Jordan turned slowly in the aisle and looked up at the stained glass window above the altar, the one with the woman holding a bell, and he read the small gold letters at the bottom aloud, one word at a time, as a boy reads who has just been told he has to. “In honor of Hattie Belcher, who rang the bell on the morning of March sixteenth, nineteen sixty, and called the children of Savannah to stand.” The sanctuary, which had been humming with the low talk of the dedication, went silent. I am Hattie Belcher, eighty one years old, and I sat in the front pew with my hat on my knee.
In 1960, I was fifteen years old. The old church on Gwinnett Street kept a brass bell in its tower, and on the morning that the young people of Savannah decided to sit down at the lunch counters, it fell to me, the smallest girl in the youth choir, to climb the tower stairs and ring it. I rang it for eleven minutes. By the time I came down, the sidewalk was full of children in their Sunday clothes, and the deacons were holding their hats. I was arrested that afternoon with forty others. I spent the night in a cell with my mother, singing hymns.
The silver bell pin on my hat was the first thing the church gave me, a month later, from the founders table, with my initials engraved on the back. I had worn it every Sunday for sixty six years. The pastor, who had been standing at the side of the pulpit with his hand pressed against his mouth, came down the three steps of the chancel in his white robe and stood in front of me. His eyes were wet. “Mother Belcher,” he said, “the window was given by the congregation in 1998. Nobody told the ushers.”
A stained window above an altar gave one old seamstress the Sunday morning to bring a young usher back to the history of his church in Savannah.
I gave my terms to Jordan when he came to stand in front of me with his carnation drooping. “Young man, I do not want you to leave this church. I want you to learn it. On the first Sunday of every month you will come to my little yellow house on the east side and sit on the porch with me for one hour, and I will tell you who built these pews and who rang that bell. Then you will tell the new ushers. That is the only price. The front pews belong to the people who loved this church first, whatever they could afford to give.”
Jordan dropped to his knees on the red carpet, in front of four hundred people, and put his forehead against the arm of the pew. “Mother Belcher, I am so sorry,” he said, and his voice broke. “My grandmother told me about the bell. She sat on the steps of the old church that morning. I forgot, and I am ashamed.” I laid my hand on his head, the way I used to lay it on the heads of the choir boys in the nineteen sixties. “Child,” I said, “your grandmother must be smiling in heaven. Get up now. You are in the way of the choir.”
But not everyone was ready to let it go. Mr. Wexler, the chairman of the building fund, a thin man in a pinstripe suit who had watched the whole scene with stony lips, stepped into the aisle, reached out, and snatched the silver bell from my hat. “Let me see that,” he hissed, holding it up to the light. Then he turned and walked quickly toward the vestry door, as though he meant to take it to the pastor office and have it tested, or lose it in a drawer. He had gone ten steps when the deacons rose from the front pew.
Six deacons in black suits stepped shoulder to shoulder across the aisle, and behind them, with a rustle like a flock of birds, the ladies of the Bell Society stood up in their purple and white hats, forty strong, with their fans in their hands. Mr. Wexler stopped as if he had run into a hedge. Mother Odessa, the organist, eighty five years old, turned on her bench and played a single, loud, low note on the organ that vibrated in the floor. He slowly held out the pin.
The consequences were gentle, as such things should be. Mr. Wexler resigned from the building fund by letter, and the pastor accepted. The window now has a small brass plate beneath it, polished every Saturday by the youth choir. Jordan came to my porch on the first Sunday of the next month with a pound cake from his grandmother. He has not missed a visit in eleven months. The bell pin I wear again on my hat, and I have given the old church bell a place of honor in the vestibule.
In the name of my husband Josiah, who passed in 2017, I started the Josiah Belcher Fund. It pays for scholarships for young people who lead in their communities and for sewing classes for women who want to start their own business, in Chatham, Bryan and Liberty counties. In the first year we sent twenty eight young people to college and taught fifty two women to sew professionally. One was a grandmother from Pooler who now makes the choir robes for three churches.
On the first Sunday in June, Jordan, in a clean gray suit, carried my hat box up the three steps to the porch of the church and set it in the front pew, the one that had a little brass plate on the end now. It read, Reserved for Hattie Belcher and Anyone She Loves. The congregation filled in around me, the fans began to move, and the choir stood. Jordan took his place at the end of the pew, in his usher badge, and offered me a peppermint. I took it. We sat, and the music began.
