Deacon Harris, eighty-eight years old, set the big brass key on the table in front of the pastors wife and said, Pastor, before you pray, Miss Courtney ought to know who really owns that piano.
Courtney, who is twenty-nine and started a worship team with a fog machine, had just told me in front of the whole fellowship hall that my old hymn stuff is why young people do not come to church, and that it was time for fresh voices to take over.
Deacon Harris cleared his throat and told them. The piano in that sanctuary, the baby grand everyone takes for granted, was donated to Bethel Baptist in 1981 by my late husband and me, paid for over two years out of a railroad pension, with one condition written into the gift. It stays in the church as long as the hymns are still sung, and the donor family keeps a say in the music.
That family is me. The last of it. And the brass key opens the bench where the original hymnals and the deed of gift have been locked for thirty years.
Courtney wanted to retire me and my old hymn stuff. She did not know the instrument her fog-machine band plays on was given by the very woman she was pushing out the door.
I did not want a fight. I have sung alto at Bethel since 1979, at weddings and funerals, at my own husbands service, and never took a dime. I love that church more than my pride.
But Deacon Harris was not going to let a newcomer strip a founding member of her place in the choir. The pastor, red-faced, apologized to me right there in the fellowship hall.
I told Courtney there was room for her fresh voices and for the old hymns both, that a church big enough for a fog machine is big enough for Amazing Grace. She agreed, quietly, over banana pudding.
I still sing alto at Bethel. Forty-six years now. The piano my husband gave is still there, and so am I, and the brass key is back in my purse where it belongs.