Southern Freud Chicken
an autobiography
Joel enters and sits at a kitchen table slightly left of center He opens a bottle of Coke-a- Cola and drinks down a large swallow. He then opens a small package of salted planter’s peanuts and empties them into the bottle of Coke. He takes a mouth full and begins to play a hand of solitaire.
Joel: (Looking up) You know, there’s a reason they call this game solitaire.
The first conversation I remember having with my mother was over one of her games of solitaire. I asked her who she was playing, and she said that she was just plying by herself. “You can’t be playing by yourself” I said, “You have to be playing with somebody”. You see I grew up with an older sister and two younger brothers and up until that point I had no concept of a game that you played by yourself. Finally she said, “Oh, I’m playing against the king”. “Who’s winning?” I asked, “Oh, I believe the king’s gonna’ get this one.” she said. And from that point on whenever I asked my mother who was winning she would answer as if she were playing against the king.
Orangeburg South Carolina, born and raised. That’s the way we say it in the south. “Where you from?” “Orangeburg, born and raised.” Actually I was brought up in Cordova. Take John C. Calhoun drive out of town, turn left on the cannon bridge road and head down toward Bamberg. They were our archrivals in basketball; the Bamberg Red Raiders against the Edisto Cougars. Back before the South Carolina schools integrated in 1968 we were the Edisto Blue Devils. When we merged with George Washington Carver we took the name of the white school and the mascot of the black school and became the Edisto Gougers. I remember the first day of school that year going into the fourth grade; my father leaned down and said to me “you can have them for friends but don’t bring one home”. It seemed a little odd to me considering he appeared to be pretty good friends with Willy Reed and Mr. Green who lived around the corner from us.
Mr. Green would come over to help papa butcher the hogs. First you take a rifle or a pistol and you put the barrel right between the hog’s eyes. You gotta hold it steady because a hogs head is really hard and if you don’t hit him straight on the bullet can glance off and end up in your leg, Mr. Green told me that. My brothers and I used to have lots of fun chasing the hogs around the pin and trying to catch them. When we got tired we would lay down in the hog trough [pronounced trof] to rest, because it was so muddy everywhere else. Hog trough that’s where you slop the hogs, where you feed them. The hogs would lick it clean and then the sun would bake the trough dry so it would be all cozy and warm at least to an 8 year old South Carolina boy.
I remember seeing a production of Crimes of the Heart at a university in Maryland. The characters are all supposed to be from Georgia, but the actor was pronouncing it, hog throw. That would have entertained my brother Lin to no end. I think the director was Hungarian.
So yea, we raised hogs boarded horses, when I was really young my father ploughed the field with a mule named Princess, who was blind in one eye. We had a milk cow named Daisy for a little while. In fact my father was a milkman when I was real little. Friends of my parents would sometimes joke around and say, “Oh, he looks more like the milk man”, and then everybody would laugh. It was years before I understood what they were laughing about.
My father won a raffle one year from the Coberg dairy where he worked. The prize was a shot gun, a 12-gauge pump with full choke. When I turned 14 he gave me that shot gun for Christmas. Lin got a 20 gauge single shot, he was only 12. I never cared too much for hunting though but Lin did. He and papa would join a hunting club just about every season. When you shoot your first deer they smear your face in the deer’s blood and hang it’s testacies around your neck. They split the meat up among everyone in the club but the young shooter gets the prime cut, and all though they don’t formally call it a coming of age ritual it’s about as good a one as you will find in the south, bout as good a one as you will find anywhere in the US really.
I did trap rabbits, that was something Lin and I did together. Contrary to what you might assume it wasn’t with steel jaw traps, I’m pretty sure that would be illegal, not to mention senseless. We would build what’s called a rabbit box. The rabbit would go into the box to get the bait, I think we used apples, and by pulling on the apple he would release the stick that held the door allowing gravity to shut the door behind him. In the morning we would make the rounds of our traps. From a distance you could see if the trap had been triggered, then the pleasure was in seeing if it was a rabbit. Every now and then it would be an opossum or in extreme cases a raccoon. You take the rabbit out of the box and hold him to the ground. Then you place a broom handle or something like that over his neck and stand on the ends. Then with a sharp yank on his back legs you break his neck and he dies right away. The skinning process is pretty much the same as skinning a dear or butchering a hog just on a much smaller scale. Same thing for squirrels but I tell you there ain’t much meat on a squirrel.
