Sister Patrice rose from the third pew with a folded sheet of paper in her gloved hand, and the whole fellowship hall in Birmingham went still. She is a woman of seventy, a retired nurse and the head of the ministry for women, in a lavender suit and a hat to match, and when she speaks, the church listens. She walked down the aisle between the folding tables toward the head table. She stopped in front of Pastor Marcus, my brother in law, who sat with his Bentley keys on the cloth, and she said, “Pastor, I am sorry to interrupt the dinner.”
Marcus half rose. He is a handsome man of forty seven with a booming voice and a gold watch, who preaches on Sundays to eleven hundred people. He had spent the first part of the evening telling a story about how his sister, the line cook, should aim higher, how the Lord does not bless idle ambition. He said, “Sister Patrice, the work of the Lord can wait until after the benediction.” Sister Patrice said, “Respectfully, Pastor, this is the work of the Lord.” She unfolded the paper and held it up to the light.
She said, “This is a memo from the administration of UAB Hospital, dated April of the first year of the pandemic. I was on the staff then, on the COVID floor. Do you remember what it was like, Pastor? The hospital was full. The cafeteria was closed. The nurses had been working sixteen hour shifts for weeks. The food had stopped coming. They were living on vending machine crackers and cold coffee.” She looked at the faces in the room. “I remember one night I sat in a stairwell and cried because I had not eaten in nineteen hours.”
A hot meal carried up in a freight elevator to people who forgot to feed themselves is a sermon no pulpit has ever matched.
I did not look at my daughter. I could not. Tasha was sitting at the end of the table in her Sunday dress, her hands clasped in her lap, her eyes downcast. She cooks the lunch shift at a chicken restaurant on Green Springs Highway, and has done so for nine years. She never mentioned a thing about the pandemic, except that it had been hard. Sister Patrice said, “At nine oclock that night, a woman I had never met walked through the front doors of the emergency entrance with six large aluminum pans.”
The voice of Sister Patrice began to shake. “They were full of fried chicken, and greens, and cornbread. She had made them in the kitchen of her restaurant after closing. She had paid for the groceries from her own savings. She said, I heard you all have not been eating. I figured somebody ought to bring you something hot. And she walked the pans up in the freight elevator herself, because the security guards would not let anyone else go.” She held up the memo. “She did this every night for sixty one days.”
The hall had fallen into a silence so deep I could hear the refrigerator humming in the kitchen. Sister Patrice said, “Sixty one nights. More than a hundred and fifty meals every night. She paid for it out of her own pocket until her savings were gone, and then she put it on a credit card. Her boss gave her the kitchen but not the ingredients. The hospital sent her a thank you memo, and she folded it into her apron and never told anyone.” She looked at Marcus. “I found it taped inside the freight elevator door, Pastor. Someone had saved it.”
She put the memo into his hand. He took it, and he began to read, and I saw his lips tremble. The memo said, in the formal language of a hospital, that the nursing staff of the fourth floor wished to express their profound gratitude for the sustaining meals provided each night by Miss Tasha Greer, and that they believed her generosity had preserved the health and morale of the frontline team during the most difficult period in the history of the institution. It was signed by forty one nurses. the hand of Marcus began to shake.
He lowered the memo. Slowly, as if his legs were not his own, he came around the head table and went to his sister. Tasha looked up, startled. The pastor of eleven hundred people got down on one knee on the floor of his own church hall, in his good suit, and he took her hands. He said, “Tasha, I have been a proud and foolish man.” She said, “Marcus, get up.” He said, “No. Not until you forgive me.” She laughed through her tears and said, “I forgave you before you asked.”
The whole hall stood. A chorus of Amens went up, and then someone started to sing, and the room was filled with it. Sister Patrice stood with her hand on her heart, weeping softly. Marcus helped his sister to her feet and did something I had never seen him do before. He asked her for advice. He asked her what the church kitchen needed. She said, honestly, that it needed everything. By morning he had a plan, and by summer there was a new commercial kitchen in the basement of the church.
They call it Tashas Table. It serves a hot supper to anyone who comes through the door, six nights a week, and no one is asked a single question. Tasha runs it on Saturdays, in an apron, with her own recipe cards taped over the stove. Marcus peels potatoes in the corner. He is slow at it, and his fingers are sore, but he does not complain, because his sister has told him that a man peels what he is given. Behind the counter, in a plain black frame, hangs the memo signed by forty one nurses.