Chapter 3: The Church Piano
Althea was seven the first time she sat at the piano in New Hope Community Church and understood that music could be a place. The church was small, with plain wooden pews and windows that turned the afternoon light gold, and the upright piano stood to the left of the pulpit, its wood worn smooth by decades of hands. Her grandmother Esther played it on Sundays, her fingers moving surely over the keys even then, and Althea would sit in the front pew swinging her legs, watching those hands the way other children watched television.
Lorraine Moss, Althea's mother, sang in the choir. She had a voice that did not need to be loud to fill the room, warm and clear, and on Sundays she stood in the second row with her eyes half closed, singing as if the words were something she had just remembered rather than learned. After the service, when the congregation drifted out into the sunshine to talk on the steps, Lorraine would stay behind and sing softly while Esther played, just for the pleasure of it. Althea would climb onto the piano bench beside her grandmother and put her small hands on the keys, pressing one note at a time, listening to how each sound hung in the air before it faded.
"That's a hymn," Esther told her one Sunday, when Althea was eight and had begun to pick out a melody by ear. "Your mama used to hum it while she cooked. It's about a river." The hymn was simple, only a few lines, about a river that remembered everyone who had ever crossed it, carrying their names gently downstream. Lorraine had learned it from her own mother, and Esther had played it for as long as anyone could remember. Althea learned it note by note, first with one hand, then with both, until she could play it without looking down. She played it at home on the kitchen table, drumming the rhythm with her fingers, and she played it in her head at school when lessons grew dull.
When Althea was eleven, her mother died. She did not remember the funeral clearly afterwards, only the flowers and the sound of many people singing at once and the feeling that the world had tilted and would never quite right itself again. Esther took Althea and Jerome into her own small apartment and raised them there, cooking large pots of soup, mending clothes, keeping the household steady with a kind of quiet stubbornness. In those first months, Althea barely spoke. She did her schoolwork, she helped with Jerome, she went to church on Sundays and sat in the front pew with her hands folded, and she said almost nothing to anyone.
Then one Sunday, Esther led her to the piano after the service, when the church was nearly empty, and sat her on the bench. "Play your mama's hymn," Esther said, not unkindly, but firmly, the way she said everything important. Althea shook her head. Her hands would not move. Esther waited. She put her own stiffening hands over Althea's, gently, and pressed the first notes with her, one by one, until the melody began to come back, thin and uncertain, like a voice after a long silence. Althea cried then, quietly, without making a sound anyone else could hear, and she kept playing, because stopping felt worse than going on.
From that day, the piano became the place where Althea could say the things she could not say aloud. She practised after services, when the church was empty and the light slanted through the windows. Esther taught her what she could: how to sit properly, how to curve her fingers, how to keep time steady, how to let a phrase breathe instead of rushing it. She taught her hymns and gospel songs and, when Althea was older, showed her how a melody could be dressed in different harmonies, like the same person wearing different clothes. Althea learned quickly, not because she was trying to be clever, but because the music made sense to her in a way nothing else quite did.
By the time she was fifteen, she was playing for the choir on Sundays, and the congregation knew her name. She never thought of it as performing. She thought of it as keeping something alive: her mother's voice, her grandmother's hands, the river in the hymn that carried names downstream. She did not know then that a conservatory existed, or that people auditioned for such places, or that music could be a career. She only knew that when she played, the grief loosened its grip for a little while, and the church felt like home, and she felt like herself.
Years later, standing on the steps of the Alden Conservatory in a thrift-store dress, Althea would think back to that empty church and her grandmother's hands over hers, and she would understand that everything she was about to play had begun there, on a worn upright piano, with a simple hymn about a river that remembered.