Hermina Glass-Avery

Chicken Head

The southern way calls for cooking and consuming all parts of all land animals fit to be eaten.  Aside from the usual delicacies fixed from livestock, poultry, and fishing, that could mean almost all other land animals including but not limited to frog, tarrapin, possum, snake, lizard, squirrel, rabbit, coons, gators, and scorpions.  Not to mention hawg mawl, hawg jawl, hawg head, ears, feet, oxtails and cow tongues.

Now, tell me how does one eat a tongue? – the talking part of that bovine beast.

Or chicken feet? – the walking part of that poor old bird.

Such seditty and I dare say citified folks with such country ways.

Less than two miles from the state capital right off pryor street people pluck chicken feathers and spoil your appetite till you won’t want no more chicken in your natural bone life.

I wouldn’t belive this here except that I saw it with my own eyes when I was a young girl living in a concrete world.

Mr. John’s old country cousins from Jackson, Georgia brought two georgia reds to our housing project and all the children went hog wild with excitement to see such real live chickens.  Nobody had never seen no live chickens before, ah say, except for Foghorn Leghorn.  The Colonel didn’t even advertise with live chickens.

Looking back on this event turned out to be one of the most exciting and worst moments of my ten year old life all wrapped into one.

No sooner had we fallen in love with the soft feathery chickens than some big old black man dressed in all black wearing a big old ten gallon come around the corner with a machete in hand, caught two chickens and with one swing he beheaded one then the other.  The chickens ran, and ran, and ran.  The trip part about it was not that they were dead now but that for a good couple of minutes they were running around with no heads.  Can you imagine living without a head.  We were quite thrilled at the sight of a chicken running around with its head cut off as if it were some magical robot chicken.

In a daze, all I saw was two head and nobody.