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When I was a child, my grandmother would sometimes allow me to come into her kitchen and lick her big wooden spoon after she mixed the batter for one thing or the other, a sweet moment in our often bitter relationship.
She was so mean, dispensing daily doses of disapproval to her household, especially to me. Besides, we were so different.
I was a city boy and a child of books, imagination and ambition. She was born in the country and became an old woman of the Bible, prayer and endurance. I would never have made it in her rural past. She’d have no place in my urban and urbane future.
My grandmother was a child of God and a conjure woman. She knew everything she needed to know. The sun rose and the sun set. God was in His heaven. And on earth, as it was in heaven, nothing that really mattered ever changed.
When I was a child, there was so much I wanted to know in a time that was changing, with still more change to come.
“Boy,” my grandmother would say, “ain’t nothing new under the sun,” a pearl of wisdom she’d scooped up from the Bible and then dropped from her righteous pedestal.
Black folks were marching in the streets then. They were dancing in the streets too.
But for my grandmother, the evil men of the early to mid-1960s were just the latest incarnations of the pharaohs of the Old Testament and King Herod as the new hand puppets of the devil. For my grandmother, the dances of my youth were no more than a new generation shuffling their feet over the same things invented and forgotten eons ago.
Nothing worth thinking about. Nothing worth talking about. Nothing new.
Still, from time to time my grandmother would ask my grandfather, who read several newspapers a day, to tell her about the people, places and things that had gotten the world in a tizzy. After my grandfather gave his wife his latest current events update, my grandmother would search her Bible for context and further explanation.
“Ain’t nothing new under the sun.”
More than 50 years ago, my grandmother found everything neatly explained in her Bible, from Bull Connor to the Vietnam War: “There will always be war and rumors of war,” grandmom said of the latter.
If she were alive today, grandmom would find explanations for everything from global climate change to the resurgence of white supremacy in America and in Europe in her Good Book.
Society’s travails, my grandmother would say, are the consequences of people mocking God and his commandments of how we should live in accordance with nature and one another.
As far as I know, my grandmother never voted or took to the streets to protest the trouble the world was in or the men and women who made it so. Instead, she found solace and sanctuary in her faith, secure in the notion that nothing really changed.
But sometimes my grandmother, who never hugged me, would invite me into her kitchen and let me lick her big wooden spoon, a tacit embrace of my hopes and dreams for a better future. It’s a sweet memory that bolsters me in bitter times, which, as always, are changing.