Biscuits & Firecrackers: True Stories from the Cotton Country

By Ph.D.

This collection of essays addresses humor and pathos in the Cotton Country of northern Alabama and Tennessee in the 1950s and 60s. After World War II, the G.I. Bill and the emergence of the new South brought Darnells Depression-era parents from the soil to the boardrooms and strip malls. From holidays, to classrooms, to fields, these children of the Greatest Generation flourished in an evolving culture that arose to change the face of Dixie forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Feb 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781512728651

Ph.D.

ROBERT N. DARNELL, the author of Biscuits and Firecrackers, was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1950. He grew up in Florence and then Decatur, Alabama. His essays have been published in several literary journals and magazines. He was a doctor of chiropractic, a certified acupuncturist, and he also held an MFA from Spalding University and a PhD in clinical pastoral counseling. As ordained clergy, he and his wife, Constance, have been instrumental in starting churches and home fellowships in many locations around the United States. They reared their two adult children in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, beginning in 1997. Dr. Darnell passed away in 2015, with the goal of finishing this collection of stories unmet. They were completed with a final edit by Constance, who has authored many magazine articles as well as Songs for Martha.

Book preview

My Grandmother Killed Chickens

One bright blue fall afternoon in 1955, I sat eating lunch with my grandmother. Somewhere in my five-year-old mind a question formed. The answer would bring me face-to-face with mortality.

This is the best chicken I ever ate, Grandmom. What store did it come from?

In my parents’ house, chicken had always come from a store. It rested dutifully in the refrigerator wrapped in white butcher’s paper until it appeared on the table fried, roasted, baked, fricasseed, barbecued, and broiled.

I didn’t get this chicken from the store, son. I got it from our chicken house.

Whaaat?

The chicken house, son. You know, right over there.

My paternal grandparents had moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, from the family farm in Kentucky after the government required their land for Camp Campbell, future site for the 101st Paratrooper Division known as the Screaming Eagles. When the Eagles screamed, my grandparents moved to an antebellum on the outskirts of town.

The home was a brick two-story with six wooden columns and a balcony off the second floor. The house faced south and overlooked a spear-tipped iron and stone fence. Stately oaks buckled the ancient sidewalk along a street that had seen buggies before the automobile. The place may have been considered grand at one time; a plantation house perhaps.

Through the haze of memory I recall twenty-five acres of mature oaks, ash, chestnuts and red and yellow maples, all glorious in their autumn foliage. A fresh fall breeze swept over the red clay garden to the east. It was rows of turnip greens, corn, okra, beets and the like. To the north the smokehouse waited for the sausage and hams of November. The chicken house to the west, an apiary and an orchard completed the compass. One western acre had been fenced off to allow forty or so chickens to scratch.

From my seat in the kitchen, nothing in that chicken yard resembled what I was eating. There was never a connection between chicken on the plate and the birds that I had so often seen pecking, scratching, and gliding on the breeze. I always envied them their gliding. How did they catch and ride the wind? I yearned to do the same. My daddy and I spent hours flying kites at our Alabama home. Mother would laughingly say, You two might have your feet on the ground, but your heads are in the clouds.

"Those birds are eating chickens? How? They’re all covered with feathers."

Well, you have to take the feathers off, Bob.

Confusion. I thought I knew about chickens. Daddy was a fount of poultry information. He had taught me, for instance, that the chicken was the closest living relative to the Tyrannosaurus Rex. He said there were more chickens in the world than people. Did you know that chicken clucks had meanings to other chickens? I did.

How d’you take the feathers off? Dread crept in the air.

Well, we’re havin’ chicken for dinner tomorrow, so, you and I will choose some birds and I’ll show you how to take their feathers off.

She pulled her apron off over her head and it caught in the hairpins of the bun at the nape of her neck. Grandmother’s long grey tresses were contained in the daylight and released in the evenings. I loved to watch her brush her hair at night before bed. It was a ritual intimacy that she and Grandfather and I shared when I visited. In my grandparents’ house we went to bed at dusk and rose before dawn. Whippoorwill to rooster. The days unfolded in an order as purposeful as new growth driving toward the harvest, and the rhythms of our schedule played harmony with the sunrise and the land.

My grandfather still owned several hundred acres out near the camp where he raised corn, tobacco, horses and cattle. His time was divided between farming and running a general store he owned across from the main gate of the military base. I knew my Grandfather as shrewd and industrious and grave— except when my grandmother was brushing her hair.

I hurried to finish my meal, eager to learn the secret method by which the white birds went from barnyard to table.

Grandmother Nanny was wearing a white and blue dress that day. She wore dresses every day of her life. They were the thin, printed cotton frocks that rural women wore in the fifties. The fabric faded with washing, but her dresses were always ironed and neatly buttoned. She smelled of the sunlight caught in her line-dried clothing. Her hosiery was rolled to the knee in a kind of brown nylon cuff. She was shod, as usual, sensibly. Grandmother wore traditional, thick-soled, black lace-up shoes that adhered to her personal maxim, Never sacrifice your feet for fancy.

