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Crowe's Nest |
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I have some memories about chickens. They range from the violent and bloody to the humorous, sad and curiously thought provoking. That is one of the benefits of growing up poor in the South during the years that I did. I had the opportunity to experience the relationship, in those days, between chickens and human beings in ways unknown to the average youngsters of today. I was born on Oct. 11, 1945 in Atlanta, Ga. All of my important chicken experiences occurred during those years between 1945 and the summer of 1963 when we were living in Lakeview, Ga., on the outskirts of Chattanooga, about a half mile, as the crow flies, from Lake Winnepesaukah. When I say poor, I don’t mean the poorest of the poor. We were always pretty much up there among the higher level of the poor class. Which is to say we could always pretty much count on having a pot of beans and greasy fried potatoes for supper. For variety we had white beans one day and pinto beans the next during the week days. On Saturdays, especially during our more prosperous years, we had hamburgers and Cokes. On Sundays, we could pretty much count on having some kind of meat to go with the beans and potatoes. Usually that meat was fried chicken. That Sunday image is still vivid today. The beans and potatoes and fried chicken on the table surrounded by us kids and momma, waiting for daddy to sit down and start eating – which was the starting gun for the rest of us to go to war on that chicken. My earliest memory of chicken violence goes back to when I was about two years old. We were at Granny and Grandpa Jolly’s railroad section house out on Seven Mile Hill on the outskirts of Tullahoma, Tenn. The memory is a little vague in that I cannot actually see it in front of me anymore, but I am pretty certain that I witnessed from a distance Granny Jolly just going out and grabbing a couple of chickens and ringing their necks. She just grabbed them by the head and gave them a little swing and a twist. It wasn’t a big swing. I don’t think she used her arm. It seems like it was all in the wrest. She held the chicken’s head firmly but the rest of the chicken spun around a few times. When she let go, that chicken jumped around like crazy all over the yard with it’s head hanging down. It’s was a pretty scary sight for me and that’s about all I remember of it. The next time I saw that particular chicken it was in a big pot of scalding water. A few minutes later one of the women folk, probably Aunt Lois, was pulling its feathers out. That concludes that memory. My next memory occurred a couple of years later when we were living in Daytona Beach. We lived in a little house in the Holly Hill area. Daddy called us kids outside. We obeyed, naturally. As soon as were lined up outside the kitchen door, Daddy wrung a chicken’s neck to the point that the head came off in his hand and the chicken went into a wild flopping frenzy, spraying blood out of its neck all over us kids and acting like it was attacking us. It scared us to death, of course. I guess it was one of the earliest horrors that I faced in life. It was made even worse by the fact that daddy was laughing at us while this terrible thing was taking place. It was also one of the earliest times when I made a moral judgment against my daddy and decided that it was a mean and cruel thing for him to do. It was a shock that daddy could do that to us and laugh about it. But I was only four with no choice but to accept this new reality. I would never be able to trust my daddy’s sense of kindness and fatherly protection the way I had before. I didn’t have any more memorable chicken experiences until I was a teenager and we were living in Lakeview. The first memory there didn’t actually take place there and didn’t involve a firsthand experience. I only mention it because I think it’s a funny story about humans and chickens. It was around 1959 or 1960 and daddy decided that we would pay a surprise visit to Granny and Grandpa Jolly in Huntsville, Ala., where they were living in a big railroad section house downtown right by the railroad. Besides momma and daddy, there were five of us kids. Besides all those mouths, granny and grandpa were housing several of my uncles and aunts at that time and they all had to be fed. It was a usual Granny Jolly country meal with a lot of good stuff on the table surrounding a platter of fried chicken. There was plenty to eat for everybody, which was something of a miracle, since Granny Jolly didn’t know we were coming and didn’t know that the chicken would be paying a visit either. I remember that took up the biggest part of her prayer, thanking the Lord for that chicken. Out on the back porch with the men folk I heard the story of this miracle chicken. It was told by Uncle Hershel, my mother’s youngest brother, who was a funny story teller. He was just as funny as Granny Jolly herself and Aunt Lois. They could all have a person laughing so hard that it made the ribs hurt. I could never tell it the way he did because he acted it out and made all kinds of funny facial expressions and went through the motions as if it were all taking place again in front of your eyes. So I won’t try, except to say that that chicken didn’t appear until just a couple of hours before we arrived. My uncles, Hershel, Billy Joe and Cranford, along with Grandpa Jolly, were out in the backyard when Hershel saw something on the railroad tracks coming towards them. It was a pretty long ways in the distance but Uncle Hershel realized immediately that it was a chicken. He hatched up an ambush scheme right away and they all went into action. Hershel took up a position across the railroad tracks behind one of those tall boxes that the railroad keeps tools in. Uncle Billy Joe waited behind the wood pile. The others got behind cover and waited. They waited patiently for quite