What the Bishop Was Like Before Grace Was Born

Most people wonder, at some point, what their parents were like before they were born. Mavis suggests that her brother-in-law, the bishop, was a very different person before Grace entered the world.

Here, in her Beale Street blues bar that was recently shut down, Mavis hints at what she sees as the bishop's promising, open-minded younger days. "See, what you don't know is, by the time you were born your father was..." Mavis pauses. "He was who he is now. He was that man, but there was a time before you knew him when he was somebody else."

"He just wanted to live and he wanted to experience all that God created for us," Mavis says. "He didn't want to stand apart from it. He didn't want to proclaim a gospel about it."

Grace, for her part, may be embarking down the path to become a preacher like her father, and Mavis expresses her concerns. "I never wanted that for you. I never did, and I never would have led you down this path if I'd known it would," Mavis says, defeated. "So what do I know?"