The back doors of Mount Zion Baptist Church in Valdosta swung open on the second hymn, and three hundred people turned around in their pews. I am Loretta Bascom, eighty years old, in my purple homecoming hat, and I sat in the front row with my hands on my Bible. Through the doors came my son Terrell, forty six years old, in a borrowed suit, walking quickly up the center aisle with a briefcase. Behind him came a smooth man in a gray jacket whom I had never seen, and who carried a leather folder under his arm. Sergeant Hollins, at the end of my pew, said softly, “That is Reggie Pope.”
I knew the name. Reggie Pope had been seen with my son at the bus station on Tuesday, according to Sergeant Hollins, who had known me since the days of the church choir. Pope was a paper man, a notary who traveled from county to county notarizing power of attorney forms for old women with sons in trouble. My son had come to my church, on the most important day of the church calendar, with a man like that, to ask me to sign over to him my four point six million dollars from the patent on the jail tray.
I did not move. I had designed that tray in the kitchen of my own house in 1998, a plastic plate so tough that it could not be broken into a weapon, after my late husband Eugene, a corrections officer, came home hurt from an assault with a ceramic dish. The patent had made me rich, and my son poor in spirit. He had been in and out of trouble with drugs for twenty years. I loved him with the whole of my heart, and I had said no to him on Monday, and on Tuesday, and on Wednesday.
A pair of church doors flung open at homecoming gave one mother the morning to bring her son back to the pew in Valdosta.
I gave my terms from the front pew, in front of Pastor Williams, in front of three hundred friends, in a voice that carried to the choir loft. “Terrell, come here and sit down beside your mother. I will not sign a paper in this house, and I will not argue in this house, and I will not lose my son in this house. If you will listen to the Sergeant, and listen to the pastor, and go with them to the program at the hospital after the service, I will hold your hand through every step of it. Do you understand me, son?”
Terrell stood in the aisle, his face working. The briefcase fell from his hand and burst open on the carpet, and out slid the papers, the forms, the notary stamps and the pens. He sank into the pew beside me and put his head in my lap, in front of everyone. I put my hand on his thick hair, which had gone gray at the temples. “Mama,” he said, “I did not want to do it. I owe thirty thousand dollars to people I cannot name. Reggie said it would only take a signature.”
Reggie Pope was no fool, and he saw what was happening. He took one step backward, then another, and turned toward the back doors with the leather folder against his chest, which held the papers prepared for my signature. He ran. His shoes slapped the marble. But the ushers of Mount Zion that morning were seven women in white gloves, the oldest of whom was eighty nine, and they had been standing in a row at the back since the doors opened. They closed the doors in his face, and each of them folded her arms.
Mr. Pope found himself facing seven ladies in white gloves, holding the programs of the homecoming service like small swords. He turned back toward the aisle, and Sergeant Hollins, who had not had to move at all, walked calmly down the carpet and put a hand on his shoulder. “Mr. Pope,” he said, “I believe we have been looking for you in three counties.” The congregation, which had gone quiet, burst into applause. Pastor Williams raised both hands and said, with great dignity, “Church, let us continue with the hymn.”
The money consequences were gentle. Mr. Pope was arrested for fraud, and the papers in the leather folder were enough to convict him of eleven other offenses. Terrell entered a hospital program in Tifton that afternoon, and I paid for it myself. He came out after ninety days, sober and humbled, and began working at the church maintenance crew. The four point six million dollars of the patent stayed in my name, with a trust for my grandchildren, and a modest allowance for Terrell, paid every month by the church treasurer, with a clear accounting.
In the name of Eugene, who passed in 2014, I started the Eugene Bascom Fund. It pays for treatment beds, church ushers training in elder fraud and free legal help for seniors, in Lowndes, Lanier and Echols counties. In the first year we placed thirty one people in treatment and trained forty ushers. One of them, a retired nurse from Hahira, stopped a stranger from walking an old man out of the sanctuary with a briefcase of papers. She wore white gloves and told me it felt like wearing armor.
On the next homecoming Sunday, in my purple hat, I sat in the front pew while Terrell stood at the back doors in a pressed suit with a program in his hand, an usher himself, a year and two months clean. When the second hymn began, he opened the doors for the late arrivals, one by one, with a smile. I watched him from the front, and Pastor Williams leaned over and whispered, “Sister Loretta, some doors open the right way.” I told him I had been waiting a long time to see it, and that I would wait a good while longer to see a great deal more.
