“…I did not approve anything,” I told Derrick Hall, and I pressed James folded church bulletin into his palm, with the list of forty two names printed on the back. “I did not sign a thing. I did not know that Marcus worked for you until tonight. And I would not give a nickel of this scholarship to any man who has gambled away his own house.” The ballroom hummed around us, the jazz band tuning, the waiters gliding by with trays of crab cakes. Derrick looked down at the paper. He was fifty one, tall, calm, in a gray suit that fit like it had been tailored, and I watched him read.
He read the list slowly, the way a man reads a list of his own relatives. At the thirty first line, he stopped. “Derrick Hall, 1994,” he said aloud. His voice caught. He said, “Mrs. Washington, your husband paid for my first year at Prairie View. Four hundred and fifty dollars, in a church envelope, handed to my mother in the parking lot. I remember it exactly. She cried the whole way home.” He folded the bulletin and put it into the inside pocket of his jacket, over his heart. Then he looked across the room at Marcus, who was approaching fast.
Marcus arrived out of breath, with his tuxedo bow tie crooked and a drink sloshing in his hand. He was forty eight years old, handsome, thickening, with his father jaw. He said, “Mama, what are you doing, talking to Mr. Hall?” in the bright, strained voice he used when he was afraid. I looked at my son and I said, “Marcus, I am telling Mr. Hall about your father scholarship.” He went still. Derrick said, pleasantly, “Marcus, I think you and I should have a conversation in my office before the toast.”
A church bulletin with forty two names on the back, a gala ladies room whisper, and a forty third name added in black ink.
They went upstairs, Derrick and Marcus and a quiet woman from the legal department whose badge read Counsel. I waited in the ballroom beside the champagne fountain, with my navy dress and my small black purse, trying to breathe slowly. A waiter brought me a glass of ginger ale without being asked. A woman in a green gown touched my arm and said she had heard I was the widow of James Washington, and that her own brother had been in the scholarship. I smiled and thanked her. Inside, I was praying, and my hands were cold.
They returned twenty minutes later. Marcus was gray, with his tie in his hand, and Derrick was walking beside him with a firm, kind hand on his shoulder. They stopped in front of me. Marcus did not meet my eyes. He said, in a low voice, “Mama, I took a lot of money from the company. Some of it was mine to take. Most of it was not. I was going to put it back.” I said, “How much?” He said, “About ninety thousand.” I closed my eyes, and a tear ran down my face, and I let it.
Derrick spoke gently. He said that he had been unaware of the extent of the problem, but that his finance department had flagged irregularities in March and that he had been giving Marcus time to confess. He had hoped it would be tonight, among family. He said, “Mrs. Washington, I want you to know that I am not pressing charges. But Marcus will repay the company, over seven years, through a payroll deduction. He will enter a gambling treatment program in Dallas. And he will take a leave of absence, starting tomorrow.”
I put my hand on my son cheek. He was crying openly now, a big man in a ruined tuxedo, and I heard the old note in his voice, the boy note, the one he had when he scraped his knee on the church steps. I said, “Marcus, I love you. I am not going to rescue you. I am going to sit beside you.” He nodded, and put his forehead against mine. For a minute we stood like that, in the middle of the ballroom, with the music playing around us, two figures in a pool of light.
At ten o clock, Derrick took the microphone. The band stopped. A hush fell. He told the story of a boy from Tyler, Texas, who could not afford his first semester, and of a welder from the Carrier plant who put fifty dollars a year into a church envelope. He said the company would donate five hundred thousand dollars to the James Washington Scholarship Fund, administered not by any family member but by the church scholarship board that James had founded. A cheer rose from the crowd. I stood at the back, with my hand over my mouth.
In May, the first four recipients under the new fund were announced, in the sanctuary of our church, to a full house. They were students from Tyler, Longview, and Kilgore, children of cafeteria workers and truck drivers and nurses aides. Each walked to the front in a borrowed suit or a new dress. Derrick Hall presented the checks himself, wearing his old college ring. And in the back pew, in a clean white shirt, with his hair freshly cut, sat Marcus, ninety days into his program, clapping steadily, with tears running down his face.
That evening I sat on my porch in the soft Texas dusk with James church bulletin, which Derrick had returned to me in a small frame. The printed list ran down the back, forty two names in a neat column, and below the last one, Derrick had added a forty third in black ink. It was Marcus. He had signed it himself, that afternoon, with a trembling hand: Marcus Washington, scholarship recipient, class of whatever he decided to become. I laughed out loud, in the quiet, and I put the frame on the mantel beside James picture.