There have been times while she sat bhind her highly polished black piano and lifted her voice in praise that I actually heard a Heavenly Host of angles join in to accompany her, so sweet and majestic was the sound.  With beads of perspiration crowning her high forhead and her raven hair curled on her shoulders, a complection so smooth with only a trace of powder to hide her birth mark that lightens up half of her ebony face, one would never guess that 50 years had carried her thus far.

As she seats herself at the piano she wears large bifocals but is soon readjusting the light and laying her glasses to the side like a used tissue. She impatiently rearranges the sheets of music, and sometimes turns her ear to the page as if she can see better in that position.  She claims that the notes dance off the page and just run all over the place, which explains why sometime she leans forward and scowles at the paper like she is going to tear it apart and just as suddenly streaches way back with big brown eyes wide in a look of astonishment.

But when the spirit begins to move, her hands cascade on the keys like a waterfall, her head thrown back, eyes close in sheer rapture as the music flows on.  At times her hands recoil from the keys as if they were on fire and she has to shake the intense heat from off her finger tips, but somehow the music never lets up. With her foot sounding the cadence and the waves of music in accordance with the choir it’s all she can do to stay at the piano.Her soft lilting voice and choice of word phrasing sometimes hints at her Jamaican heriage, but oh, when she gets up to teach…..Pacing the floor, spinning on her heal to  grind a thought in, sometimes wringing her hands in dispare or throwing them up in subjection admitting that we alll are in need of the Lord and correction……..
that’s when her Christian heritage shows through.

I wrote this over 30 years ago

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Florence M. Campbell

April 7, 1936 – December 6, 2022

Royal Palm Funeral Home & Memorial Gardens

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