There was a fair amount of Houck land when I was growing up. In the late 60s my father built a pond about a quarter mile from the house just off of what is now called Houck road. I’ve always thought it’s funny that they say built a pond instead of dug a pond. We did a lot of fishing for brim and bass. Papa stocked the pond with catfish a couple of times. One year we had an alligator come up out of the swamp and spend a few months with us. I got pretty tired of eating brim and bass but my mama made the most wonderful catfish stew. I could never get enough. For years after my mother’s death from cancer I would pine for her catfish stew until one day it occurred to me that Papa knew how to make it and I could just ask him.
The best place for catching catfish was the swamp. We would fish with worms that we dug ourselves or crickets that we bought from Henry Metts Grocery store or Sunny boy Bronson’s “cold beer and live bait” store. But the crème de la crème of live fishing bait was a caterpillar known as the Catalpa worm. A beautiful black and yellow caterpillar found feeding on the large heart-shaped leaves of the Catalpa tree. Leaves that, I might add, were perfect for playing Adam and Eve, but that’s another story.
Like so many southern things worth writing about there is a peculiar technique to fishing with these furry creatures. First you remove their heads and then, with a very small stick you turn them inside out. This leaves them an irresistible slimy day glow green. Now my Papa says that a true fisherman bights the head off of his catalpa worm… I think we all did it once just for the experience but the taste of catalpa worm can only be justified if it guarantees the future consumption of catfish stew and lots of it. Now by this point the thing had usually urinated in your hands which stained them highlighter yellow.
I don’t remember exactly how it happened but one day my brother Lin and I decided to write catalpa worm songs. I don’t know it must have been a rainy day.
(Song)
Fishin’ with catalpa worms from schoolin’ I have cut
Fishin’ with catalpa worms and sittin’ on my butt
Fishin’ fishin’ fishin’ fishin’ it’s how I spend my time
If it weren’t for catalpa worms I could not make this rime
Fishin’ with catalpa worms it makes me scream and shout
Fishin’ with catalpa worms I turn um’ inside out
Fishin’ fishin’ fishin’ fishin’ havin’ lots of fun
If it weren’t for catalpa worms I guess there would be none
If you like going fishin’ give catalpa worms a try
There’ guaranteed to add a couple pounds to your fish fry
But if the thought of furry worms just makes you toss in bed
Perhaps you’d rather gig a frog and eat frog legs instead
Anybody here ever have frog legs? It doesn’t tastes at all like chicken. The method of capture is called gigging. A frog gig is a small three to five pronged trident…five-pronged trident….Pentadent? Any way it’s a fork fixed to a bamboo shaft much like a fishing pole. Now frog gigging is done from a small boat with at least two people. The person in the back of the boat paddles along the edge of the pond. The person in the front of the boat shines a flashlight along the bank looking for the glow of the frog’s eyes. By the way this is done at night. So when you find a frog he freezes just like a deer caught in headlights. The guy in back sets up a gliding approach to the frog and puts down the paddle. You pass the flash light back to him making sure not to louse the frog. Then you pick up the gig and just as you come into range you stick him. You never throw the gig like a spear there’s a much higher chance of missing or not getting a clean stick and that would be very bad form. Then you put the frog in a burlap bag or “corker sack”.
