Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? ... A Story

Some years ago there was a lot of jokes made up about why the chicken crossed the road. I don't remember any of them. Sorry. I do remember going on a road trip from California to Mississippi, and seeing a lot, really a lot, of armadillos on the sides of the road, in the middle of the road, or all of the above. These armadillos were not dead like the chickens in the jokes were. They just moved slowly, laboriously across the highway and never did I see a dead one.

So while visiting my cousin in Vicksburg, Mississippi, I asked, "What's with the armadillos everywhere on the highway? We've seen dozens."

She replied, "You know the jokes about why did the chicken crossed the road? Around here the question is why did the armadillo cross the road, and the answer is 'to show the chicken that it could be done...' "

I never did learn where all those armadillos were headed, but those jokes reminded me of a story Mama told me about hard times on the farm in Mississippi. This was after the great flood of  1926-27 (that is another story) when it had been impossible to put in a crop of cotton during the summer. They had a few chickens, but wouldn't dare eat them because they needed the eggs for cornbread more than they needed meat like fried chicken.

The bacon and fat-back from the previous year was nearly gone. They had been eating vegetables only, sparingly, for weeks. They were even running low on corn meal for cornbread. They had a big long table with a lot of feet under it, several boys and five girls. All the boys were over six feet tall, and some were six feet seven inches. Pap'aw and the boys were awfully hungry for meat.

The front of the house faced the road and the fields across from it. The flood that had, during previous months, turned the fields into black muddy lakes had drained into the deep trenches dug on either side of the road for that purpose. The cotton was planted but it was yet a long time before any money would be coming in from the crop.

Most of the family was perched on the front porch steps or in straight chairs gazing out across the brown fields on the other side of the road. The Saturday afternoon sun traveled slowly in a westerly direction, bringing the shade of a tree to cover them. No one had anything to say.

Everyone was hungry, not with the gnawing, life-threatening kind of hunger we see on faces of people in Third World countries today, but with the kind of hunger you have when you have for months been fed a steady diet of cornbread and beans, cooked with bacon grease and fatback... Hunger that knaws at your mind, as you imagine... well, fried chicken, for instance.

Mama said everyone was being still, just slumping in their chairs, or leaning against their porch post. They sat that way quite awhile. Mama thought she was dreaming when she saw a bit of white movement in the ditch across the road. It was a friar size chicken, she realized, just slowly wandering up and down the steep sides of the ditch, pecking at bugs in the mud, oblivious to the hungry Coalter family perched up on the wide front porch.

As chickens do, that white one would take a few steps along the bottom of the ditch, peck at the ground, then raise his head, turning this way and that, looking for... trouble? more bugs? Who knows? Anyway, he very slowly kept moving in the direction of the Coalter house. Mama just watched. Everyone stayed quiet...

In a little while Mama was aware of Mam'aw stirring ever so slowly. She got up like a ghost and faded into the house. One by one the boys stood up, very quietly and slowly, and followed their mother into the house. They went out the back of the house, out of sight of the unfortunate chicken in the ditch, and separated to the north and south. Staying out of the chicken's line of vision until they could surround him, they caught that friar, and killed him and had him for Sunday Dinner the next day.  They couldn't have fried chicken, though. No, they had to boil him for Chicken 'n Dumplin's. Had they fried him, he would only have been enough for two or three people to get a bite or two.

Remember, in those days, the meals were Breakfast, Dinner, and Supper; not Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. Dinner is the big meal of the day, and on the farm it was eaten in the middle of the day, and the leftovers for Supper were eaten as just a light meal before going to bed when it was too dark to do anything else. No electric lights to stay up and read.

Today, we have Breakfast, then a light Lunch at midday, and Dinner is the big meal at night, sometimes late at night with light and heat from electricity or gas or both.

When I first heard this story, I already knew that killing a live chicken and preparing a chicken dinner, whether fried chicken or a big fat stewing hen was a lot more trouble than the process today, of going to the grocery store, buying your chicken in a styrofoam+plastic wrap probably already cut in pieces... Today, you can wrap any parts of the poor chicken that you don't want and toss it in the garbage (take it OUTSIDE, please) and cook the parts you want. OR, you can just go to KFC or Chick-a-fil, or whatever and eat in or take out, whatever suits your fancy...

In the olden days, you had to chase and catch the chicken, certainly a challenging job.

Then you had to somehow make a dead chicken out of a live, screeching, wiggling, clawing, pecking, totally frightened and frightening live bird. And that process was necessarily difficult, bloody, and totally distasteful.

Even after you had a quiet, still, though probably quite bloody dead bird, you couldn't just start cutting him up into pieces like wings and thighs and drumsticks. No, you had to get rid of those feathers. Big job. Back in those days they got some wood, built a fire under a huge wash pot in the yard, filled it with water, boiled the water, put in the whole feathered bird, let the boiling water loosen up the feathers, and only then (after they got him out of the water and let him cool enough to handle) could they pull all those feathers out by hand, and at last he would be ready to cut up and cook.

Poor chicken. He shouldn't have crossed the road.

I've often wondered where he came from and who he belonged to. I wonder if they went hungry because they lost him. I hope not.

I also wondered if the Lord viewed my family as doing wrong because they killed and ate someone else's chicken. What do you think?