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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.