Long Time Leaving (17 page)
Authors: Roy Blount Jr.
It's been years and years since I had a chicken heart. Since I ate one, I mean; there may have been the odd moment, more recently, when I was chicken-hearted. But times of real fried chicken on the table, when I was a boy, were times when I was hearty, bold. I might even say plucky.
I wonder how the word
pluck
came to mean, as the
American Heritage Dictionary
puts it, “resourceful courage and daring in the face of difficulties; spirit.” I don't recall ever plucking a chicken myself. I did a duck, once, after shooting it, cutting it open, and reaching inside to pull out the guts—it was so hot in there! I haven't shot anything since. I do remember, from visits to relatives, the angry stench of scalded feathers after a chicken was dipped in boiling water to render it more readily pluckable. Food preparation was not for the faint-hearted back then.
Well, here you go. The
Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English
defines
pluck
as “the internal organs of a hog eaten as food.” (“As food,” I guess, rather than for medicinal purposes, or for show. Or so as not to be suspected of lacking pluck, as when I ate a sliver of shark sashimi off a barely dead hammerhead because my friend Vereen did. Don't you do it. People weren't meant to eat raw shark.)
Pluck is guts, then. “Liver, lights, and melts, and sometimes sweetbreads” according to the aforementioned
DSME.
Lights being lungs. Melts being spleens. Sweetbreads being whatever the plural of pancreas is. We weren't country enough to dine that comprehensively on a hog when I was growing up. (Souse, which is congealed meat from all over a pig's head and maybe other parts, is something I sampled too late in life to be fond of.) But we sure didn't throw out the liver, gizzard, and heart of a chicken. The heart tastes a little bit like cardboard and a little bit like blood, maybe, but of course my mother's chicken hearts tasted primarily of how good she was at frying. The interest of the gizzard is mostly in the crunchy texture of it (you're chewing what chickens have instead of teeth), variable in density and approaching a funky softness in the thick part.
You know what a “chicken wobble” is? According to the
DSME,
it's “a party, usu[ally] of men, at which stolen chickens are cooked and there is drinking, music making, the telling of tales, and so on…. The chickens had to come from someone represented there, and they made the rounds choosing them from the different roosts. No one knew just when he was eating his own chicken, as they were stolen very quietly during the evening.”
Chicken dinners weren't quite that much fun at our house, but feeling did run high, and I could eat more chicken at a sitting than anybody else in my family. It says a great deal in favor of the other members that I was encouraged to feel proud of this. We were a family of four, my parents, my younger sister, and I. Just right for one chicken. If we had been six, I might have turned out to be a less latitudinarian person. If we'd been twelve, Louis Jordan's song “I Get the Neck of the Chicken” might seem more poignant to me—though there is meat worth gnawing after on a chicken neck, or a chicken back, if you can take it as a divertissement accompanying a drumstick and a breast and a “baby drumstick” (the meat part of the wing) and, if you're lucky (my sister and I, as I recall, took turns), the pully bone, which is what we called the wishbone, which lies between the neck and the breast (it's formed from the fusion of the collarbones—funny to think of a chicken having a collar) and is surrounded by what may be a chicken's sweetest meat. Pully bone, of course, because after you chew and suck all the meat off it (and maybe get a soupçon of the marrow that's close to the surface on the tab projecting from what we might call the prow), you and your sibling can each pull on a prong of it till it snaps and whoever gets the shorter end (or the longer, there are two schools of thought there, and if you're really thinking, you'll wait until after you see which end you come up with to declare which school you subscribe to), gets a wish.
