My mother was proud the July afternoon I married. The day before Independence Day, July 3rd, 1982, I marched down the aisle of the church in which my mother and her mother had been faithful members.
Though I had not joined the congregation I attended services. I had chosen membership with my father’s church. The decision had been simple enough. Couples much like my parents comprised the congregations of both churches.
The town in which the two churches existed, where my mother had grown up was tiny by comparison to larger metropolises like where my husband came from, bedroom community in the western part of North Carolina, a bedroom community of Charlotte.
It was quite a change to visit a parish with a congregation large enough to sustain a service each Sunday.
The population of the town where my mother grew up and we attended church, was so small that each of the three churches held services on but two Sundays of the month. First Sunday was what each church deemed, Jr. or Young People’s Church Sunday.
This was the Sunday that young people, less than eighteen years of age carried out all the tasks of the church service with the exception of delivering the sermon.
Each church had a young people who ushered and collected the morning’s offering, as well as a choir that sang. Having studied piano, I often assisted the pianist in playing for the choir, most particularly during the Christmas Season since I loved learning to play Christmas carols.
My mother attended services the church in which my father and I were members as with the same faith and commitment she held towards the church to which she and her mother belonged.
And so on the day I, her daughter, married, members from the congregation of which I was a member where my father had also belonged and worked came to my mother’s church, the Baptist Church, despite the fact that my mother’s church, the Baptist Church held communions and sacraments closed to other denominations–a belief my mother, in her open- mindedness despised.
The Baptists, who had opened their church to not only the Pentecostals from my and my father’s church, but Catholics, Presbyterians, and of course the African Methodist Episcopal Zion’s who participated in Eucharist every month, also came if only to see why so many black limousines with no hearse in tow had parked in front of my mother’s church.
My mother was proud that day the day I married. People from all over had come, even white people had entered the Black Baptist Church of her small town.
And for once in a long string of Sundays my mother was entering a sanctuary for a family affair that did not center on the death of a loved one.