Now cleaning a frog is practically a surgical operation. It’s a combination of performing a Lobotomy, cleaning a catfish, and pulling the legs off of your sisters Barbie doll, and it is not for the faint of heart. Ok, here we go. You take the first frog out of the corker sack and while you hold him down you take a long needle and pierce the top of his skull. There’s a little crack up there for you to get in through but you have to fish around a little to find it. As soon as you do you push the needle in and scramble his brains. In Biology it’s called pithing. You do that so he’s brain dead for the part to come. Now you take a large nail and drive it down through his head and into a board below. That keeps him from jumping away while you work but you have to make sure the nail has a big enough head on it that he doesn’t slide off when he jumps. You make a shallow incision around the circumference of his upper thy, and with pliers, it’s like you’re pulling his stockings down. When you’re at the ankle you cut off the feet. You cut off his legs where they meet the torso and viola. But you’re not done yet. With a hammer you pull the nail out and toss the torso into a bucket.
By the time I was a freshman at Edisto High I had not been frog gigging’ in several years but near the end of the school year my biology teacher, Ms. Sanders, was offering an A to anyone who could bring in a live frog for dissection. My brother and I were out on the pond that night. You know it was so easy when I was ten, but now at fifteen I was having a very hard time with the idea of putting that trident into a frog’s body.
Lin, my brother, had started the glide toward the bank, and had put the paddle down. I had passed the flashlight back and picked up the gig but my body was tingling and I could feel the hair standing up on the back of my neck. I was trembling with indecision as the critical window of time opened in front of me, and as it did I realized that I couldn’t do it; then the knowledge of how much I really needed that “A” crept into my mind. I shut my eyes and threw the gig. Thinking that if I missed I wouldn’t have to admit that I did not try, and I wouldn’t have to admit that I couldn’t do it. I shut my eyes and threw the gig.
I hit him; but it wasn’t a clean stick. I had hit him in the arm and it was a struggle to get him in the boat without tearing his arm off. Very bad form, very bad, and for that I apologies. I got the “A” and probably need it to pass the class but I was not very proud. Of course being a stoic southerner talking about it would never even occur to me as an option.
I did mention that Lin had written a Catalpa worm song too.
Catalpa worm don’t pee on me, do do do do
Catalpa worm don’t pee on me, do do do do
Cause if you do, do do do do
I will kick you, do do do do
I will kick you in your knee, do do do do
And if you holler’ let me go, do do do do
I will kick you even more, do do do do
And if you die, do do do do
I will not cry, do do do do
I will go wash the pee off of me.
Lin couldn’t actually play the guitar.
Now stoicism in the south is further magnified by the quiet nobility of those southern families who lost their fortunes with the end of the civil war, but had no legal means of recovering their losses. Both my parents’ families would be counted among them. The Houck’s and the Hungerpiller’s, it’s Dutch. There is a story about a great great aunt of mine on grandma’s side whose home was saved from being burned by Sherman’s troops because she refused to get out of the chair where she was sitting. Not only did she save the family home but also the family silver, which apparently was hidden under her dress. I have the Hungerpiller nose… Actually, to tell you the truth, it’s the Houck nose but there’s this great photograph of my grandma Hungerpiller in profile looking as noble as George Washington himself. I have a newspaper article about her giving blood. It was a few days before her 60th birthday and the nurse had said, “Mrs. Betty I’m not sure that we can take your blood, you are almost at the cut off age.” My grandma said, “Well, you took Ellinore Roosevelt’s blood, she’s older than me and my blood is just as good as hers.” So they did.
Now it would be easy to only tell you the noble parts but it wouldn’t be the whole story. Like all young boys in the 70s I tried to grow a mustache as soon as I could, no that’s not the bad part. Grandma Hungerpiller told me she didn’t want me growing a beard and my mother explained that it was because it would remind grandma of Lincoln, who freed grandma’s grandfather’s slaves and didn’t pay him a thing for them. Grandma’s been dead for a long time now and things are very different in the south. Sure there’s still prejudice but it’s in the North too it’s just a little more popular to ignore it there.
The history of slavery in the US is as embarrassing to the south as the holocaust is to the Germans. And the Civil War did not start over slavery but the victors write the history, while the losers write the poems. There is a marvelous old story from the southern oral tradition that was used to put me to sleep as a child. I learned it of course from my mother, who learned it from grandma Hungerpiller. A chicken story that was passed down through generations of blacks and whites, it covertly tells of an old black mammy who takes better care of the white children than the misses does. It’s the oldest thing of my family’s that I own and easily the most valuable.
