Chickens on the Run

By Patricia White

    Chicken and Sausage Gumbo is lagniappe for the soul in my family. Just last week I got my Le Creuset 9.5 quart pot out and assembled my ingredients on the counter for this Cajun delight. I know it sounds lazy, but I always use a couple of rotisserie chickens because it makes life in the kitchen easier. I like easy. Mr. Leblanc usually takes over with the deboning of the chicken, but he was not home. I attempted to dismember the rotisserie chicken. First, I pulled off the legs, then the wings which gave me pause for a shiver. I stepped back, took a deep breath and in what seemed like ten seconds I recalled a disturbing sequence of events from my somewhat redneck childhood deep in the heart of Louisiana.

  

  One cold rainy evening back in February 1952, my daddy got a call from the Baton Rouge Post Master just at closing time. A mail order of five hundred little biddies had not been claimed and the Post Master wanted to know if Daddy would take the chicks. It was going to be a cold night and the Post Master wanted assurance those little biddies were safe and warm for the night and the rest of their lives. Have you ever seen one of those Farmer’s Almanac ads that read: 500 biddies for $19.95?  Daddy had a contract with the Post Office to transport the mail four times a day in one of the Army surplus trucks that he bought after the War and the crew at the Post Office knew that he was always looking for a money-making opportunity.

  Mr. Mac. as Daddy was affectionately called, quickly seized the opportunity. With childlike excitement, he told mama and my sisters and me that taking on the biddies would be a family project. Supplies were needed for the new fledglings, like coops, feeding trays and warmers. The five o’clock whistle had already blown for the day and Baton Rouge’s streets were rolled up tight as jelly rolls. Neither of the town’s two feed stores were open. Not easily discouraged, Daddy said we would have to make do for the night. He had a plan. “If Daddy can’t do it, nobody can,” was his mantra.

  Our garage became the neo-natal nursery for five hundred of these screeching little biddies who wanted their mamas. We divided the little yellow balls of fluff into four large cardboard boxes that we scavenged from a couple of grocery store alleys on our way home. Each box was lined with newspaper and held one pie tin filled with cornmeal and another filled with water. We strung a spider web of extension cords across the boxes with one lone light bulb dangling down into each box to provide some warmth in our below freezing garage. By the time the biddies were bedded down for the night, the garage was beginning to smell. Some of the biddies were screeching loudly. Daddy plugged in an old radio and turned it on hoping to quiet them. He could not quell the smell, so he softly closed the door.

  As Daddy kissed each of our foreheads good night, I could see a smile on his lips. He knew he had hit pay dirt with those little biddies. Five hundred fresh country eggs a day would almost make us rich. I could see Mama’s eyes rolling back in her head like she had doubts about this latest venture. Mr. Mac was a force to be reckoned with, a legend in his own time.

  At first light, Daddy entered the cold and smelly garage. His smile turned upside down as he found half of the biddies frozen to death, legs in the air or face down in the pie pans of water. Dead either way. Equipped with shovels and little wooden crosses, we three children buried the still-frozen biddies in a mass grave. After a short prayer, the family moved on with plans for the two hundred fifty remaining future layers. Daddy built a chicken yard, outfitted with all the needed chicken equipment and fed them laying mash religiously for the next three months.

  This would probably be a good time to disclose that several hundred pounds of laying mash later, we discovered that all two hundred fifty of our future laying hens were roosters. Those little fluffy yellow baby chicks had turned into the meanest white roosters on earth.  After we all left home each morning for school and work, I guess those cold-hearted roosters got bored because they commenced pecking each other until their white feathers were splotched with blood. It was a scene right out of Deliverance. Someone told my Daddy that if he daubed black Shinola shoe polish on the bloody feathers each day that the chickens would stop trying to peck each other to death. Sweet Jesus, I thought, come get me now. I wanted no part of that operation.

  Daddy was eager to get the Shinola show on the road. Rushing home each afternoon, he would coral us all into the chicken yard and designate who would catch the chickens-on-the-run by their legs and who would be the polish dauber. Two of us were instructed to catch three sets of feet in each hand. I cried and pleaded that I didn’t want to touch them. I was not cut out to be a farm girl. Daddy said I was being foolish and I should quit acting like a baby. (I was the oldest) I don’t know how I didn’t die from holding my breath during the whole Operation- Shinola when it was my turn to wrap my short fat fingers around those crusty, yellow chicken legs. Every third day I was the dauber which was no easy task with their wings flapping every which-a-way as they tried to peck me with their beaks. After a few weeks of these farm yard tactics, the chickens began to heal. Life almost returned to normal. Homework never looked so good.

  The chickens were fat and clucking when slaughter day approached. We watched in horror as a crusty old whip-of-a-woman with a blue rag tied around her head and matching apron showed up at our house and made no apologies as she rang each and every chicken’s neck. “Come here, you little “SOB,” she’d yell. Then grabbing each chicken by the neck she’d start cranking. Chicken heads flew into one pile and their still-flopping bodies were tossed into another. The last chicken to go gave her a run for her money. No part of the process was orderly. Laissez-fair of the 50’s.  I had to go lie down inside by the fan. Upset as I was, I was still ecstatic to be free from the chickens. Maybe the Circus would be in town tomorrow.

  However evil on my part as it sounds, I realized the chickens were not leaving our neck of the woods. They were cleaned and cut in half, then fourths. The back section consisting of a leg and second joint (thigh) was neatly wrapped in white paper and marked and stacked in our freezer in the same garage where the travesty had begun. Those daayum chickens had come full circle. The two hundred fifty that didn’t freeze that first night were frozen now. The breasts were sold to a local grocer, so the whole disgusting undertaking was not a total loss. And, we did have lots of Bar B Qs. None for me, thank you. Mercy, I hated those chickens dead or alive and felt a sense of deliverance about a year later when the last leg was eaten.

  Do I like chicken today? Do I eat chicken today? Yes, for some sick reason, but breasts only. Let me just say that I do not allow anything in my freezer that has legs or wings. That rule puts my husband in a bind, being the game hunter he is. But, I am the only Chick in this house and I rule the roost.