by Roy Blount
In the Batesville (Mississippi) Panolian, there appeared several years ago a photograph of a woman displaying an egg and a sweet potato, both extremely elongated. The caption read: “NEVER AT A LOSS FOR natural phenomena is Mrs. Cordie Henderson of the Mt. Olivet community. Last week, Mrs. Henderson visited the Panolian with an extra large hen egg, which later proved to have two yolks; and an unusually long sweet potato.” The Times is sometimes at a loss for natural phenomena.
(Also to be filed under Most Surprising Thing a High-ranking American Official Ever Tried to Do with a Rubber Chicken.) According to People magazine, after Nelson Rockefeller delivered his graduation-day address at the U.S. Naval Academy, “outgoing midshipmen presented Rocky with … a rubber chicken (which the Veep vainly tried to inflate).” Rockefellers! There is no telling what the late Rocky would have tried to do with a live chicken. I can tell you what a live chicken would have let him do: not very much.
Keeping Chickens—A Personal Account
When I was about thirteen I got for Easter a baby chick that had been dyed pink. I now deplore the practice of dyeing chicks and ducklings, but this chick thrived and made a good pet. Some people don’t believe this, but before all the pink had grown out of it this chicken was already running around in the yard after me like a puppy. I used to carry it around in my shirt or my bicycle basket. (I am not going to say what its name was. You can’t win, telling what you named a chicken. The reader’s reaction will be either “That’s not a funny name for a chicken” or “He had a chicken with a funny name. Big deal.”) I didn’t really love it the way you love a dog or a cat, but I really liked it, and it liked me. We were talking about that chicken the other day. “I would think that would be embarrassing, being followed by a chicken,” said my then-brother-in-law Gerald.
“No,” said my sister Susan. “That chicken liked him.”
But the chick grew into a pullet. It didn’t look right, and might have been illegal, to have a chicken in our neighborhood; and we didn’t have the facilities for it. We didn’t want the facilities for it, because at our previous house we had kept chickens in quantity (six), in and around a chicken house, and my father was softhearted about wringing their necks (that is, he would try to wring their necks in a softhearted way). Or that is my recollection. When I asked my mother for details, she wrote:
The chicken house was there complete with rather sad-looking and unproductive chickens when we bought the house. There was a rooster and five supposedly hens.
The people we bought the house from had them because of the war and food shortage. I was sorry they were there, Daddy was glad. You were delighted with them. It also smelled bad and I hated cleaning it—so did Daddy and we tried to outwait each other. You can guess who won most often. We finally decided two eggs a week were not worth it. The chickens didn’t look too healthy, then too they were all named and after one try we decided we couldn’t eat them and gave them to a colored man.
The one try was by Daddy. He assured me he could kill a chicken. His mother always wrung their necks etc. and he had watched. He violently wrung the neck (you were not told)—real hard—and threw the chicken to the ground. It lay stunned and then wobbled drunkenly off to the chicken house. We spent the rest of the week nursing it back to health.
When the chickens were gone, the chicken house remained. It was made of scrap lumber and tar paper. I used it as a fort, a left-center-field pavilion, and a clubhouse for a while, but by the time I was eleven or twelve I had gotten off into other things, was playing Little League ball, and had peroxided the front of my hair. And my mother hated the chicken house. She said it ruined our back yard.
She said she burned it down by accident. One afternoon she was raking leaves and burning them, and the fire spread to the chicken house. When Mrs. Hamright, across the street, out watering her bushes, smelled smoke and heard the sirens coming, her reflex was to yell “Oh Dear Lord” and squirt the hose through the window of her house onto her husband, Gordy, who was inside reading the paper. We eventually had to give him our copy of that evening’s paper. Even though we were the ones who’d had the fire.
Mr. Lovejohn, the old man who lived with his middle-aged daughter next door to the Hamrights, and whom we ordinarily never saw except when he was sitting in his daughter’s DeSoto early on Sunday morning waiting for her to get dressed and drive him to Sunday school and church, came over in the dark-brown suit at about the same time the firemen started thrashing around with the hoses. He said he wanted to “counsel with” us. He said fire was the wages of smoking in bed.
“Now, Mr. Lovejohn,” my mother said. “No one in our family smokes, anywhere. And there aren’t any beds in the chicken house.”
“That don’t excuse it,” he said.
By the time the firemen got there, the chicken house was about gone, but they stretched hoses all over the back and side yards, trampled a dogwood tree, and eyed our house as if they would love a chance to break some windows. We didn’t have many fires in our area at that time, for some reason, and the fire department was accustomed to igniting abandoned structures—chicken coops often, in fact—on purpose and putting them out for practice, playing them along for maximum exercise.
Mrs. Hamright kept trying to get one of the firemen to tell her whether the fire was under control. I think he hated to admit that it was. Finally, he turned around and asked her, “Whud they have in there?”
