Jay tells stories, and oh, the stories he tells. Many of his tales detail the doings, sayings, and habits of his grandmother. Jay's paternal grandparents escaped the planet before Jay got the opportunity to hit them up for loans - that is, before Jay was born. The maternal-side units, however, contributed substantially - in a non-monetary sense - to Jay's upbringing. Let's just let Jay tell this one, since after all this is his autobio.

Now if everyone will please open your hymnals to page 42, let us stand and sing together "Amazing Beans." My sermon today is on evolution. I suspect we all know what that is. However, in case there's someone out there with Doubt in Their Mind or who has lived under a rock for a century, I'm going to ask my free-thinking grandmother to give us a quick review. I’ll narrate, since she died more than forty years ago.

Born in 1898, my maternal Grandma grew up on her family's farms near the microscopic town of Windsor, a full morning's journey by horse-drawn buggy - about 15 miles - from Aiken, South Carolina. They didn’t actually live in Windsor, but a good piece down the road from there. Windsor was where they came to get supplies - it had one store back then - and occasionally caught the daily passenger train to Aiken, the big city. (Yeah, well, it was big to them, anyway.)

Not much beyond Windsor was within reach of electricity, running water, telephones, and indoor plumbing. Yet, life was good. There was plentiful food if you didn’t mind growing it, shucking it, grinding it into grits, boiling it over a wood- or kerosene-fired stove, and troubling the hens for some eggs to put with it. The occasional drummer - a drifting direct sales specialist who lugged satchels of sewing threads, kitchen contraptions, bibles, and other frivolities - brought most of the items you'd otherwise have to ride a horse half a day to fetch. Besides, the horse was usually occupied, like the paternal grandfather unit, with the plowing and therefore unavailable for a shopping trek.

Grandma courted long, married young, and prospered in spite of the usual vicissitudes. She and her husband share-cropped for a while, managed - i.e., milked the herd  of - a small dairy for a share of the profit, and later moved to a farm of their own. Time fujited onward, as it stubbornly insists on doing. Automobiles replaced buggies, cotton mills replaced farms, and light bulbs replaced kerosene lamps.

The big move

When the Forties replaced the austere-to-the-max Thirties, Grandma moved to town. She and my grandfather brought her cracked and discolored dinner plates and her marble-pedestal lamp, the only survivors of a house fire that claimed everything but them and their two daughters. Grandma also brought along her unusual, personalized religion, honed in the country, to be tested in town.

In Grandma’s bucolic stomping grounds, Windsor Baptist Church was a small, wooden affair hand-built of locally hewn timber by its original members. It perched atop a gentle slope in the center of town on land donated for the purpose by Grandma’s family. The tiny building, brick veneered in its latter days, presided over two graveyards, one in front, where Grandma rests today, and another one for people of African-American descent, off to the side under some drooping oaks.

You could easily fit several churches the size of Windsor Baptist into the citified Memorial Baptist Church in Aiken. Its imposing edifices built of the finest materials just outside the ten-thousand-strong city limits, Memorial Baptist blazed trails in zealotry, racial prejudice, and devotion. To white-only church services, Grandma insisted on bringing her adopted granddaughter, who was black. Orphaned in the rural community by a fire, the girl had been cared for by her white neighbors, my grandparents. When Grandma moved her family to town, she brought Annabelle along. At twenty-two, Annabelle found out a thing or two about the world, and it wasn't all good. In the country, she was Grandma's adopted child, created equal and treated so. In the city, she was a threat to the very foundation of Southern culture and religion, a face of color with as much right to the frontmost church pew as Grandma herself. Or so Grandma saw it.

