I set the old folded deed on the board table, and Deacon Jenkins, eighty-four years old, chuckled and told the young pastor he was about to read something he should have read long ago.
I joined that choir in 1983 and sang in it forty-two years, including at my own husbands funeral. Then the new pastors wife, Brittany, caught me in the hallway after service, said my voice was tired and did not fit the younger direction, and took my robe off my back right there, in front of people walking by.
I folded it neat, the way my mother taught me to fold a flag, handed it over, and told her I would see her at the board meeting Thursday. She laughed and said that was just for deacons.
She did not know that the land under her fog machines and her drum kit was given to this church by my family in 1948, with a condition written into the deed.
My grandfather donated the acre that church sits on, and he was a careful man. The deed grants the property to the congregation so long as a Broussard sits on its governing board. For forty-two years that seat had quietly been mine, and nobody thought to mention it to a pastor who had been in town eighteen months.
Deacon Jenkins had been waiting to see Brittany find that out. The pastor read the deed, and the color went out of his face, because a church does not strip a founding familys daughter of her robe in a hallway when that family holds the ground it stands on.
I did not ask for anyone to be fired. I am not built that way. I asked for one thing. That the choir stay open to every voice that has sung faithfully, young and old, drum kit or no drum kit.
I got my robe back, folded into my hands with an apology. I sing in that choir still, forty-three years now. The fog machine and I have made our peace. My grandfathers deed made sure I would get the chance to.