One hundred fifty-one days into 1900—May 31—Ezra and Susie
McNeal welcomed a baby girl, Essie. In 1910 the family bounced, in a wagon, from
lower Alabama to Baker County, Georgia. Word was that schools were better on this
side of the Chattahoochee River.
My mother’s
mother, Essie McNeal, dreamed of being a schoolteacher. College wasn’t possible,
but that didn’t keep her from being a “teacher.”
As a boy, I sat in Nanny’s “classroom,”
her screened front porch. The only air conditioning we knew was the breeze stirred
by rocking and flapping a Bramblett Funeral Home fan.
If she had a
special point to make, Nanny would pause and shoot a stream of peach snuff—through
the fork of two fingers—into a cloud of Kleenex in a Maxwell House coffee jar. Nanny
was a God-fearing, church-going widow, but she was no saint.
Her husband
died young, leaving the hardscrabble load of a mortgaged farm on her shoulders.
Maybe that was the reason her salty words could curl the bark on a chinaberry
tree.
Nanny could
be blunt. If someone raced past her baby-blue F-100 pickup, she would snarl, “Hurry
on, you old heifer. H-e-double-l ain’t half full yet.” My
grandmother was what she was, and she certainly wasn’t a hypocrite.
The only
book that I ever saw in her house was a black, leather-bound Bible. And that
reminds me of the night she “preached” on hypocrites, she stopped rocking and
said, “Honey, go get me my Bible.”
Before
thumbing through onion-skin pages of the King James Version, Nanny launched
another stream of snuff. Patting her lips with a clean Kleenex, she said, “Here
it is, Luke 6:42.”
And she read:
“Either
how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote from that
is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own
eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then
shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.”
My 10-year-old
wrinkled nose told her that I didn’t understand. Holding up her hand and sticking
out her index finger, she said, “Look at this. When you point a finger at
someone else, always remember there are three other fingers pointing back at
you.”
I was still confused,
so she explained, “Too many times people want to point a finger and blame others
without considering their own faults. See those doorsteps? I believe Jesus was
saying that you need to sweep around your own doorstep before trying to sweep around
somebody else’s.”
That made
sense then and now.
With all the
finger pointing today, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Whether it’s a beam
or just a tiny mote in our eyes, we all have our flaws. She reminded me, “Jesus
said in John 8:7 (KJV), ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast
a stone at her.’”
We cannot
change the past, but we can change our attitudes and actions for today and
tomorrow.
If Nanny
were still rocking and dipping, she’d be 120. Given the current hate-filled
turmoil, I’d expect her to say, “Honey, go get me my Bible.” And she would thumb
to Ecclesiastes 3:1-3 (KJV):
“To everything
there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be
born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is
planted;
A time to
kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up ….”
We’ve had
enough “breaking down” and killing.
It’s time to
“build up” and heal.
dnesmith@cninewspapers.com
