All sorts of people walk over to the place. It's a job, man. Jobs are scarce. And the fuel company is making sure its people and their families get fed. But these are just bodies. They need someone with experience handling big quantities of fuel. They're too overworked to train someone, much as they need the body.
In the suburbs of Beltsville, itself a suburb, there's a former webdesigner who, during a single stint in the Army, worked a fuel distribution point in Iraq. She is a trained fuel transfer technician and has experience. But the place that needs her experience is in Cincinnatti. She's more than willing to go there to get a job and assured food. Maybe a bit of money left over for more than bare survival. It's a job, man.
Say that she still gets some Internet access, somehow. (Libraries still had some functionality.) Say that she finds the want ad on MonsterJobs.com. (Which came back up in June of 2019 and stayed up to this day.) How does she get to Cincinnatti? Note the "she." Hitchhiking is a choice of last resort. Major league trust issues.
In this case, not quite a random association. She puts her experience on the website along with a phone number at her local association (the VFW in her case, yes, it's taken from a real person's experience) where she can be reached.
The manager of the fuel point sees the hit and nearly jumps for joy. If it's legit. They'd had lots of people who could talk a good line about being experienced. One who was very good at talking had nearly blown the place up.
They get in contact. He quizzes her. She sounds good. But so did the nightmare. But how to get her to him?
Hey, fuel moves.
Mostly it moves by rail to distribution points like that. But they also handle more minor materials such as volume grease and oil. The military term is "POL": Petrol, (gasoline for Americans) Oil, Lubricants. Oil and lubricants, to a great degree, still moved by trucks.
There was a fuel point, from another company, near Beltsville. It had all the people it needed, but it also had trucks going north. The truckers, in this case, were known quantities.
Calls were made. E-mails were exchanged. (The oil companies had ensured their own connections to backbones long before the Plague. They were going to be hooked tight into the Internet if anything happened. They also had satellite connectivity if even that went down. Oil companies tend to be planners, too.)