Grandma Bryant
Courtesy Photo
The woman could cook. From the moment you entered her house by the frayed screen door, up three crumbling brick stairs just off the side of the driveway, you were assaulted with an array of smells as enticing as the best street food vendors in Yerevan, Tbilisi, or Jerusalem. I’ve tried them all. However, there was nothing like Grandma’s home cooking.
She cooked for me when I came home from school. I was always hungry when the bus dropped me off around 3:30 (or on those rare occasions, I walked to her house; it wasn’t far). Many afternoons, she made me mayonnaise sandwiches.
Grandma’s recipe for mayonnaise sandwiches:
Two pieces of Merita bread
Duke’s mayonnaise spread liberally on both sides of the bread.
Make the sandwich.
Hand the sandwich to the hungry child.
You might be asking, who likes mayonnaise sandwiches? I did. It didn’t matter to me that there was no tomato, ham, egg salad, or anything else between the bread except air and mayonnaise. I loved Grandma’s mayonnaise sandwiches. Why? I didn’t know any better. I didn’t think she, I, and we were poor. It never occurred to me. She couldn’t afford to buy meat. Yet somehow, we ate. There might be a ham bone she threw into the pinto bean soup. She sliced up onions and a few tomatoes from her backyard to give the beans a little kick. Taters and maters, she called them, all grown from behind the house, always made it into the meal. She made French fries better than McDonald’s and fried tater cakes better than any hash browns I’d ever eaten. There were no recipes or church cookbooks anywhere in her house. Grandma could barely read. Her ability to measure ingredient was by instinct alone.
There were infrequent trips to the store. I didn’t realize the slips of paper (which didn’t look like money) she gave the cashier were food stamps. Somehow, though I now know we were poor, we never went hungry. She made the Earth speak in the wilderness of dirty topsoil, old oak trees, and a tiny plot of land along a forgotten corner of the Norfolk-Southern railway. God gave, and we received. To the world, we looked poor, and we were. By God, we never went hungry, our clothes were mended, and she made a path for us to go back and forth into the world every day.
Her apron was a sign and symbol of her identity, like John the Baptizer and his camel skins. The world knew Pauline from her aprons. She was also a seamstress who made a little money by letting out pants and sewing buttons for rich and poor people. The black families who lived opposite her, on the literal other side of the tracks (not more than 50 yards away), would come to her for their sewing and sometimes eating. Her table was open to everyone. Like John, people came from miles out to hear her tell stories and eat her fried chicken. Fried Chicken night was a good night.
Grandma’s table, a foretaste of the heavenly banquet to come, welcomed anyone and everyone.
She fed everybody. She provided for collards for homeless people, biscuits for railway men, chicken livers for sheriff’s deputies, okra for the older men who hung out with Pawpaw down at the filling station, corn for the preacher (who always seemed to visit around supper time), country-style steak for the occasional gypsy, country ham for one fellow who claimed to be part of Earth, Wind and Fire (was she sewing sequins on their jumpsuits?), and mashed taters for me, her perpetually hungry grandson. Grandma’s table, a foretaste of the heavenly banquet to come, welcomed anyone and everyone. At that time, I didn’t know how heaven would look: the poor, rich, hungry, sometimes unbalanced, transient, and multicultural, all eating together and getting along over fried chicken and other dishes bought with food stamps.
Food stamps are just another way of giving someone “grace.” It’s free, unmerited, and comes with no strings attached. You need this “grace” to survive. John tells us to get ready for Big Grace. We are awaiting some massive food stamps to be delivered. Is the road prepared for the mailman to get to your house? They are coming, and it’s coming fast. When you reach the end of the road, a place is set for you at Grandma’s table. Come hungry, there’s plenty of food for everyone.