You know what Blaze Starr and Robert E. Lee had in common? Fried chicken as a metaphor for ideal satisfaction. When a Richmond lady teasingly asked General Lee about his ambitions in life, he told her, according to Mary Chesnut's diary, “He only wanted a Virginia farm—no end of cream and fresh butter—and fried chicken. Not one fried chicken or two—but unlimited fried chicken.” And when I saw Blaze Starr dance in her Baltimore club, she asked a man in the audience if he would like for her to take off her ample brassiere, and he responded to the effect that, come to think of it, why yes, yes he would—she danced away saying, “Well, I guess you would like some friiiiiied chicken.” (I have made the acquaintance, in New Orleans, where they sometimes reside, of Ron Shelton, who directed the movie
Blaze,
about the romance of Earl Long and Blaze Starr, and of Shelton's lovely wife, Lolita Davidovich, who played Blaze. Once I asked Lolita whether her parents named her after the eponymous nymphet in the Nabokov novel. “No,” she said, “they just thought it went well with Davidovich.”)
My mother made great barbecued chicken, too, on the grill. (My father didn't cook, even out in the yard, but he would produce sugarcane chews for us with masterly pocketknifemanship. Taking each segment of
the stalk at a time, he'd perform a precise circumcision just through the peel, then slice the peel off in four vertical strips, then cut the chunks from that naked segment with deeper circular cuts that somehow never injured his thumb.) She would use chicken that wasn't too plump, so that it cooked through without getting burnt, just crispy (and greasy only in the most elegant sense) and yet deeply sauce-tinctured and suffused with the taste of sauce and smoke. With homemade peach ice cream? Oh, Lord, that might have been better than her fried chicken. I could eat even more of the barbecued because, by the time we started cooking on the grill, I was in my teens, for one thing, and, for another thing, my mother had started using packages of chicken parts, amounting to two or three or four chickens’ worth of legs, breasts, thighs (second joints, we called them), and wings.
No hearts or gizzards or necks. Lord knows it's easier on the cook to work with chicken that's already been cut up, but you don't get giblets with that, and you don't get a pully bone either, because it is severed wishlessly in commercial dissection. And nowadays you can go to the store and pick up a package of chicken breast fillets, no bones. You miss out on all the breast's ossicular details, from which to worry off all the subtle sweet dribs and drabs of intimate flesh that hold the ribs together. But, okay. A chicken breast fillet is no bad thing. Nothing, however, can be said in defense of “chicken fingers” or “chicken nuggets.” Or worst of all, “chicken drumlets,” which are bits of white meat somehow stamped out in the form of gizzard-size cartoon-style drumsticks. In the process of turning chicken meat into illusory figments, you know a lot of chicken gets lost. Not only a lot of chicken substance, but
the
chicken.
I make no bones about being a carnivore. I wrote a little quatrain once entitled “I Like Meat”:
Cold meat or hot meat,
Sliced thick or thin.
I guess I've just got meat
Under my skin.
But don't serve me any of those drumlets. The chicken my ladyfriend Joan cooks for us now is guaranteed free-range. The chickens we eat may not have had a full, robust life, even for a chicken, but they have been able to stretch their legs and eat bugs. And they taste like something, because they have tasted things. Once I toured a plant that produced chicken parts. I went through the line backward, so that it
appeared to be constructing chickens. That perspective was sobering to a degree, but it didn't put me off chicken. It just confirmed my belief that we owe it to chicken to eat it in acknowledgment of the bird that paid the ultimate price.
P.S.:
Daniel Fletcher of the Department of Poultry Science at the University of Georgia has announced that he can transform dark meat of chicken into white. So—who asked him to? Well, it seems the mass American chicken-eating market is so drastically breastcen-tric these days that most of our drumsticks and thighs are good only for export. Fletcher has come up with a process whereby dark meat is ground up into a “slurry” and then spun at high speed in a centrifuge until the darkness (and, incidentally, all the taste) separates out. The resultant pale, tasteless glop can be molded into nuggets and faux patties long enough to be frozen, in which form it can be cooked, immediately, in large quantities. But if you were to take a chunk of it home and let it thaw, it would melt into a puddle.
That is awful. Chicken is a bird, with parts, some of which— some of the best of which—are dark. If you can't deal with that, you have no business eating chicken. If I were not such a nice person at heart, I would say that I hope someone steals into this Fletcher's bedroom as he sleeps and puts a frozen processed artificial-fiber patty in each of his slippers, so that the first and second thing his feet meet in the morning is ersatz chicken slush.