Debate raged, and feathers ruffled. Pointed sermons flew from the pulpit like hounds escaping hell. The preachers trotted out all the arguments of the Separate-Equal Fifties, the gist being that the Deity never intended the gospels to apply to people with extra suntans. Besides, if Annabelle were allowed in there might be others, and there'd be this difficult-to-explain exception, and besides, the church would have to install "colored only" water fountains, restrooms, and pews, and signs would have to be installed on the existing facilities to indicate "white-only," and it would be better for everyone if Annabelle would go to church with her own kind. She did. Grandma went, too. She bitterly pointed out that we were quite welcome. Grandma could quote scripture with the piousest, and did, pithily, at every turn. It's a good thing the good Baptists didn't know the scripture all that well, though. She took some liberties with the quotations. “I took this child in and raised her like my own," Grandma summed at every opportunity. "If my Annabelle can’t go to Memorial church with us, then we can’t go either.”

Let us all now stand and sing together: "Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight..."

All the little children

After a battle worthy of any TV soap opera, the church had to relent. To any race-based objection Grandma would burst into the Sunday School children’s song.  Loud.  “‘Red and yellow black and white...’” Grudgingly welcome at last, Annabelle chose to stay home. Before the civil rights movement even got started good in the South, she married and left us for Boston, where she could attend church in peace without invoking Grandma’s name.

In addition to a board of deacons that included my highly skeptical father, the citified church had its own personal Avon Lady, who led a tradition of regular visitations of the Faithful. Besides interracial adoption and socialization across ethnic lines, the good Baptists frowned severely on much else that Grandma loved - tobacco, gin rummy, and dancing. Nonetheless, she persisted in the religion, although she went underground with her indulgences in Tube Rose snuff, cards, and square dancing. She explained to me, a child, that she, not the board of deacons, was fully enlightened as to what was impermissible behavior, but best not to raise the issue with the Misguided Well Meaning. Ever the good grandson, I never tattled.

From the farms around Windsor, where “lawns” consisted of sculpted areas of bare sand meticulously combed with a rake, Grandma brought another of her passions to town: flowers. In that respect she brought the country to town, pestering relatives and friends for cuttings, seeds, and sets for her favorites - pink dogwoods, fluffy willows, and ball-shaped chinaberry trees. Pink and lavender four-o'clocks and deep purple verbenas speckled the space around the porches. Behind a low wall of bushy marigolds, thousands of zinnias in colors to challenge a rainbow graced her yards, front, back, and side. She maintained strict planting plans. Tall varieties with large blooms decorated the brick foundations. Bushy types with button-ish blooms occupied amorphous islands dug into the lawns.

Grandma assiduously recycled her zinnias. She stored seeds from heedfully selected plants in cloth sacks that she sorted by color and style, for planting come spring. Zinnias had one main problem: evolution. Her Baptist upbringing notwithstanding, Grandma knew about evolution, and she must have believed in it behind her veil of Creationist conformity. Darwin had his beans. With Grandma it was zinnias.

The problem was with blooms that had a protruding center section. To Grandma, these were bad, ugly, and undeserving of a place in her yard, much less her heart. She mercilessly culled such plants as soon as they showed signs of developing into undesirables. At seed gathering time, when the blooms were dry and brown, she always took care to explain her system for improving the species: ignore icky ones. Grandma might as well have quoted chapter and verse from the Epistle from the Evolutionists. Left alone, she admonished, zinnias would adopt the very trait she disliked, and all her flowers would have the unsightly center. Corrupted by even a single errant plant, the variegated zinnias would revert to plain colored and all her painstaking efforts over generations of plants would be lost.

Grandma didn’t study the science of genetics. She lived it. Each year she invested in several packets of seeds - agonizingly chosen at the uptown F.W. Woolworth’s and McCrory’s dimestores - to refine and replenish her zinnias’ gene pool. Pools, as the case may be. I listened. I paid attention. And helped her cull the undesirables by chopping them down and dropping their unwelcome carcasses in the trash.

We never cleared Grandma's Zinnia Theory with the Baptists, but it’s unlikely they would have agreed. On Sundays, however, when one or more of her favored country churches wasn’t having a homecoming or a revival, Grandma sat under her best feathered hats, front-row-center in the creationist-to-the-max Baptist Church. She sang the old standard hymns while she cooked, and vocally embellished Gershwin tunes while she gardened - out of earshot of the church’s notables. And she taught me the principles of evolution.