The very old man in the black suit came down the aisle of the little church one slow step at a time, leaning on a cane of dark wood, and in his other hand he held a single sheet of yellow paper, brittle as a dry leaf, with a row of handwritten notes across it. He was past ninety. His back was bent, his eyes were clouded, and his voice, when he spoke, was a deep soft rumble that carried to every pew. “My name is Reverend Isaiah Brooks,” he said. “Sister Clara wrote this song in 1958. I have been carrying it for sixty seven years. And I have come to set it down.”
A hush fell over the church. I was in the front pew, thirty seven years old, and beside me my mother, the daughter of Clara, sat holding her handkerchief in a tight fist. She had told me that morning that Grandma Clara only played the piano at church, for free, for fifty years, and that it was a shame she never did anything with her gift. “I was twenty five years old,” said the Reverend. “I came through Clarksdale with a traveling choir. I heard her play at a Wednesday prayer meeting, and I could not breathe.”
“She had written a hymn that week, at her kitchen table, after her husband passed. She played it for the congregation, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. The words said that grief is a road, and God walks it with you. She wrote it down, on this paper, with a pencil, and she gave it to me. She said, Brother Isaiah, take it. Sing it where people are hurting. I do not need my name on it. I only need it sung.” He looked down. “I took her at her word. God forgive me, I took her too far.”
A single sheet of brittle yellow music was carried in by a very old preacher and gave one granddaughter the morning to bring her mother back to the song of her grandmother.
“I carried it to Chicago. I sang it at a church on the South Side, and a man from a record company heard me. In 1964, it was recorded. It sold two million copies. Choirs sang it in every state. And on the label it said, Traditional, arranged by Isaiah Brooks.” His voice dropped. “I told myself it was a small thing. I told myself that she had said she did not need her name. For sixty one years I told myself that. I made a great deal of money, and I gave Sister Clara none of it, and I never said her name from any pulpit.”
My mother let out a small breath, and I took her hand. I knew the song. Every Black church in America knows the song. I had sung it myself at funerals, never knowing. All my life my grandmother had hummed it in the kitchen while she shelled peas, the same line again and again, and I had thought it was something she had picked up in church. She had never said a word. She had sat on that bench and played Sunday after Sunday for fifty years, in a church with a leaky roof, and let the whole world sing her song.
The Reverend lifted the yellow page. “Three years ago, the Lord put it on my heart to make this right. I hired a lawyer. I went to the record company. We found the copyright, which was filed in my name alone, and I have had it changed.” He drew a folded document from his coat. “The song is hers. As of last Friday, every dollar it has made since 1964, with interest, has been placed in trust. It comes to a little over four million dollars.” A gasp went around the pews. “It belongs to the family of Clara. It always did.”
My mother stood, trembling, with the handkerchief crushed against her mouth. She walked up to the old man and stood in front of him, and for a moment I thought she might strike him. Then she wrapped her arms around his bent shoulders and laid her face against his black suit. “She forgave you,” she said into his collar. “She told me, a month ago, that a man named Brooks had her song, and that she was glad it had traveled. She said it had done what it was meant to do.” The Reverend wept, a dry old man weeping like a child.
She turned to the casket and laid her hand on the lid. “Mama,” she said, “I told Monique you wasted your gift. I thought a woman with talent like yours should have gone to Chicago, and been somebody. I did not understand that you were somebody here, on this bench, in this church, for fifty years.” She lowered her head. “You did not need your name on the song. You wrote it on every person in this room.” The congregation said, softly, amen. An old woman in the back began to hum.
And then the church sang. The Reverend could not, his voice was too thin, but the pianist at the old upright, a girl of sixteen, lifted her hands over the keys and began to play, from the yellow page set before her on the stand. The congregation rose. Two hundred voices in a small white building in the Delta, in the sweltering heat, sang the hymn to my grandmother, for the first time with her name in it. The windows rattled. The old man sat in the front pew with his eyes closed and his lips moving.
The money went into a foundation. The church has a new roof, and a new piano, and a music school for the children of Clarksdale, free. The yellow page hangs in the vestibule, framed, under glass, with a card beneath it in the handwriting of my mother. It says, Words and music by Clara. Reverend Brooks passed in the spring. Before he went, he asked to be wheeled to the piano one last time. He pressed a single key. It was the first note of the song. And he said, to the empty church, Sister Clara, it was always yours.
