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The grounding was courtesy of Alice Marshall, Sheila Rice and Lula Cosby, honorees at the annual gala of the African American Community of Funds of the Springfield Foundation.
Because the event rightly observed the proper formalities, Pastor Ernest C. Brown of St. John Missionary Baptist Church gave the invocation before I got confused about which of the four food stations I intended to go to. This would have been par for the course, except that I somehow failed to slop the food on my clothing.
Shelly and Mike Lopez, long-time acquaintances, were at my table, as was Jackie Mounts, who reminded me that she’d been my daughter’s health teacher a couple of decades ago at the old Roosevelt Middle School.
When she returned from the microphone, with which she informed the crowd about the worthy work H.O.P.E. is doing with troubled teens in the area, I told her she sounded like the kind of person I’d give money to, and she smiled.
The same worthiness attached itself to the two groups that received modest awards from the AACF: Conscious Connect, which gets books with minority people in them in the hands of young minority youth by distributing them at barber shops and beauty salons, and the Freedom School, which the Covenant United Methodist Church sponsors in the summer to keep at-risk children on target academically and remember the Freedom Summer of 1964, which played a role in rolling back segregation in the South.
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It was also good to hear Mabel Jackson, whom I usually talk with while she’s mowing her lawn, give a tribute about the late Hattie Lawson, a former AACF honoree and community stalwart.
But it was when Mike Marshall appeared the large video screens that my grounding began.
He is one of two sons of Alice Marshall, the 95-year-old retired Keifer Junior High and South High School music teacher.
He recalled their family’s move to the “big city” of Springfield in 1965 from Kimball, W.Va., where she had been teaching.
He spoke of the challenges his petite mother faced in persuading her principal that she had the authority to rule over the Keifer students and the sacrifices she made “to make sure (brother) Reggie and I were successful young men.”
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“We may not have had the best of everything,” he said, “but we never needed for anything.”
Calling his mother “loving, caring, thoughtful, friendly, inspiring, motivating and passionate,” he concluded by saying, “We can never, as a family, be more thankful for the things Mom has done for all of us.”
Proof that others felt the same was at a table near me in the person of Dr. James Martin, a 72-year-old physician who made the trip from West Virginia to help celebrate the occasion.
The family theme continued in two brief tributes to Sheila Rice, 62, whom many know as a Springfield Realtor and owner of the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles License Bureau on Sunset Avenue.
Shown beside her brother, Cecil Rice, Jr., on the video screens, Jaimee led off.
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“Hey, Mom. For as long as I can remember you’ve always been a giver. Even when it seems like we didn’t have it, you always found a way to be able to give to somebody else. And I think your greatest legacy is not just your giving but that you have taught us to give … and we are transplanting that into other people. To know that the example that you set is going to go on for generations and that people are going to realize that gift (of being) selfless.”
Cecil Jr. continued: “One thing she’s taught us is how to understand and be understanding and always try to see something from somebody else’s point of view,” a practice he said “kind of instills a love for people just to be able to connect and interact with (them). It’s huge. It’s something she’s given me and all of us.”
After Jaimee added that her mother “taught us that being kind to people costs you nothing and you never know how that’s going to impact the person,” two other Rice daughters, Sasha and Star, performed a dueling “this is your favorite daughter speaking” routine that was as sweet as any desert. Rice’s grandson, Anthony West, added a touch sweet as any dessert by his grandma’s theme song, “You are my Sunshine,” followed by a formal bow.
For Rice, who was too shy even to ask her family members to pay $25 to attend an event honoring her, her children’s remarks were “everything to me.”
“When you are a giver, your family are the people who get the least of you. When you know somehow along the way, you didn’t lose them, then you know God had your back.”
“They blessed me more than they’ll ever know,” she added. At her funeral, “I don’t need a preacher to say one thing,” she said, because her children can just replay the video.
Although more reserved in tone, Rex Cosby’s recorded tribute to his wife, Lula, was powerful.
Referring to her early days as a dancer in Chicago, he opened with: “O.K., girl, from Soul Train to Springfield, Ohio, whoever would have thought? The people of Springfield are glad you made the trip. Human resources (manager) to real estate, children to grandmother to great grandmother.
“And we started our journey together 25 years ago and look where we are today. I don’t know where I’d be without you and no one deserves this award more than you do.”
Then came, in plainspoken form, the kind of thing people are reaching for when they use the word “affirmation.”
“I just want you to know that I love you, and I will continue to support you as long as I have breath in this body. So congratulations, and keep doin’ what you’re doin.’ ”
Cosby remembered those who helped her along the way.
Living in her early days with sharecropper grandparents, Cosby and at 9 moved to Chicago, where she had a rocky relationship with her mother and a stepfather who abused her mother. Cosby was living with them and had dropped out of high school before being urged to return by an alcoholic teacher, Mr. Thompson, and who told her she should not waste her intelligence.
She also remembered her grandmother as a source of strength, recalling the night she complained to her over the phone about a long day’s work and her aching legs only to be told she should be thankful for the pain because there are people who have no feeling in their legs and no legs at all who would welcome that pain.
Although she has sketched out an autobiography of her life and career, the Springfield realtor Cosby has been hesitant to pursue it further because it reads too much like Maya Angelou’s “I Know How the Caged Bird Sings.”
As Angelou did, she also has found a way to stay positive, and when she spends time helping others and gets a feeling she calls “the whisper (through which) God is saying, ‘You did what I wanted you to do. You did good today.’”
Her lengthy resume of community volunteering — and continuing work in her 70s — indicates how strong that feeling runs in her.
As I left the hall and ambled back to my car, I felt refreshed. Something about the evening — the work of good people, the regard in which their families hold them, and the unshakable power of human sincerity, surrounded me.
I was trying to find words to describe it when I ran into twins Diane Means and Debbie Mabra, long-time good friends of Sheila Rice.
After listening to me for a few moments about the event and the political and social turmoil I’d felt awash in, Mabra, who’s a teacher, found the perfect word to describe how the evening left me feeling: “Grounded.”
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