Tamika Hughes still held my casserole dish with both hands, as though she had forgotten it was there. The color had gone out of her face. In the front row, Pastor Darnell sat down heavily, and for the first time in three years he looked like a young man instead of a preacher. “Deacon,” he said, in a smaller voice, “my grandfather was Silas Hughes. He owned Magnolia Manor, the nursing home on the east side. He died in Memphis in 1981. My father always said he left with nothing.” The old man nodded. “He left with a great deal,” said the deacon. “Mae, tell them. You were there.”
I stood up, because I could not bear to have the deacon carry it alone. My knees ached. I put one hand on the back of my chair. “It was March of 1979,” I said. “I went into the walk in freezer to bring out the peas for supper, and behind the peas there was a canvas bag, frozen stiff. Inside it was money and a ledger. The money belonged to the residents. Old people with nobody. Every month Mr. Hughes took part of their checks and wrote it down in that ledger as fees. I counted it twice in the cold. Forty one thousand and sixty dollars.”
The ballroom was so still I could hear my own breath. “The next morning the state auditors were coming,” I went on. “Mr. Hughes was already packing his car. I could have called them. I could have taken the bag to the sheriff, but the sheriff was a friend of Mr. Hughes. I could have gone to the governor and been laughed at. Instead I took the bag to Deacon Montgomery, because I knew that the church was about to be sold, and that the people in those beds had been members of this church, every one. I said, put it where it will do good.”
A woman who gives away what she could have kept will be remembered long after the ones who laughed at her dish.
Deacon Montgomery rolled his chair closer to the stage. “I kept the ledger,” he said. “Mae did not want it, and I could not throw it away. Forty five years it has sat in a metal box in the basement of this church, under the choir robes. I never opened it again. I was afraid. Tonight I am not afraid. The money saved this building, and it was money that had been stolen from our own people, and Mae Dawson knew it, and she gave it to us without taking one dime for a new dress. That is the whole of it. Now I am tired.”
Nobody applauded at first. There was a rustle, a few coughs, a chair scraping, and then, at the back of the room, a very old woman in a purple hat began to cry out loud. “Magnolia Manor,” she said. “My brother Wendell died there in 1977. We never could find where his check went.” A man at the next table stood up. “My aunt Clara,” he said. Then someone else, and someone else. Eleven people in that ballroom had family who had lived and died at that nursing home. I had fed their people grits and greens. I remembered their faces.
Pastor Darnell stood up slowly. He walked down to the front, took the microphone from his wife, and held it for a long time without speaking. “Sister Mae,” he said finally, “I owe you an apology that I do not know how to make. My wife owes you one, and she will make it herself. But I owe the rest of you something too. My grandfather stole from your people, and I have lived on the name he left me. I will find every family in that ledger if it takes the rest of my life. And I will pay what is owed.”
Tamika walked across that ballroom in her purple hat with the casserole dish in both hands and set it down on my table in front of me. She knelt, right there, on the carpet, in a silk dress, and took my hands. “Sister Mae,” she said, in a voice I would not have known, “I was ashamed of my own life, and I took it out on you. I have never in my life been hungry. I am so sorry.” I looked at her bowed head and the hat tilted to one side. I thought of my son, whom I buried out of that church. I said, “Get up, child. You will ruin that dress.”
It took the pastor fourteen months. The ledger gave him sixty three names. With the help of the state archive, a retired judge, and the whole membership of Mt. Olive, who held a bake sale every Saturday until Christmas, he found the families of fifty eight of them. The church paid back every dollar with interest, and the grandson of Silas Hughes handed out the checks himself in the fellowship hall, one at a time, with a handshake and a plain sentence: I am sorry for what my family took.
On the Sunday after the last check was given, they unveiled a plaque beside the front door of the church, a small brass thing. It said, MAE DAWSON FELLOWSHIP HALL. In gratitude for a faithful servant who gave what was not hers to keep, and kept nothing. The whole congregation stood. The choir sang, though nobody had asked them to. I sat in the third pew in my good blue dress and could not see the plaque for the water in my eyes, and a hand I knew slid into mine. It was the hand of Deacon Montgomery, in his chair at the end of the row.
Last Saturday Tamika came to my house in Tupelo, in a plain dress and no hat, with an apron over her arm. “Sister Mae,” she said, “would you teach me the casserole?” We stood in my little kitchen with the cream of mushroom and the fried onions and the green beans from my own garden. She stirred; I watched. When it came out of the oven, golden and bubbling, she tasted it and shut her eyes. “The Lord provides,” she said softly. I laughed until I had to sit down. “Child,” I said, “sometimes He provides behind the frozen peas.”
