‘I Got On My Knee and Asked Her Again and Put This Big Ring on Her Finger’

BY JE’DON HOLLOWAY-TALLEY | Special to the Birmingham Times CORNELL AND CHARLOTTE HALL Live: Pleasant Grove Married: Aug. 5, 2006 Met: Summer 2005 at their pastor T.L. Lewis’ home in Bessemer. Lewis has since retired as pastor of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church in Pratt City. Cornell was there to maintenance Lewis’s lake. “I was putting a pipe in the ditch when Charlotte came out to bring me and my brother some water. And when she brought the water out I told her I had been praying for a wife and that she should give me a kiss so I’ll know she’s real,” Cornell laughed. “I was covered in mud, and she said, ‘You’re so dirty, you can’t even come in the house’, and she laughed and walked off, and I said, ‘well blow me a kiss, and she turned back around and blew me one.” Charlotte had been at their pastor’s house assisting with his wife, who had recently had an aneurysm. “I had taken her to a doctor’s appointment…and Pastor Lewis’s mother was also there and asked me to take some water out to Cornell and his brother,” Charlotte recalled. “Cornell did ask me for a kiss, and I...