Interesting thing about the Civil War or the War Between the States as it is properly referred to in the south. When you go to a Civil War re-enactment today, even in the north, the Confederacy is always three times the size of the Union army. Apparently it’s more fun to be Southern, but it does make it a little more difficult to justify the north winning that particular re-enacted battle.
Eleven days after graduating from Edisto High School I left for the US Navy and spent most of the next two years in South East Asia. It was as easy as walking into the next room. The G.I. bill carried me through two years at The University of South Carolina and that’s when I left the south for good. It wasn’t’ a conscious decision I was just doing what came next.
North of the line people were often surprised to learn that I’m from South Carolina. They would ask what happened to my southern accent and over the years I have had lots of different answers to that question but the real truth is this. When I was young I noticed the way that characters on TV with southern accents were treated by the characters that didn’t have southern accents and I decided that I didn’t want to be treated that way.
People would often ask if my family had accents and I always answered, “oh yes, they all have beautiful Southern accents”. I’m still not really sure why I felt the need to insert the word “Beautiful”.
When I was a student at the University of Rhode Island I had a little crush on a girl named Pam Crossman (not her real name). She was graceful and charming and naturally had all the deportment that some society girls in the south still study in order to “get a good husband”. But she had had a fiancée from the time that I had meet her. Pam spent one summer in Charleston South Carolina while her Fiancée was stationed at the navel base there. So of course I was anxious to ask her how she had liked it when she returned. When I did she let out a cute little sound of frustration and then said, “Joel you went to school in the south so you would know the answer to this, are southerners stupid or do they just sound that way?” I laughed and reminded her that not only had I gone to school in the south but that I was from there, born and raised. We talked on for a moment or two about Charleston before she went on to class and then I walked into the nearest bathroom and cried for ten minutes. Now I know that crying is not supposed to be a part of the male southern MO, but let me point out that stoicism is an external manifestation.
The worst thing I ever heard come out of my mother’s mouth was to call Gradey Myers a Jack-leg. Pretty mild considering the fact that twenty years ago Gradey shot and killed his wife as she ran from him across the Gervais Street Bridge in Columbia South Carolina.
My poor papa, like so many men of his generation, worked very hard to maintain the image of the 50s nuclear family. The pressure of that on top of being a southern stoic, and marrying into another family of proud southern losers of the war makes it just about impossible to reconcile human flaw. It’s a heavy weight to carry but under the circumstances he did a fine job. He certainly loved us very much and provided a modest but picturesque southern child hood. As I get older it is an honor and pleasure to discover the parts of me that are direct infusions of my mother and father. Not the least of which is the capacity for compassion handed down through generations of Houck’s and Hungerpiller’s in the form of that old chicken story.
Go to sleepy that’s a honey
Mammy tell um tale’s so funny
Bout a little yellow hen
Hatchin’ chickens then wouldn’t tend um like she aughta’
Traipsing round in grass and water casa keepin’ in the dry
And the chicken’s they would foller’
Best they could and peep and holler’
Mammy, Mammy, wee’s most froze’
We can hardly lift our toes
Sit down Mammy hover, hover
Let us creep beneath the covers
Peers like we is bleeged to die
But that mammy never heedin
Went off in the rye patch feedin’
Then a pullet standin’ by
Just about big enough to fry said
Come here chickens all together
I ain’t got no sign of feather
But I’ll warm you best I can
And the missus, bless you honey
Saw the sight with her own eyes
And she said to old Aunt Dina’
Kill and cook that lazy mother
Give her chickens to the other pretty little yellow hens
You’s a chicken yourself sweet thing
Mammy’s shoulder is the wing
Under her black feathers creep
While she hovers don’t you peep
Daw that child is fast asleep.
