Trent walked out through the glass doors of the bank, into the heat of the Charlotte sidewalk, and around the corner of the old stone building to the cornerstone at the base of the wall. He knelt on the pavement in his good suit and brushed the soot from the engraving with his palm. He read the second line out loud to the empty street, then repeated it more slowly. “Odessa Pickett, First Depositor and Later President, nineteen fifty eight.” I am Odessa Pickett, eighty two years old, and I had followed him out onto the sidewalk with my cane, with the little brass vault key on its chain still swinging against my blouse.
In 1958, a group of forty one families from the Brooklyn neighborhood, who could not get a loan from any bank downtown, pooled their savings to open a savings and loan. I was twenty years old and a seamstress. I brought four dollars and eleven cents in an envelope and became the first depositor of Piedmont Savings. I worked my way up from teller to branch president by 1979, the first Black woman in the state to hold that title. The brass key was the original key to the first vault. They gave it to me when I retired.
The old security guard, Mr. Lester Banks, seventy eight years old, had come out of the lobby with his cap in his hand and stopped on the curb. “Miss Odessa,” he said. “I told that boy twice to look at the stone. He said he had no time.” A woman with a baby carriage had paused at the corner. A man in a delivery uniform set down his box. An elderly customer, who had followed me out, leaned heavily against the lamppost and began to laugh and weep at once, saying, “She gave me my first mortgage in nineteen seventy one.”
A brass vault key on a thin chain gave one retired bank president a hot afternoon to bring a young manager back to the cornerstone in Charlotte.
I gave my terms when Trent stood up from the cornerstone with dust on his knees. “Young man, I will not call your regional office. You are thirty one years old and you manage a bank that was built by people your age and mine. I would ask that you do three things. Print the names on this stone in the lobby, where the customers can read them. Hold a Saturday class on savings for the children of the neighborhood. And hire Mr. Banks a better chair, because that man has stood in that doorway for thirty one years.”
The voice of Trent did not hold steady. “Mrs. Pickett, I grew up two blocks from here,” he said. “My grandmother had an account at this branch. She kept her money in a coffee can until you opened the doors for her.” He pressed his lips together. “I stood behind that desk this morning and told you that vault keys were not for customers. I told you to hand it over, as if you had stolen it.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I became exactly the person your bank was built to stand against.”
But in the sharpness of his shame, he made one more error. Trent reached for my neck, caught the chain, and pulled the brass key free, and ran for the lobby doors, shouting that it had to be checked against the vault log. He had gone three steps when Mr. Banks, in spite of his years, stepped squarely in front of the revolving door. The woman with the baby carriage rolled it sideways across the walk. The delivery man stood with his arms spread, and the elderly customer by the lamppost lifted her umbrella like a crossing gate.
Trent stopped on the hot sidewalk, with the key swinging from his fist and four strangers blocking his way. Mr. Banks spoke in the patient voice of a man who has stood at a door for three decades. “Mr. Trent,” he said, “I have watched a hundred customers walk through that door. Not one of them ever tried to take something from the lady who built it.” The knees of Trent gave. He walked back across the pavement, lowered himself in front of me, and placed the key around my neck with trembling hands.
The consequences were warm and a little loud. By Monday morning, the bank had commissioned a bronze plate to hang in the lobby with all forty one family names from 1958. Trent held his first Saturday class for children with a piggy bank in each hand, and sixty showed up. Mr. Banks received a cushioned chair and a raise. I was invited to open a special account, the very first of a new youth savings program, with four dollars and eleven cents, the same sum, and I was photographed shaking the hand of Trent.
In the name of my husband Samuel, who passed in 2013, I started the Samuel Pickett Fund. It pays for small business loans and first home down payments for families who are turned away elsewhere, in Mecklenburg, Cabarrus and Union counties. In the first year we helped thirty four families open bank accounts and funded twelve first homes. One was a young couple from Gastonia, both nurses, who walked through the door of their own house holding hands, and who asked me to cut the ribbon on the porch.
On the last Saturday of the month, I stood in the lobby with my cane and my brass key, watching thirty children line up to deposit their coins at the counter. Trent, in a fresh white shirt, handed each of them a little passbook. When the smallest boy came up with a plastic bag of pennies, Trent counted them aloud and wrote the sum in the book. Then he looked across the lobby at me. “Mrs. Pickett,” he said, “would you like to cut the ribbon on the next account?” I smiled and handed my key to the boy, who held it high.