“Chickens,” she said.
His eyes lit up. “Hit them rascals with the hose,” he said. “They’d take off.”
My parents didn’t want to go through all that again, so we gave my pet chicken to Louisiana, who came every Wednesday to iron and clean and yell “You better not bleev ’at man, child” at the female characters in the soap operas, and who received a lot of things that we didn’t know what to do with. The chicken was getting too big, I could see that. Having a grown chicken as a pet would have been a strange thing.
“How is the chicken?” Susan and I would ask Louisiana on subsequent Wednesdays.
“He wa—… He’s fine,” Louisiana would say. Finally, when, we said we wanted to visit it, she said she had let it go see her granddaughter, who lived eighty miles away.
“Does she play with it lots?” we asked.
She said she did.
HIDE THE RAZOR ON APRIL FOOLS’
THIS MAY SEEM PREMATURE, but I think it is time we started getting ready for April Fools’. April Fools’ rolls around on Monday, and most of us may think oh, well.
But those of us who have had occasion lately to read the Atlanta Journal for April 9, 1906, will not feel so casual.
“TRIED TO KILL HIMSELF,” reads the headline on page one, “WHEN WIFE APRIL-FOOLED HIM.”
“W. O. Roberts Slashed His Throat in Effort to End Life,” a smaller headline goes on, “Because Wife Said There Was a Cow in the Front Yard.”
The story begins: “As a result of brooding over an April Fool joke perpetrated upon him by his wife last Sunday, W. O. Roberts, a carpenter, residing on the Greensferry Road, Tuesday night attempted to commit suicide by cutting his throat with a razor.”
Fortunately, it is explained, Mrs. Roberts restrained her husband, and with the help of some friends brought him by streetcar to Grady Hospital.
“Mrs. Roberts,” the story continues,
who spent the night in the women’s department at police headquarters, told Matron Bohnefeld that several months ago her husband suffered a lick on the head that affected his mind.
Sunday, while in a playful mood, Mrs. Roberts told her husband there was a cow in the yard. After learning that he had been fooled Roberts is said to have become morose and sullen and up until he cut his throat refused to speak to his wife.
Well. We are not told how Mr. Roberts suffered the lick on the head. Perhaps it was during one of his wife’s playful moods. Perhaps it was during some involvement with a cow. That would give Mrs. Roberts’s April Fool joke a little more point. “Here comes that cow again”
is what Mrs. Roberts may have said in fact, or in effect, and Mr. Roberts may have been humiliated when Mrs. Roberts came to get him out of the closet, telling him she was only fooling.
We used to play a family joke on my old dog Chipper, I must admit, along very similar lines. Chipper used to hang out the window of the car when we drove up to Lake Burton, and she would bark at the cows along the side of the road.
Occasionally when things were slow at home we would yell, “Chipper, there are cows in the yard,” and she would run to the front door and bark and cry. It would always get a good rise out of her, even though there were never any cows when we let her out. But she enjoyed it.
She enjoyed striking attitudes, and she believed cows were as small as they looked from the car window. In fact my father once stopped the car near some cows she had been barking at. “All right, Chipper, go on and get ’em,” he said, and she jumped out and tore after them. She ran barking all the way up to the nearest cow, saw how big it was, turned around without breaking stride and ran barking back to the car, from which she continued to bark as we drove away. She never admitted anything.
Chipper has not only stayed away from suicide, she has defied veterinarians who gave her not much longer to live. She lives now in Avondale with my parents, and I expect she will still bark if cows are mentioned provocatively.
But there are those who, like Mr. Roberts, are less satisfied with illusions. If the reader is such a person, or is married to one, I hope he or she will think about the potential headlines before doing anything foolish Monday.
A NEAR-SCORE OF FOOD SONGS
Dream Song
I dreamt in the night I had gone on to Glory,
And found it was full of loose girls who weren’t whory—
Whose faces were sweet, whose bodies incredible,
Whose sweat was white wine and whose few clothes were edible,
And all of whom naturally knew special arts;
And along with the wholes there were sumptuous parts:
Great legs, cherry lips, and deltas aglow,
And breasts you could nibble and cause them to grow,
And sirenlike voices expressing their gratitude
To me on account of my marvelous attitude.
And through the whole business I kept saying, “Look.
It’s all very nice, but can someone here cook?”
Song to Pie
Pie.
Oh my.
Nothing tastes sweet,
Wet, salty and dry
All at once so well as pie.
Apple and pumpkin and mince and black bottom,
I’ll come to your place every day if you’ve got ’em. Pie.
Hymn to Ham
Though Ham was one of Noah’s sons
(like Japheth), I can’t see
That Ham meant any more to him
Than ham has meant to me.
On Christmas Eve
I said, “Yes ma’am,
I do believe
I’ll have more ham.”