Joel enters and sits at a kitchen table slightly left of center He opens a bottle of Coke-a- Cola and drinks down a large swallow. He then opens a small package of salted planter’s peanuts and empties them into the bottle of Coke. He takes a mouth full and begins to play a hand of solitaire.
Joel: (Looking up) You know, there’s a reason they call this game solitaire.
The first conversation I remember having with my mother was over one of her games of solitaire. I asked her who she was playing, and she said that she was just plying by herself. “You can’t be playing by yourself” I said, “You have to be playing with somebody”. You see I grew up with an older sister and two younger brothers and up until that point I had no concept of a game that you played by yourself. Finally she said, “Oh, I’m playing against the king”. “Who’s winning?” I asked, “Oh, I believe the king’s gonna’ get this one.” she said. And from that point on whenever I asked my mother who was winning she would answer as if she were playing against the king.
Orangeburg South Carolina, born and raised. That’s the way we say it in the south. “Where you from?” “Orangeburg, born and raised.” Actually I was brought up in Cordova. Take John C. Calhoun drive out of town, turn left on the cannon bridge road and head down toward Bamberg. They were our archrivals in basketball; the Bamberg Red Raiders against the Edisto Cougars. Back before the South Carolina schools integrated in 1968 we were the Edisto Blue Devils. When we merged with George Washington Carver we took the name of the white school and the mascot of the black school and became the Edisto Gougers. I remember the first day of school that year going into the fourth grade; my father leaned down and said to me “you can have them for friends but don’t bring one home”. It seemed a little odd to me considering he appeared to be pretty good friends with Willy Reed and Mr. Green who lived around the corner from us.
Mr. Green would come over to help papa butcher the hogs. First you take a rifle or a pistol and you put the barrel right between the hog’s eyes. You gotta hold it steady because a hogs head is really hard and if you don’t hit him straight on the bullet can glance off and end up in your leg, Mr. Green told me that. My brothers and I used to have lots of fun chasing the hogs around the pin and trying to catch them. When we got tired we would lay down in the hog trough [pronounced trof] to rest, because it was so muddy everywhere else. Hog trough that’s where you slop the hogs, where you feed them. The hogs would lick it clean and then the sun would bake the trough dry so it would be all cozy and warm at least to an 8 year old South Carolina boy.
I remember seeing a production of Crimes of the Heart at a university in Maryland. The characters are all supposed to be from Georgia, but the actor was pronouncing it, hog throw. That would have entertained my brother Lin to no end. I think the director was Hungarian.
So yea, we raised hogs boarded horses, when I was really young my father ploughed the field with a mule named Princess, who was blind in one eye. We had a milk cow named Daisy for a little while. In fact my father was a milkman when I was real little. Friends of my parents would sometimes joke around and say, “Oh, he looks more like the milk man”, and then everybody would laugh. It was years before I understood what they were laughing about.
My father won a raffle one year from the Coberg dairy where he worked. The prize was a shot gun, a 12-gauge pump with full choke. When I turned 14 he gave me that shot gun for Christmas. Lin got a 20 gauge single shot, he was only 12. I never cared too much for hunting though but Lin did. He and papa would join a hunting club just about every season. When you shoot your first deer they smear your face in the deer’s blood and hang it’s testacies around your neck. They split the meat up among everyone in the club but the young shooter gets the prime cut, and all though they don’t formally call it a coming of age ritual it’s about as good a one as you will find in the south, bout as good a one as you will find anywhere in the US really.
I did trap rabbits, that was something Lin and I did together. Contrary to what you might assume it wasn’t with steel jaw traps, I’m pretty sure that would be illegal, not to mention senseless. We would build what’s called a rabbit box. The rabbit would go into the box to get the bait, I think we used apples, and by pulling on the apple he would release the stick that held the door allowing gravity to shut the door behind him. In the morning we would make the rounds of our traps. From a distance you could see if the trap had been triggered, then the pleasure was in seeing if it was a rabbit. Every now and then it would be an opossum or in extreme cases a raccoon. You take the rabbit out of the box and hold him to the ground. Then you place a broom handle or something like that over his neck and stand on the ends. Then with a sharp yank on his back legs you break his neck and he dies right away. The skinning process is pretty much the same as skinning a dear or butchering a hog just on a much smaller scale. Same thing for squirrels but I tell you there ain’t much meat on a squirrel.
