A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [50]
At the reception after my mother’s memorial service, someone asked me what it felt like to be an orphan. Strangely, I felt as though I already knew the emotional distance that orphans must experience. But I also came to know the moral imperatives that every family confers on every member—to comfort and love, to support and encourage, to bless and forgive. Sometimes the last one is the hardest. It was for me, and I wish I had understood its importance sooner. But there is no statute of limitations on forgiveness. You need only save a place, and because I did, I found reconciliation in good time. That is comfort enough.
Chapter 6
My mother did not care much for church. By the end of the week, she was bone tired from work and the weight of her misery. But my grandmother was a child of the South, and for her, church on Sunday was a must. She was an envied soloist for many years in her church and punctuated her days around the house with soulful hymns. Though she also cursed like a sailor, she quoted scripture often. There was no question in her mind that my sister and I would be raised in the church, and she insisted we go every Sunday.
Her means of enforcing this rule did not involve threats of eternal damnation so much as the promise of a big country breakfast when we came home. In a household where her groceries were strictly segregated from my mother’s and where my sister and I were always hungry, Sunday mornings (like holidays) were occasions for a common feast. And these were big country breakfasts, prepared in the traditions Gram had brought with her from Kentucky—eggs, sausage or scrapple, bacon, grits, homemade biscuits and gravy, fried apples in the fall, sometimes liver and onions. We awoke to the luscious smell of bacon frying. We could not partake, however, until after church. It was a bribe, pure and simple. And it worked.
The Cosmopolitan Community Church was just a block away, on 53rd and Wabash Avenue. It was an unusual black church for its time. The pastor was a woman. Dr. Mary Evans was humble, subdued, and elderly, with dull, limp gray hair and skin so fair she may have been white. The church seemed to be in decline. The pews were hardly ever full except on Easter Sunday. Today there is an updated sanctuary, with modern broadcast and sound systems and a band with an electric bass and drums. But in my childhood, services were held in a cool, dark space with wooden folding seats, a wheezing organ, and, behind the altar, a lighted cross. Services were quiet, even a tad boring, with little of the shouting or theatrics of many black churches. I was baptized there just before I went off to Milton Academy, wrapped in a white sheet, fully immersed in a big bathtub of warm water that appeared from behind a wine-colored velvet curtain. That was about as close as we came to drama at Cosmopolitan.
What I recall most vividly are the old ladies. They wore dresses whose bright colors had faded or tailored suits in shades of brown or gray that may once have fit. Some wore gloves, yellowed with time. They all wore hats—pillboxes, ovals, broad-brimmed, and those little numbers shaped like military caps or fedoras—with ribbons and pins and plumes. All the jewelry was costumed and dated but worn with pride. The ladies swept into the church with their grandchildren in tow and seated themselves with little ceremony, clutching their frayed King James Bibles, ready to get down to the business of worship. They nodded their approval during the sermon or when student achievements were acknowledged, fanned themselves when it was warm, and glared at fidgeting children.
Old ladies ran the place. When it was time to sing, they chose which hymns would best suit the pastor’s message by humming the tunes until the organist caught on and caught up. The music rose from our pews, and the songs themselves—“Amazing Grace,” “The Old Rugged Cross”—were haunting, reverent, and spiritual. At the