Every other month, Susie would fix fried chicken for Sunday dinner. I started to pay close attention to this when I was about three, which would have been 1946. After breakfast, she would go behind the swinging kitchen door, next to the water heater, and bring out the broom.
Seeing this, I would follow her out the back door and down some steps to the back yard. She had a chicken coop built onto the back of the garage, and there were always several chickens in residence. During World War II, and after, men in the area, mostly friends of her son, my uncle, Clyde, who was a cavalry colonel in the South Pacific, would visit the house, bringing Susie firewood, produce, meat and chickens.
Susie would go among the milling chickens, select one that I am sure she had already picked out days before, and grab it by the neck. She carried the chicken away from the others, then put its neck down on the ground, lay the broomstick across it, and put her foot on the broomstick. Then she reached down and pulled the chicken's head off. It never ceased to amaze me, how easily the chicken's head came off.
She lifted the broom handle and the headless chicken ran around for some moments, then fell over. She placed the chicken in a paper bag and carried it inside, at which point I lost interest. The rest of it involved routine stuff like scalding the chicken, pulling out the feathers, washing it and cutting it up for frying.
At 10, I was taken to Sunday school, no matter how much I protested, and at 11 Susie, her three daughters, and I, went to church, St. Paul Methodist, on the north side of the tracks. After church, we stopped by Mack Eplen's Restaurant, across the street from the First Baptist Church, that you could hangar a blimp in, and picked up a pan of rising yeast cloverleaf rolls.
Autumn afternoons were nothing like today. We had a radio, and a piano, and sometimes my mom or aunts would play the piano. Professional football teams played games on Sunday afternoon in the east, but nobody in Abilene paid much attention. Of course there was no television and no computers. Clyde was a polo player, and after the war we spent many Sunday afternoons watching teams play polo on fields south of town, where South 20th is now.
On other afternoons, I would play outside or listen to the radio. It didn't matter what was on, though as time went by, I really got attached to shows like "Sky King," "The Green Hornet," and "The Shadow." The radio provided a bit of foreshadowing. Sometimes, when a favorite show was on, I took my dinner into the living room and ate it listening to the radio.
Otherwise, we always ate as a family at the big dining room table. There was a story in The New York Times this morning about the benefits to children when families all eat together at the dining table. I suppose that is true, but I also witnessed quite a number of dysfunctional things that can occur among family members eating around a dining table. Susie's other memorable employment of the broom was to chase her daughters around with it once in a while.
There was also something about touching food that made it non-consumable, and this was most apparent on fried chicken night. I suppose kids today would have some vivid mental picture of where that golden chicken on the table came from, but in those days it was no big deal. It was just fried chicken, with cream gravy, the cloverleaf rolls, and green beans or black-eyed peas, a couple of vegetables like that. Susie always ate the back and the neck, which none of the others would eat, and at the end, there always seemed to be a leg left on the platter. Susie would say to me, "Why don't you have this last piece? Nobody's touched it."
It still seems important to me, not to offer anyone food that I have touched. I also know how to cut up a whole chicken – it's a lot cheaper that way – and to cut it so there is a pully bone to wish on at the end. The short bone got the wish.
No comments:
Post a Comment