There was a fair amount of Houck land when I was growing up. In the late 60s my father built a pond about a quarter mile from the house just off of what is now called Houck road. I’ve always thought it’s funny that they say built a pond instead of dug a pond. We did a lot of fishing for brim and bass. Papa stocked the pond with catfish a couple of times. One year we had an alligator come up out of the swamp and spend a few months with us. I got pretty tired of eating brim and bass but my mama made the most wonderful catfish stew. I could never get enough. For years after my mother’s death from cancer I would pine for her catfish stew until one day it occurred to me that Papa knew how to make it and I could just ask him.
The best place for catching catfish was the swamp. We would fish with worms that we dug ourselves or crickets that we bought from Henry Metts Grocery store or Sunny boy Bronson’s “cold beer and live bait” store. But the crème de la crème of live fishing bait was a caterpillar known as the Catalpa worm. A beautiful black and yellow caterpillar found feeding on the large heart-shaped leaves of the Catalpa tree. Leaves that, I might add, were perfect for playing Adam and Eve, but that’s another story.
Like so many southern things worth writing about there is a peculiar technique to fishing with these furry creatures. First you remove their heads and then, with a very small stick you turn them inside out. This leaves them an irresistible slimy day glow green. Now my Papa says that a true fisherman bights the head off of his catalpa worm… I think we all did it once just for the experience but the taste of catalpa worm can only be justified if it guarantees the future consumption of catfish stew and lots of it. Now by this point the thing had usually urinated in your hands which stained them highlighter yellow.
I don’t remember exactly how it happened but one day my brother Lin and I decided to write catalpa worm songs. I don’t know it must have been a rainy day.
(Song)
Fishin’ with catalpa worms from schoolin’ I have cut
Fishin’ with catalpa worms and sittin’ on my butt
Fishin’ fishin’ fishin’ fishin’ it’s how I spend my time
If it weren’t for catalpa worms I could not make this rime
Fishin’ with catalpa worms it makes me scream and shout
Fishin’ with catalpa worms I turn um’ inside out
Fishin’ fishin’ fishin’ fishin’ havin’ lots of fun
If it weren’t for catalpa worms I guess there would be none
If you like going fishin’ give catalpa worms a try
There’ guaranteed to add a couple pounds to your fish fry
But if the thought of furry worms just makes you toss in bed
Perhaps you’d rather gig a frog and eat frog legs instead
Anybody here ever have frog legs? It doesn’t tastes at all like chicken. The method of capture is called gigging. A frog gig is a small three to five pronged trident…five-pronged trident….Pentadent? Any way it’s a fork fixed to a bamboo shaft much like a fishing pole. Now frog gigging is done from a small boat with at least two people. The person in the back of the boat paddles along the edge of the pond. The person in the front of the boat shines a flashlight along the bank looking for the glow of the frog’s eyes. By the way this is done at night. So when you find a frog he freezes just like a deer caught in headlights. The guy in back sets up a gliding approach to the frog and puts down the paddle. You pass the flash light back to him making sure not to louse the frog. Then you pick up the gig and just as you come into range you stick him. You never throw the gig like a spear there’s a much higher chance of missing or not getting a clean stick and that would be very bad form. Then you put the frog in a burlap bag or “corker sack”.
