The name on the certificate was Elijah Crowley, and the bishop said it as if it tasted bad. In 1994, he told me in the fellowship hall with his hand on his walking stick, Elijah Crowley had been a young pastor in Bessemer who took a building fund of forty one thousand dollars meant for a new roof on a church for the elderly. The denomination had put him out and warned every pulpit in Alabama. The bishop was the one who signed the papers. He had not seen the man in thirty one years, and he had not thought of him in twenty. Then, at nine o clock that morning, he saw the name typed on the line that says “presented by.”
“Who types a name like that?” I asked. “Someone who knew I would not check,” the bishop said. “The certificate was printed on Friday at the church office by Mrs. Holloway herself.” I did not say a word. I sat and thought of the purple suit and how she had said “Marcus mother” to every deacon. Her brother, I remembered, was a man she mentioned once, years ago at the wedding, with her mouth drawn tight: a brother who had been “wronged by the church.” Her brother was Elijah Crowley. She wanted him in the front pew, presenting my grandson to the denomination, so that he could be quietly restored to the ministry under the name of her husband.
Bishop Walker, as he asked me to call him, stood up from the folding chair with a groan and held out his arm. “Sister Grant, I am seventy six years old and I have never in my life walked into a sanctuary through the back door. Will you walk in through the front with me?” I looked down at the white hat and the white suit and the purse, with the Bible of Clarence inside it, and I took his arm. We climbed the stairs together one step at a time, past the usher with the clipboard, who went the color of grits.
A typed name gave one pastor wife the length of a church supper to bring her brother back to the truth in Birmingham.
I gave my terms to Mrs. Holloway in the fellowship hall of her husband church, in front of the rolling cart with the television still glowing, and I gave them in the voice I used on food fights. I said the certificate would be reprinted with the right name before the reception, that Elijah Crowley would leave the building before the cake was cut, and that Marcus would sit by his grandmother at the head table where the family belonged. I said I did not want an apology for the overflow room. I only wanted the chair. The bishop stood behind me with his stick and nodded.
Mrs. Holloway sat down heavily on a folding chair and, to my surprise, she told the truth. She said her brother had been a good preacher once, and that she had sent him money for thirty years, and that he had promised he would repay the church if he could ever be restored. She said she thought I would not mind, because I was a quiet woman who did not need a front row. Then she said, in a small voice, “I only wanted one person in that sanctuary who was proud of me.” I told her she had a daughter and a son in law for that.
At that moment a tall thin man in a borrowed gray suit stepped out of the stairwell, took one look at the bishop and went white. It was Elijah. Before anyone could speak, he snatched the framed certificate off the easel by the door, meaning to run with it out the side exit and be gone before anyone saw his face, and he bolted down the hall toward the fellowship kitchen with the frame under his arm. Mrs. Holloway cried out his name. The bishop lifted his walking stick, but I put my hand on it. I said, “Bishop, let the Lord handle the hallway.”
The Lord, as it turned out, had sent three hundred sweet potato pies. The kitchen ladies were rolling a long cart of them out for the reception, each one wrapped in plastic, and Elijah ran straight into the front of it at full speed. Pies went up, pies came down, and the man slid the whole length of the hallway on his back with a pie on his chest like a medal. A kitchen mother named Sister Pearline stood over him with her hands on her hips and said, “Young man, that was the Sunday school pie fund.” He did not argue. The frame slid to my feet.
The certificate was reprinted before the reception with my name on the line, in gold, and the bishop signed it himself in front of the whole congregation. Elijah Crowley went home to Bessemer that same afternoon. The bishop sent him a letter, and later I heard he took a job sweeping at a Baptist school and told the children every Friday what he had done. Mrs. Holloway and her husband called a meeting with the deacons. Her husband learned about the brother that night, and, to his credit, he apologized to me from the pulpit the next Sunday. I forgave him, because Clarence would have.
In the name of Clarence, who passed in 2017, I started the Clarence Grant Front Pew Fund. It pays for seminary books, robes and room rent for ministry students whose grandparents are raising them, in Jefferson, Shelby and Walker counties. In the first year we helped nine students buy their robes, and the first was a nineteen year old from Ensley named Terrell, raised by a grandmother who cleaned offices downtown. She sat in the second row at his licensing service in a hat I would have been proud of. Bishop Walker says it is the only fund he knows that asks each student to write a thank you letter to a lunch lady.
Back at the reception, Marcus found me at the head table. He had taken off his stole and his hands were trembling a little, and he put his forehead down on my shoulder in front of two thousand people. I took the Bible of Clarence from my purse and put it in his hands. He opened it to the first page, where Clarence had penciled, in the careful block print of a deacon, “Sit where you are needed, not where you are told.” Marcus read it out loud, once. Then he sat beside me, and Sister Pearline brought us each a slice of pie on a real plate.
