Mr. Edward Whitfield cast his leather-bound Bible onto the stone steps of Mount Olive Baptist Church in Macon, Georgia, on a Sunday morning, unaware he was soon to learn three things he spent 40 years refusing to ask about:
Why his mother actually died. What was actually in her coffin. His biological father.
Edward had climbed those same church steps every Sunday for 52 years. He had been on the board for the last 19. He had contributed more money to the church’s restoration fund than any other individual donor in its 134 year history. He had a brass nameplate on the third pew from the front. He’d never paused to sit on those stone steps and think about the morning his mother had sung her last hymn there. Not once.
Until a barefoot, 8 year old girl in a faded yellow dress closed her eyes, opened her small mouth and sang just like Eunice Whitfield had sang. With the same impossible breath, the same delicate pause before ‘why should the shadows come’, the same rare phrasing that had made the whole congregation cry on a Sunday morning in October 1985. Three hours after the little girl finished singing,
Edward was sitting in the office of ninety-two-year-old retired Pastor Reverend Theodore Bramwell — and his trembling hands were about to shred the first piece of his mother’s truth. This is what actually happened.
Her name was Naomi Calloway. She was 8 years old, 49 inches tall and had walked four miles barefoot from a small mobile home on the outskirts of Macon to the church steps that Sunday morning. Her grandmother, Miss Pearl Calloway, 79, was too weak to walk with her, suffering from stage-four ovarian cancer. Miss Pearl had one instruction for Naomi: “Sing it on the steps, baby, where it’s at. Sing it for the people who put her away. They will remember .
And when the man in the navy suit drops his Bible — and he will drop his Bible — you tell him Pearl sent you. “Then you come home to me.” That song Pearl had known for 40 years. She had been best friends with Eunice Whitfield since they were 7 years old. They’d been baptised together in the same font at Mount Olive Baptist one hot July afternoon in 1953. They’d sung together in the youth choir. They’d attended each other’s weddings.
And when Eunice died, suddenly, of a heart attack at age 41, on November 3, 1985, it was Pearl who dressed her for the coffin. And it had been Pearl who found the letter. When Pearl arrived at the funeral home the morning of November 5th 1985 to do the final preparations before the viewing,
Eunice Whitfield was in a soft grey Sunday dress. Pearl had asked the undertaker for a moment alone with her friend. That was the time she had used to do the small, private things between best friends–to rinse Eunice’s hair, to fix the tiny gold cross that hung at her throat, to button gently the collar of the dress. Pearl reached into the dress pocket, out of long habit, knowing Eunice always kept a small folded piece of paper there with a Scripture verse for the day, and she found two things.
The first was a folded square of yellow legal paper. Written on it in Eunice’s careful schoolteacher’s handwriting was, “For my Edward — to be opened when he is old enough to forgive me. The second was a little black and white photograph. It was a picture of a young black man in a Navy uniform on a dock with his arm around a smiling young Eunice. On back, in pencil, “Pensacola — March 1959 — JJ & E. Pearl had been gazing at the photograph for a long time. Edward was born in November 1959. Edward’s father, the man he was raised to call “Daddy,” was a white insurance executive named Robert Whitfield Sr. He married Eunice in June 1959, three months before Edward was born.
The man in the Navy uniform wasn’t Robert Whitfield. Pearl folded the photo back into the letter. She slipped both into her own purse. She finished dressing her best friend for the coffin. She herself closed the lid. Then she went home and placed the envelope in a small cedar box on the top shelf of her bedroom closet. She lived there for forty years.
Pearl Calloway had wanted to give Edward the letter a hundred times. The first time was at the funeral itself, when Edward, 25, a recent Mercer University graduate, heartbroken, asked Pearl to sing his mother’s favourite hymn at the graveside service. Pearl sang “His Eye Is On The Sparrow.” In the same delicate phrasing that Eunice had taught her.
The same impossible pause before the shadows should come, why. Edward had cried so hard at the graveside that Pearl couldn’t bring herself to add another grief to the one he was already carrying. Then there was Edward’s marriage in 1991 and she tried again. She tried again in 1996, the year Edward’s first son was born.
In 2003, the year Edward made partner at his accounting firm, she tried again.
She tried again in 2011, after Robert Whitfield Sr., the man Edward called Daddy, died of a stroke at 84. Whenever her courage deserted her. But Pearl had her own diagnosis three months ago. 4th stage. Six months, tops. She had been thinking of it for two long weeks. She had prayed about it every night. She had asked God for three different signs.