Now cleaning a frog is practically a surgical operation. It’s a combination of performing a Lobotomy, cleaning a catfish, and pulling the legs off of your sisters Barbie doll, and it is not for the faint of heart. Ok, here we go. You take the first frog out of the corker sack and while you hold him down you take a long needle and pierce the top of his skull. There’s a little crack up there for you to get in through but you have to fish around a little to find it. As soon as you do you push the needle in and scramble his brains. In Biology it’s called pithing. You do that so he’s brain dead for the part to come. Now you take a large nail and drive it down through his head and into a board below. That keeps him from jumping away while you work but you have to make sure the nail has a big enough head on it that he doesn’t slide off when he jumps. You make a shallow incision around the circumference of his upper thy, and with pliers, it’s like you’re pulling his stockings down. When you’re at the ankle you cut off the feet. You cut off his legs where they meet the torso and viola. But you’re not done yet. With a hammer you pull the nail out and toss the torso into a bucket.
By the time I was a freshman at Edisto High I had not been frog gigging’ in several years but near the end of the school year my biology teacher, Ms. Sanders, was offering an A to anyone who could bring in a live frog for dissection. My brother and I were out on the pond that night. You know it was so easy when I was ten, but now at fifteen I was having a very hard time with the idea of putting that trident into a frog’s body.
Lin, my brother, had started the glide toward the bank, and had put the paddle down. I had passed the flashlight back and picked up the gig but my body was tingling and I could feel the hair standing up on the back of my neck. I was trembling with indecision as the critical window of time opened in front of me, and as it did I realized that I couldn’t do it; then the knowledge of how much I really needed that “A” crept into my mind. I shut my eyes and threw the gig. Thinking that if I missed I wouldn’t have to admit that I did not try, and I wouldn’t have to admit that I couldn’t do it. I shut my eyes and threw the gig.
I hit him; but it wasn’t a clean stick. I had hit him in the arm and it was a struggle to get him in the boat without tearing his arm off. Very bad form, very bad, and for that I apologies. I got the “A” and probably need it to pass the class but I was not very proud. Of course being a stoic southerner talking about it would never even occur to me as an option.
I did mention that Lin had written a Catalpa worm song too.
Catalpa worm don’t pee on me, do do do do
Catalpa worm don’t pee on me, do do do do
Cause if you do, do do do do
I will kick you, do do do do
I will kick you in your knee, do do do do
And if you holler’ let me go, do do do do
I will kick you even more, do do do do
And if you die, do do do do
I will not cry, do do do do
I will go wash the pee off of me.
Lin couldn’t actually play the guitar.
Now stoicism in the south is further magnified by the quiet nobility of those southern families who lost their fortunes with the end of the civil war, but had no legal means of recovering their losses. Both my parents’ families would be counted among them. The Houck’s and the Hungerpiller’s, it’s Dutch. There is a story about a great great aunt of mine on grandma’s side whose home was saved from being burned by Sherman’s troops because she refused to get out of the chair where she was sitting. Not only did she save the family home but also the family silver, which apparently was hidden under her dress. I have the Hungerpiller nose… Actually, to tell you the truth, it’s the Houck nose but there’s this great photograph of my grandma Hungerpiller in profile looking as noble as George Washington himself. I have a newspaper article about her giving blood. It was a few days before her 60th birthday and the nurse had said, “Mrs. Betty I’m not sure that we can take your blood, you are almost at the cut off age.” My grandma said, “Well, you took Ellinore Roosevelt’s blood, she’s older than me and my blood is just as good as hers.” So they did.
Now it would be easy to only tell you the noble parts but it wouldn’t be the whole story. Like all young boys in the 70s I tried to grow a mustache as soon as I could, no that’s not the bad part. Grandma Hungerpiller told me she didn’t want me growing a beard and my mother explained that it was because it would remind grandma of Lincoln, who freed grandma’s grandfather’s slaves and didn’t pay him a thing for them. Grandma’s been dead for a long time now and things are very different in the south. Sure there’s still prejudice but it’s in the North too it’s just a little more popular to ignore it there.
The history of slavery in the US is as embarrassing to the south as the holocaust is to the Germans. And the Civil War did not start over slavery but the victors write the history, while the losers write the poems. There is a marvelous old story from the southern oral tradition that was used to put me to sleep as a child. I learned it of course from my mother, who learned it from grandma Hungerpiller. A chicken story that was passed down through generations of blacks and whites, it covertly tells of an old black mammy who takes better care of the white children than the misses does. It’s the oldest thing of my family’s that I own and easily the most valuable.
