Now for the enumeration; I shall discuss a paradoxical one first. My grandmother was an enemy of all books save those based upon or derived from the Bible. Whenever I neared home with any books other than those sanctioned by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church school to which I was made to go, I’d push them under my coat and steal to my room and secrete them under the pillow on my bed. Hours later I’d go to look for my books and they would be gone. But I’d never confront my grandmother and ask her where they were; long experience had taught me where they were. I’d go to our wood-burning stove in the kitchen and lift up the lid, and sure enough, there in the black ashes would be what was left of my books. Similarly, no piece of music ever sounded in my home save a hymn. If my grandmother had ever heard me so much as hum a blues song, she would have branded me with whatever she happened to hold in her hands at the moment, be it a broom or an eight-pound, cast-iron skillet.

In contrast to this, my grandmother would pray that I acquire knowledge to get on in the world, in order that I might succeed in supporting myself, and she took great pride in all good reports she heard of my progress in school. But she strove with all of her might to keep any realistic knowledge of the world from me. Her religious faith was so deep and rigid, so uncompromising and fanatic, that it could not manifest itself continuously in daily life. It was capricious, disjointed, brittle, chopped to bits by the daily necessity to live. This was as it had to be, for my grandmother was real, normal, healthy; she had her bodily functions, her temper, her concepts of earthly loyalty; she was married; she loved her husband; she had nine children; she liked to eat, to laugh, to sing, and to play. And yet, through all of this, there spouted spasmodic eruptions of religion, trying desperately by faith to tie all these many earthly—and, to her, meaningless—items together into one meaningful and ultimate whole. Another way of expressing it is this: She lived with all of us, yet, psychologically, she hovered somewhere off in space so distantly that things that strike us as having no relationship were merged into an organic blur for her, and things that were united for us were either separate or non-existent for her. To this day, when I look upon my grandmother’s life, it seems to me to have been utterly meaningless; yet, to her, I know, her faith tied all of the disparate items of her environment into one meaningful pattern of value. And it was this bringing from somewhere else a code of meaning and imposing it upon her home and its life that made life an exasperation to those who lived with her, unless they saw and felt as she did. Always she seemed to be peeping out of Heaven into the world while living in the world.