Used to ache sometimes and swell
By: James Caig
Tags: Lyrics, Music, Family, Soul, Love

With Grandma’s Hands, Bill Withers tells us the story of his earliest years in flashback, and in close-up.

What he lets us see is controlled, our view narrowed; we’re made to see what a child would see. Spielberg’s camera made us do this too, once, in ET, by placing us at a child’s height — the height of door handles, of the dinner table, the height of the waists of shadowy men.

In Grandma’s Hands, Bill makes us see through a camera that is the shape of his memories. He remembers being Billy, back when he was knee high, and tours us around his town using sometimes Grandma’s voice, but mainly by her hands. Hands that were signposts for Billy’s learning and to a moral code that as Bill he still lives by. Those hands loom large, especially for a small child sat in a pew.

Grandma’s hands clapped in church on Sunday morning

Grandma’s hands played a tambourine so well

Grandma’s hands used to issue out a warning

She’d say, “Billy don’t you run so fast,

Might fall on a piece of glass,

Might be snakes there in that grass”

Grandma’s hands

These hands, they believe. Their faith resounds through the church, joining in with everyone else, asserting the sense of belonging that Bill finds so reassuring. The hands perform, too, staking out the beat that tethers the music and the ritual to the community that understands itself through both. Hands mark out the rhythm of worship, but also the familiar rhythm of the week, the weeks, and hence life.

We imagine the hands, perhaps, to be clean, proud hands, protruding from neat, pressed cuffs; dressed in Sunday Best, presentable, as society expects, but never stiff or starched. The church in which these hands clap and play tambourine is warm and welcoming. That’s clear enough when the hands — which speak in gesture as well as music — issue out a warning that isn’t fire and brimstone, but friendly, and protective. It’s the voice of experience. Grandma helped Bill to learn; she was saving him not from damnation, but from himself.

These hands did a lot of saving.

Grandma’s hands soothed a local unwed mother

Grandma’s hands used to ache sometimes and swell

Grandma’s hands used to lift her face and tell her,

She’d say, “Baby, Grandma understands,

That you really love that man,

Put yourself in Jesus’ hands”

Grandma’s hands

The hands understand. They give comfort. They know how to navigate a world that causes fear and anger — a grown-up world where snakes, the dangerous, figurative ones, still hide in the grass. These hands, as someone else once said, know too much to argue or to judge, embodying values indivisible from the woman to whom they belong and from the faith she carries with her. They ache sometimes, these hands, and swell, but they cannot help but love. It’s instinctive, or maybe learned. Either way, they’re there when the burden is too much for others to take.

They are hands that never cross the road.

Billy knows this, instinctively. But Bill, looking back, understands it.

Grandma’s hands used to hand me piece of candy

Grandma’s hands picked me up each time I fell

Grandma’s hands, boy, they really came in handy

She’d say, “Matty don’ you whip that boy

What you want to spank him for?

He didn’t drop no apple core”

But I don’t have Grandma anymore

If I get to Heaven I’ll look for

Grandma’s hands

Those hands were always giving, always helping, always saving. Always able to see things from your point of view. You hear it when Billy’s Dad gets a word or two. There’s no moralising, just logic — he didn’t do anything wrong, Matty; you might fall on a piece of glass, Billy. The patience of a saint.

And now she’s up there herself. No doubt still helping people to help themselves. Her faith repaid.

And from here, no longer knee high, Bill knows that Grandma’s hands stand for safety, for comfort, for strength. Young Billy learned by them, and learned to trust too; from what they did, who they touched, and how. They’re still the focal point of his love for her and of hers for him; signposts for the world around him, and the values he’s grown up with.

Those hands carry a lot of weight.

Bill Withers says that of all the songs he wrote, Grandma’s Hands is his favourite.