People pour into the sanctuary—many I recognize, and some I knew very well in the past but haven’t seen in ages. The crowd already numbers several hundred, and more are still coming, filling the balconies, jockeying for places to sit, exchanging greetings and hugs. Their friendly, increasingly boisterous voices echo off the cavernous ceiling and spar with the chants filtering in through the double doors that have been propped open to let in the warm June breeze. Keep America safe! Keep America safe!
People outside, many dressed in American flag attire, have come to protest Dr. Darla Kelsey, tonight’s speaker. J. B. is probably in town to do a story about her for the New York Times. Or maybe he’s doing a story about Bertha. That would be nice.
I’ll never forget the day I met Bertha, thirty-nine years ago. She held something in her hand that looked like a hollowed-out metal ball. “You know what this is?” I shook my head. “It’s a cluster bomb. The Nectaral Corporation designs them.” She shoved it in my hand. I almost dropped it. “About six hundred and sixty of these bomblets . . . cute name, huh?. . . are shot out of large bomb containers. Imagine, almost seven hundred of these bomblets spinning out at warp speed all around us, little steel balls exploding from each one, indiscriminately killing, injuring.” She paused. I handed, almost threw, the cluster bomb back to her and she caught it with one hand. With her other hand, she held up a photo of a dead Vietnamese baby. “This is who they kill.” She looked down at the metal shell in her hand. “You see, not all the bomblets explode right away. No, they lie in wait. In the ground. And when little children pick them up . . . Boom!” She whispered the word. “One more dead kid.” She lifted the photo higher.
Her big brown eyes drilled into my heart. “You’re going to have to do something about it, you know.”
She was right. I was never the same after that.
A squealing microphone on the pulpit interrupts my reflections, and a bald white man hunched over with arthritis jumps back like it bit him. He leans forward again. “My name is Henry Williams, and I’m a deacon in this church. We’ll be starting in five minutes, so if you would please get yourselves settled?”
The man hobbles off, and conversations come to an end. The young plop down on the floor in the aisles, others squeeze together in the pews, barely able to move, their elbows and thighs pressed together. People push in closer to me in the middle of the pew. I pick up my purse, give up J. B.’s seat.
A man in a nondescript tan button-down shirt and brown chinos passes by, leaving behind a trace of Aqua Velva aftershave cologne that invades my nostrils and moves directly to my heart. The man heads down the middle aisle, turning his head from side to side in search of a place to sit. A full beard, dark brown, almost black. A ponytail halfway down his back. Green eyes. His green eyes. But, of course, it can’t be him. Norton died more than thirty years ago. So who is this man who looks like him, who has the same distinctive gait, the same slight backward sweep of his left leg, who wears the same cologne? He squeezes into a pew several rows in front of me just as a ghostlike hush falls over the cavernous room.
A tall Black woman steps up to the pulpit. She has a smile that could melt the coldest heart and her ministerial attire—sleeveless lavender vest layered over a long white robe, clerical collar at her neck—could stir devotion in the staunchest nonbeliever and the conservatively religious alike.
“Welcome. My name is Reverend Jeannette Capen. Pastor Jean to most of you. We have gathered tonight to honor Bertha Pickering, a longtime fixture in our city who needs no introduction.” She pauses. “But I’m going to give you one anyway.” Warmhearted laughter. “Bertha was an unsung heroine, a lead organizer whose tireless work often went unrecognized, a woman who sought to live an authentic human and spiritual life and never stopped trying to do the right thing, even in the face of near certainty that it would make no difference. Bertha Pickering’s life was grounded in radical Christian values and pacifism. And yet, she was often denounced from pulpits in this town. Well, not now, not here, not in this church.”
Excitement mounts as the deacon reappears carrying, with some difficulty, a long rectangular object covered in white silk. He places it on the pulpit, and with a grand sweep of her hand, Pastor Jean pulls off the cloth to reveal a replacement nameplate for the church sign outside. Gasps pass from person to person and turn into clapping hands.
“By unanimous vote of the congregation, the name of our church has been officially changed to the Bertha Pickering United Church of Christ.”
The sign’s gold letters on black background are projected onto the screen behind the pulpit. People jump to their feet, clapping and laughing and chanting. Ber-tha, Ber-tha, Ber-tha.
Pastor Jean waits for everyone to settle down. “And now I invite you to talk about the Bertha you knew. Please limit your comments to a sentence or two so everyone has a chance.”
People rush to the front in waves, and soon there’s a long line stretching all the way down the left aisle. I squirm in my seat, fidget with my fingers, want to join them and don’t want to join them. There’s no way I could say everything Bertha meant to me in a sentence or two. And the line is already too long anyway. At this rate we’ll be here all night.
The first person to step up to the microphone looks familiar, but I can’t place her. She’s about twenty years younger and a few inches shorter than me, with coal-black hair.
“Bertha was the first woman to chain herself to the door of the Pentagon.”
At the sound of her voice I remember who she is. In 1984, I was attached to her at the gate to the Seneca Army Depot in New York. Bertha had been there, too, only that time she was fastened to the gate with yarn, not chains.
An elderly hippie with a headband streaking across his forehead is next. I recognize his face but never did know his name. “My dear friend Bertha Pickering served five years in prison, two in federal maximum security. My friend Bertha was beaten and jailed during the antiwar protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968. She was under FBI surveillance for decades.”
One after another, they speak, and each one stirs a new memory for me. The last in line is Marianne. She’s my age, but unlike me, she’s still out there protesting. She’s shorter than I remember; maybe she’s shrunk like I have. All I can see over the pulpit is a shock of pure white hair and steely blue eyes encased in wrinkles.
“Bertha only got irritated with me once. It was on her ninety-sixth birthday.” Marianne’s deep voice reverberates through the sanctuary. “I told her she should slow down.” We all laugh. We know what’s coming. “Bertha looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Marianne, I will give up my activism on the day I die and not a day sooner.’”
I’m on my feet, cheering along with everyone else and, at the same time, wondering what Bertha would think if she knew what my life was like today. If she saw me loading and unloading boxes of food from my car during my weekly Meals on Wheels deliveries and doodling away the interminable minutes at the monthly Monrow City Retirement Association board meetings instead of going to all the protests and rallies. Would she think I’ve given up on the world? I wish she were here so I could assure her that I care as much as ever about what I see and hear—children being locked in cages on our borders, people murdered every day just for daring to be who they are, thousands of people sleeping on our streets and in our parks—and that, like her, I will never quit until the day I die. I would also tell her what I’ve learned over the years, and that now I’m doing what I choose to do, not what I think I should do or what I think I have to do in order to be an okay person. I wonder if, like me, she ever got tired, asked