Interesting thing about the Civil War or the War Between the States as it is properly referred to in the south. When you go to a Civil War re-enactment today, even in the north, the Confederacy is always three times the size of the Union army. Apparently it’s more fun to be Southern, but it does make it a little more difficult to justify the north winning that particular re-enacted battle.
Eleven days after graduating from Edisto High School I left for the US Navy and spent most of the next two years in South East Asia. It was as easy as walking into the next room. The G.I. bill carried me through two years at The University of South Carolina and that’s when I left the south for good. It wasn’t’ a conscious decision I was just doing what came next.
North of the line people were often surprised to learn that I’m from South Carolina. They would ask what happened to my southern accent and over the years I have had lots of different answers to that question but the real truth is this. When I was young I noticed the way that characters on TV with southern accents were treated by the characters that didn’t have southern accents and I decided that I didn’t want to be treated that way.
People would often ask if my family had accents and I always answered, “oh yes, they all have beautiful Southern accents”. I’m still not really sure why I felt the need to insert the word “Beautiful”.
When I was a student at the University of Rhode Island I had a little crush on a girl named Pam Crossman (not her real name). She was graceful and charming and naturally had all the deportment that some society girls in the south still study in order to “get a good husband”. But she had had a fiancée from the time that I had meet her. Pam spent one summer in Charleston South Carolina while her Fiancée was stationed at the navel base there. So of course I was anxious to ask her how she had liked it when she returned. When I did she let out a cute little sound of frustration and then said, “Joel you went to school in the south so you would know the answer to this, are southerners stupid or do they just sound that way?” I laughed and reminded her that not only had I gone to school in the south but that I was from there, born and raised. We talked on for a moment or two about Charleston before she went on to class and then I walked into the nearest bathroom and cried for ten minutes. Now I know that crying is not supposed to be a part of the male southern MO, but let me point out that stoicism is an external manifestation.
The worst thing I ever heard come out of my mother’s mouth was to call Gradey Myers a Jack-leg. Pretty mild considering the fact that twenty years ago Gradey shot and killed his wife as she ran from him across the Gervais Street Bridge in Columbia South Carolina.
My poor papa, like so many men of his generation, worked very hard to maintain the image of the 50s nuclear family. The pressure of that on top of being a southern stoic, and marrying into another family of proud southern losers of the war makes it just about impossible to reconcile human flaw. It’s a heavy weight to carry but under the circumstances he did a fine job. He certainly loved us very much and provided a modest but picturesque southern child hood. As I get older it is an honor and pleasure to discover the parts of me that are direct infusions of my mother and father. Not the least of which is the capacity for compassion handed down through generations of Houck’s and Hungerpiller’s in the form of that old chicken story.
Go to sleepy that’s a honey
Mammy tell um tale’s so funny
Bout a little yellow hen
Hatchin’ chickens then wouldn’t tend um like she aughta’
Traipsing round in grass and water casa keepin’ in the dry
And the chicken’s they would foller’
Best they could and peep and holler’
Mammy, Mammy, wee’s most froze’
We can hardly lift our toes
Sit down Mammy hover, hover
Let us creep beneath the covers
Peers like we is bleeged to die
But that mammy never heedin
Went off in the rye patch feedin’
Then a pullet standin’ by
Just about big enough to fry said
Come here chickens all together
I ain’t got no sign of feather
But I’ll warm you best I can
And the missus, bless you honey
Saw the sight with her own eyes
And she said to old Aunt Dina’
Kill and cook that lazy mother
Give her chickens to the other pretty little yellow hens
You’s a chicken yourself sweet thing
Mammy’s shoulder is the wing
Under her black feathers creep
While she hovers don’t you peep
Daw that child is fast asleep.
http://www.scottishbooktrust.com/family-legends/stories/southern-freud-chicken-0
© 2011 Joel Mason all rights reserved