some time. Hershel waited until the chicken was within a few feet and then sprang into action. The chicken went nuts and headed for the wood pile where Billy Joe was waiting. Within seconds that chicken was running all over the back yard with four grown men chasing him. It was eventually caught, killed, plucked and fried up and waiting for us when we got there. I don’t know how that one chicken fed us all. It may have been sent by God. It sure provided a lot of excitement, turning a dull morning in Alabama into a celebration of family and Sunday dinner with chicken and dumplings on the table. My last experience with chicken violence occurred during the summer of 1963. It could have been in ’62. But I think it was ’63. Daddy’s brother-in-law, Hugh Duffy, had given daddy a couple of prize Japanese chickens during a visit to Atlanta. I say he gave them to him because that’s what daddy said. I don’t remember Uncle Hugh for his generosity. But maybe he did. Daddy said they were show chickens, not to be eaten, but just for show. They were very colorful chickens, much more colorful than your average American chicken. Daddy kept them in a cage down in the basement near the old coal furnace. He kept a bag of seeds by his bed, against the wall. Every day after supper he would go get his bag of seeds and go down to the basement to feed his Japanese chickens. It was completely unknown for daddy to keep a pet, but he treated these chickens like pets. Tragedy struck one night which resulted in the loss of one of the Japanese chickens. Daddy had taken the cage outside and placed it in a shady spot by the back fence. The next day when he went out to feed them, he discovered that one was missing. Apparently some animal had managed to pull it out of the cage. Daddy blamed my dog for it and gave him a good beating, which I resented because I felt that any dog could have done it, or some other critter, and that there was no direct evidence to link my dog with the killing. But somebody had to pay for the loss of that chicken; and my dog, being a dog and the only suspect handy, had to pay for it. Weeks went by, maybe even a few months, when tragedy struck again. This time, I was the culprit and the cause of it. This was a time when momma wasn’t working because the old Peerless Woolen Mill had closed down. It may have burned down, or it may have closed down to keep the union out. I don’t remember. What I do remember was that every day when I came home from school momma would be in the kitchen cooking up a pot of beans. One day it would be white beans and the next day it would be pintos. It was unheard of for us to have meat during the week. There came a day when I must have just turned bad. Usually, no matter what was in the pot, I always said, “Praise the Lord!” But not this day. I don’t know what caused me to go bad. I guess I must have just snapped. I told momma, “Wouldn’t it be good to have some fried chicken?” Of course it would, but we didn’t have any chicken, momma said. Oh but we do, I reminded her, we had a great big Japanese chicken in the basement that daddy had been fattening up for months. Momma didn’t go along with the idea at first, but I kept at her until she finally gave in. I wasn’t the type of person to just take the chicken out and ring its neck like daddy or Granny Jolly would. It just wasn’t my style. Instead I decided to give the Japanese chicken a fighting chance. My friend, Lynn Brown, had shown me a way to kill people that he had learned during training with the National Guard. It involved taking a wire in both hands, making a cross loop with it, slipping it over the head of the enemy and yanking it tight, strangling the victim within a few seconds. So I let the Japanese chicken out of its cage and followed it out into the yard with my wire. I tried the stunt three or four times, but each time the Japanese chicken would just wiggle its head free and keep going. Finally my brother Lee just picked up a big rock and smashed the Japanese chicken dead. Momma plucked it and cleaned it and had it on the table when daddy came in from work. Me and my brother and sisters and momma were all sitting quietly at the table. Daddy, like he always did, placed his lunch box on top of the refrigerator and sat down. I was thinking that he was bound to notice the fried chicken right away and that he was bound to ask where it came from. But he didn’t say a word. He just started eating as if it was the most normal thing in the world to have fried chicken on the table during a weekday. I didn’t enjoy the Japanese chicken as much as I could have because of the part I played in its murder. Even though I hadn’t actually killed it myself, it was my fault that daddy’s pet chicken was being eaten by us. Daddy seemed to be enjoying it better than anybody. Us kids left the table as soon as we finished eating and headed for the outdoors. After he had finished eating, daddy went to his room and got his bag of chicken feed, momma said, and headed down to the basement. The basement door was outside, so it took him a few minutes to come walking back into the house. “Fannie, where’s my chicken?” he asked momma with a worried look on his face. “Why Albert, you ate it,” replied momma. “If I had known that, I would have never been able to eat it,” he said mournfully, shaking his head. According to momma, that was all he said about it. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it myself. I have to believe that daddy didn’t realize that he was eating his pet Japanese chicken. Maybe he was just too tired and hungry to ask questions. Maybe the truth of that old adage about not looking a gift horse in the mouth had filtered into his brain in some sort of mysterious way, clouding his judgment. And then again, thinking back on that cruel horror he inflicted on us in Daytona Beach when I was four, maybe it was a case of the chicken coming home to roost.
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