I said, “Yes ma’am,
I do believe
I’ll have more ham.”
I said, “Yes ma’am,
I do believe
I’ll have more ham.”
And then after dinner my uncle said he
Was predominantly English but part Cherokee.
“As near as I can figure,” I said, “I am
An eighth Scotch-Irish and seven-eighths ham.”
Ham.
My soul.
I took a big hot roll,
I put in some jam,
And butter that melted down in with the jam,
Which was blackberry jam,
And a big old folded-over oozy slice of HAM …
And my head swam.
Ham!
Hit me with a hammah,
Wham bam bam!
What good ammah
Without mah ham?
Ham’s substantial, ham is fat,
Ham is firm and sound.
Ham’s what God was getting at
When he made pigs so round.
Aunt Fay’s as big as she can be—
She weighs one hundred, she must weigh three.
But Fay says, “Ham! Oh Lord, praise be,
Ham has never hampered me!”
Next to Mama and Daddy and Gram,
We all love the family ham.
So let’s program
A hymn to ham,
To appetizing, filling ham.
(I knew a girl named Willingham.)
And after that we’ll all go cram
Ourselves from teeth to diaphragm
Full of ham.
Song to Oysters
I like to eat an uncooked oyster.
Nothing’s slicker, nothing’s moister.
Nothing’s easier on your gorge
Or, when the time comes, to dischorge.
But not to let it too long rest
Within your mouth is always best.
For if your mind dwells on an oyster …
Nothing’s slicker. Nothing’s moister.
I prefer my oyster fried.
Then I’m sure my oyster’s died.
Song to Grits
When my mind’s unsettled,
When I don’t feel spruce,
When my nerves get frazzled,
When my flesh gets loose—
What knits
Me back together’s grits.
Grits with gravy,
Grits with cheese:
Grits with bacon,
Grits with peas.
Grits with a minimum.
Of two over-medium eggs mixed in ’em: um!
Grits, grits, it’s
Grits I sing—
Grits fits
In with anything.
Rich and poor, black and white,
Lutheran and Campbellite,
Jews and Southern Jesuits,
All acknowledge buttered grits.
Give me two hands, give me my wits,
Give me forty pounds of grits.
Grits at taps, grits at reveille.
I am into grits real heavily.
True grits,
More grits,
Fish, grits and collards.
Life is good where grits are swallered.
Grits
Sits
Right.
Song Against Broccoli
The neighborhood stores are all out of broccoli, Loccoli.
Song to Beans
Boston baked, green; red, Navy, lima;
Pinto, black, butter; kidney, string—I’m a
Person who leans
Toward all kinds of beans.
I hope that plenny
Of farmers sow them.
You’re not any-
Where till you know them.
No accident beans
In common speech means …
Well, are you anything other than prim?
Have you keenness, spirit, vim?
Can you make all kinds of scenes?
Then we say you’re full of beans.
“A fabis abstinete,” Pythagoras said,
Meaning “Eat no beans.” Where was his head?
Yankee, pole, mung; Kentucky Wonder;
Wax, soy, speckled; they all come under
The heading of beans. Flavor apart,
They are good for your heart.
Song to Grease
I feel that I will never cease
To hold in admiration grease.
It’s grease makes frying things so crackly,
During and after. Think how slackly
Bacon lies before its grease
Effusively secures release.
Then that same grease protects the eggs
From hard burnt ruin. Grease! It begs
Comparison to that old stone
That turned base metals gold. The on-
Ly thing that grease won’t do with food
Is make it evanesce once c
hewed.
In fact grease lends a certain weight
That makes it clear that you just ate
Something solid. Something thick.
Something like das Ding an sich.
This firm substantiation is al-
Lied directly with the sizzle.
Oh when our joints refuse to function,
When we stand in need of unction,
Bring us two pork chops apiece,
A skillet, lots of room and grease.
Though Batter’s great and Fire is too,
And so, if you can Fry, are You,
What lubricates and crisps at once—
That’s Grease—makes all the difference.
Song to Okra
String beans are good, and ripe tomatoes,
And collard greens and sweet potatoes,
Sweet corn, field peas, and squash and beets—
But when a man rears back and eats
He wants okra.
Good old okra.
Oh wow okra, yessiree,
Okra is Okay with me.
Oh okra’s favored far and wide,
Oh you can eat it boiled or fried,
Oh either slick or crisp inside,
Oh I once knew a man who died
Without okra.
Little pepper-sauce on it,
Oh! I wan’ it:
Okra.
Old Homer Ogletree’s so high
On okra he keeps lots laid by:
He keeps it in a safe he locks up,
He eats so much, can’t keep his socks up.
(Which goes to show it’s no misnomer
When people call him Okra Homer.)
Okra!
Oh you can make some gumbo wit’ it,
But most of all I like to git it