And then her great-granddaughter Naomi, who had inherited Eunice’s voice the way some children inherit hair colour or the shape of their eyes, had begun singing “His Eye Is On The Sparrow” in Pearl’s tiny kitchen one afternoon as she peeled peaches. Naomi had sung it flawlessly. With the same rare breathing-space. With the same impossible breathing. Never having been taught. Pearl sat down on her kitchen chair, hid her face in her hands and cried for an hour. She knew the sign.
Some voices she knew they didn’t teach. They were provided. They were handed down. They were taken home.
Edward was sitting across the small parsonage office from Reverend Bramwell at 4:17 PM that Sunday afternoon. The pastor’s wife had returned Naomi softly to Miss Pearl’s mobile home. Edward had insisted on carrying the letter to the old preacher himself. The Rev. Bramwell was 92. He’d baptised Edward in 1959. He married Eunice and Robert in June of that year.
In 1985 he buried Eunice and in 2011 Robert. He was the only person Eunice ever told the truth to. Edward sat down in a shabby leather chair opposite the old preacher and placed the small folded yellow letter on the desk between them. He couldn’t bring himself to open it. Reverend Bramwell stared at the letter for a long moment. And then he looked at Edward. Really looked at him, the way he’d been looking at him since 1959, when he’d first held newborn Edward in his arms in the church nursery. ““Son,” said the old preacher softly, “there’s some things your mama wanted me to tell you when the time was right. I’ve been waiting 40 years for you to be ready.”
Edward was speechless. The Reverend Bramwell interlaced his thin fingers on the desk.Before your mama met Robert Whitfield, she loved a boy named James Jefferson. James was a sailor in the Navy at Pensacola. They were getting married when he got back from deployment. He was sent away in April 1959. Three weeks later, his ship, the USS Cole, was lost at sea.
None lived. “Your mama was three months pregnant with you when she got the telegram.” Edward closed his eyes.“Your mama’s colleague at the schoolhouse was Robert Whitfield,” the old preacher went on. He was a good man. A good man. He knew the truth about you. But he chose to marry your mama anyway, and raise you as his own son, and never say another word about James Jefferson the rest of his life. Edward has kept that promise. Fifty-two years! Edward opened his eyes. “”One more thing,” Reverend Bramwell said softly.
Edward waited. “Your natural father did not die on the USS Cole. The old preacher reached into the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a small, worn manila envelope, yellow at the edges.Edward. He came back. 1969 1971 He had spent twelve years as a prisoner of war. He had been erroneously declared dead. When he come home he found out your mam married another man. He learned she had a boy. He never tried to get her out of her life. All he asked of the church was one thing.
Reverend Bramwell pushed the manila envelope across the desk.He sent you a letter once a year. Each year. Your birthday. From 1971 to the year he died. “He handed them to me to hold until you wanted to know him.” Edward opened the envelope. He found inside forty-seven letters. They were all addressed to “My son Edward.” “Your father, James Jefferson.” Each was signed. The last one was dated on 7th November 2017. That night Edward Whitfield read the 47 letters in the office of the parsonage.
He didn’t go home to his wife. He didn’t call his kids. He did not have his supper. 3:47 AM He placed the last letter on the desk, stood up from the leather chair, and asked Reverend Bramwell one question: “”Where did they bury him?” The old preacher looked at him a long time. Then he spoke five words: “Son, he’s not buried. Edward looked at him.”Your father is eighty-nine years old,” said Reverend Bramwell kindly. “He lives in Tuskegee, Alabama, in a small house. He has been waiting 54 years for you to find him. Edward was suffocating.”Edward, he is dying,” said the old preacher. “His doctor phoned me last Friday. He’s got maybe two weeks. Maybe three. Reverend Bramwell took a small white card from a drawer in his desk and pushed it across the desk. The address was in the neat hand of James Jefferson. That morning, Edward Whitfield drove to Tuskegee, Ala.
He didn’t stop until he stood on a small front porch with peeling white paint, his trembling hand raised to knock on a pale blue door. The door opened to reveal an elderly man, 89 years old.
His hair was silver, his eyes the warmest brown. He held a small framed picture in his weathered hand. It was a picture of four-year-old Edward holding a violin. A picture he had never seen before in his life. A photograph from October 1963 by a father who had never stopped watching his son grow up from a distance, from a window across the street from Edward’s childhood home. What James Jefferson said to Edward, when he saw him standing on that porch—and what Edward learned about who had really been protecting him for sixty years—would change the rest of Edward’s life.
To be continued in Part 3 – Coming soon.