Uncle Bud was never sick.
His appetite robust,
He took his steak two inches thick,
And onions were a must.
Potatoes, sweet or mashed with gravy,
Peas and buttered bread,
Beans—lima, green, and navy—
And cabbage by the head.
And out of curiosity,
Sometimes people queried,
“Bud, what serving might this be?”
And he would say, unwearied,
“Oh, maybe tenth, or twelf.
Another wouldn't hurt. ”
And yet …he never felt himself
Deserving of dessert.
No to pie or cake he'd say,
“There I draw the line.
After what I've put away,
Just coffee will be fine.”
Some called it a religious thing-
Said, “Bud's a Puritan.
You notice of an evening
He'll watch the setting sun
And then he'll say, We're only here
A little while and, puff
We're gone.’ The fact is, Bud's austere,
And meat is sweet enough.”
That seemed to be the case—but then
Grace Wages came to town.
Widowed. Fourteen local men
Proposed. She turned them down.
But Bud she took a liking to,
A challenge to her cooking.
To Bud she said, “Now I think you
Are right likely looking. ”
He loved her biscuits, loved her ham,
But when she mentioned pie,
He said, “It's just the way I am….”
She said, “But Buddy, I
Think it's time you left your shell.
You're tight. Let down your guard.”
“Well, if you put it that way, well…,”
He said, and swallowed hard.
For who could fail to want—to need—
What Grace urged him to savor?
She said if he would try it she'd
Consider it a favor.
And so at last Bud did indulge
In what he'd not before:
Her pie and ice cream topped with fudge
And hand-whipped cream, and more:
Yes. More. The thing he'd always known
Would in the end undo him.
A thing so sweet, no man could own
He had it coming to him.
She gave it, and it moved his heart
As nothing had before.
He rose and said, “Till death us part,”
And womp, he hit the floor.
And now our Uncle Bud's to bury,
Who never had a cough.
And yes, that maraschino cherry
It was that topped him off.
This piece appeared in
Mens Journal
in 1994. Update follows.
P
eople who know Michael Terry of Savannah well often call him “Mr. Elizabeth.” This does not faze him. His wife is such a great chef—her restaurant, Elizabeth on 37th, has been named one of the nation's twenty-five best by
Food and Wine—
-that he has given up the practice of law for produce shopping, schmoozing, enologizing, volunteering, parenting, and once-a-week fishing. At fifty-one, he freely proclaims himself “a happy man.”
Michael and Elizabeth met at a Kenyon College fraternity party in the early, pre-Aquarian sixties. Michael was sloshing a big container of Hairy Buffalo around and got it all over Elizabeths yellow slicker. She was visiting from Erie State, in Cleveland. Rather than invite dates to parties, Michael tended to wait and see what women remained standing after a few hours, and Elizabeth had in common with him a disinclination to fade.
Despite Hairy Buffalo's Hawaiian Punch base, it was supposed to be green, but for some reason the crème de menthe hadn't taken hold visually, so this batch—there were other ingredients—was no color you'd want to remember. Still, since Elizabeth had been prudent enough to wear a slicker, Michael couldn't see why she took so much offense. He threw a handful of money at her, for cleaning expenses. She did not welcome that gesture.
However, they found themselves upright together at future parties and got to be close. After spending a postgraduate year separately abroad, they realized they were meant for each other.
Michael has a ponytail and at medium height weighs 230, much of it around the middle. Elizabeth vaguely resembles Billie Jean King, only not really butch—though “martinet,” Michael says, is a good name for her in the kitchen. A couple of years ago, I encountered the Terrys walking peacefully home from church, across one of that city's eighteenth-century, ancient-oak-shaded squares, with their lovely daughters Alexis (now a painter in Montana) and Celeste (who at the age of six sat down in a Paris restaurant and ordered the beluga). I am not a churchgoer
myself, and at the time I had just broken up with someone again. I thought to myself, “There's a family.”