I followed Grandmom through stippled yellow sunlight under the apple trees toward the chicken house. The limbs were heavy with red and golden fruit that perfumed the air and invited bees to stop and lick. We kicked the new-fallen leaves, still soft and colorful. We held hands. She had a basket of tools in her left hand and she lifted me to jump so high with her right. By the time we reached the wire fence, I was excited and breathless.

Together we cornered three chickens and Grandmom stooped to catch them. Cornered, the hens were nervous. But they fairly exploded when captured. Two birds in her right hand, one in her left, they beat their wings wildly to no avail.

Open the box, Bob.

I ran to throw open the door of the wooden holding coop. I stood on tiptoe and leaned back as far as possible to avoid the startled feathery captives. My mother’s voice echoed in my ears, Bob, don’t act ugly. You behave and mind your grandmother. My lips were pursed to shut out the dust flying up from the flailing wings and my eyebrows stretched high upon my forehead, but Mama’s admonition bolstered my courage.

Mind your face, Grandmom said as she stuffed the chicken she held through the slatted wooden door.

I slammed the door as the first chicken tried to escape. I was giddy, but determined to be helpful. Grandmom separated the two chickens she still held and we worked together to cage them. Three captives joined in a clucking, squawking crescendo that made me cover my ears.

After building a fire from sticks and split kindling, we wrestled and tugged a large, black kettle over the crackling blaze. The garden hose gushed and sputtered to fill our scalding tank near the clothesline.

Let’s get that big chicken too, Grandmom.

No, we have enough right here.

One by one, Grandmom grasped the chickens by their heads, swung them around like a poultry lariat, and with a sudden startling snap of her wrist she beheaded Sunday’s dinner. Sprays of bright red blood colored the yellow maple leaves resting gently on the yard. With hiccupping laughter, I jumped nervously avoiding the decapitated chickens as they ran about searching for their lost heads. I held my face in my hands as she clipped the chickens to the clothesline to allow them to bleed out. There was blood, so much blood. My own nosebleeds or scraped knees had not prepared me. Mind your grandmother Bob.

"Here, hold these birds, Bob." She had me grasp two exsanguinated chickens by their cold, yellow paws while she plunged the third into boiling water to scald the feathers loose.

Come dip yours too, son. I squinted my eyes against the smoke and lowered my birds into boiling water. The pungent odor of wet chicken feathers mingled with autumnal wood smoke in my nose. The chickens jerked in my hands, nervous as three cats in a burlap bag, I held on tight and looked up at my grandmother. She smiled and said, That’s my boy.

This was all very heady and might have been more than I could stand if she had not been so solicitous. Surely she understood my shock at the gore. But she was determined to initiate me. As it was, her straightforward confidence helped to mitigate my horror. By the time we cooled the chickens with the garden hose and laid them on an old stump for plucking, I joined in with gusto.

Standing next to my tall, slender grandmother, I pulled white feathers with a sense of discovery. These birds were actually eating chickens. Without their feathers, they were identifiable. Yet another revelation occurred as my grandmother took a sharp knife and eviscerated the birds. It was a fascinating exposition of the chickens’ working parts and my first biology lesson. I realized that before eating chickens came to the refrigerator, they were living birds who flew and laid eggs. Each one was covered with feathers and filled with strange, marvelous organs and tubes made from tissue that I had never seen before. Grandmom cut the scaly paws from what were clearly now three eating chickens and headed for the house with a pan full under her arm.

Come on in Honey.

I followed, picking up several large white wing feathers that lay on the ground. Grasping the feathers between my fingers, I flapped my arms to try to catch the wind. The big old country kitchen was alive with discovery and possibilities as Grandmom continued to prepare for the next day’s dinner. I busied myself assembling an imaginary flying machine out of chicken feathers and a sweet potato. Grandmother did not notice my wind rider until it sailed past her ear and landed with a crash into the luncheon dishes in the kitchen sink.

Robert Norman Darnell! What in the world do you think you’re doin’?

I made a glider!

Well, you better take this thing and glide right outta here, sir.

In the yard, I began experimenting with lift and acceleration by launching my tuberous craft from the hammock near the clothesline. It was not long after I had perfected the technique of hurling the sweet potato by forcefully swinging the hammock toward the chicken yard that I noticed the big red chicken investigating the commotion.

I did not know that he was an aggressive ten-and-a-half-pound Rhode Island Red Rooster. I did not know that my grandparents had chosen him for the hardy resilience of his breed. The fact that the reds can handle marginal diets and limited housing conditions while continuing to produce more eggs than any other strain was unknown to me. All I knew was that I was a recent graduate of chicken killin’ school. I could see he was the biggest and most beautiful chicken in the whole yard. Most of all, I longed