What Lucius witnessed in 1971 was a registered letter. He was a young mail sorter that spring, filling in on a route he did not know, and on a Tuesday in April he carried a certified envelope up the steps of the Whitfield house on Gaston Street addressed to Miss Odessa Grant, who cooked for the family and lived in the room behind the kitchen. Judge Whitfield met him on the porch. He signed for the letter himself, and before Lucius reached the sidewalk, he turned and tore it in half. Lucius kept the green receipt card. He put it in the back of his Bible, behind the leather, and never told a soul.
Mr. Barnwell told me all this in the parking lot, in the glow of his lantern, while the band played. The letter held a deed. Years later, a lawyer found the registry copy: the grandmother of Caroline had signed over the small lot behind the house to Miss Odessa in thanks for forty years of service, and the deed was meant to be mailed before she passed. The Judge made sure it never arrived. Mr. Barnwell had learned the story from his own father, who had been the lawyer. He lowered his voice. “Mrs. Pope, I believe the receipt in the Bible of your husband is the last proof in the world.”
I opened the Bible on the hood of the Buick, under the dome light, and turned to the back cover. I felt along the leather with my thumb. There it was, a hard little rectangle beneath the lining. With a pair of nail scissors from my purse and a prayer, I slit the old glue. Out slid a faded green card, stamped REGISTERED, signed with a flourish: J. W. Whitfield. And underneath, in red pencil, in the careful hand of Lucius: A good name is rather to be chosen. I laughed, and then I wept, and Mr. Barnwell lent me his handkerchief.
A faded green receipt hidden in a Bible cover gave one retired church secretary the length of a single evening to bring her grandson back to the truth in Savannah.
I gave my terms to Caroline Whitfield in the courtyard of the inn, under the live oaks, with Mr. Barnwell at my left and the receipt in my hand. She would apologize to Jamal and to me before the cake was cut. The small lot behind the house on Gaston Street would be deeded to the heirs of Miss Odessa Grant within the month. And my grandson would sit beside his grandmother at the head table, as was fitting. If she refused, Mr. Barnwell, who knew the editor of the Savannah paper, would be glad to print the receipt on the front page. I said it with a smile, in my best church secretary voice.
Caroline did not argue. Her face crumbled, as one watches a sandcastle in the tide. She said she had found the papers of her father after he passed, and had read the whole story, and had been sick with fear for ten years that someone would come asking. When she saw the name of Lucius on the Bible, she panicked. She had not thought. She had only wanted me gone. Jamal, who had walked up behind her, said quietly, “Grandma, I am so sorry.” His voice cracked. He knelt in his tuxedo and laid his head on my knee.
Caroline suddenly snatched the green card out of my hand, meaning to run for the inn and put it in the kitchen fire, and she bolted across the courtyard in her silver gown with the card clutched to her chest and her heels clicking on the old bricks. Jamal called out. The groomsmen turned. I stayed beside my car and folded my hands over the Bible, because I had learned from Lucius that the quickest way to lose a hard truth is to chase it.
She went through the gate onto Jones Street and ran directly into a horse drawn carriage tour. The carriage was making a wide turn for the evening ghost walk, and the old gray horse, who had made that turn four thousand times, did not intend to stop for anybody. Caroline stood in the middle of the cobblestones with the carriage in front of her and the tourists staring down. The driver, an elderly gentleman in a top hat, leaned over and said, “Madam, you are holding up the ghost tour.” Then the horse lowered his great head and gently took the card from her fingers with his lips, and offered it to the driver, who returned it to me with a bow.
Caroline cut the cake with her hands shaking and gave a short, honest toast, which began with an apology. Within the month, a deed was recorded with the clerk of Chatham County giving the lot behind the Whitfield house to the heirs of Odessa Grant. One heir turned out to be Denise Grant, the pastry chef at the inn of Mr. Barnwell, who had been making the wedding desserts that very night. She came out to the car in her flour dusted apron and held my hand for a long, long time without saying a word.
In the name of Lucius, who passed in 2019, I started the Lucius Pope Red Pencil Fund. It pays for title searches, surveys and legal help to recover family land for heirs in Richmond, Burke and Columbia counties. In the first year we cleared the titles on twenty two small parcels, many of them with a single page of old paper behind a Bible cover or inside a drawer. One family in Waynesboro got back a pecan grove. They sent me a sack of pecans so heavy I needed my grandson to carry it.
Jamal and Courtney visit me in Augusta every Sunday after church now, and Caroline sometimes comes along, quiet, with a pound cake. We sit on the porch swing beneath the magnolia that Lucius planted, and I read aloud from his Bible, the red lines in Proverbs. Jamal asks me to read the one about a good name. I read it twice. Then the breeze moves the magnolia leaves, and I can almost hear Lucius, in the kitchen, turning the page.
