Pax Ameraucana or The Chicken Chronicles

Pax Ameraucana or the Chicken Chronicles
©2009 by Alice Walker

Chapter One

For my fortieth birthday I had two wishes. To sing with Sweet Honey in the Rock and to visit Bali. I fulfilled them both: Singing with Sweet Honey for Sisterfire, a celebration of women artists in D.C., and going to Bali where my partner and I rented a house that faced rice paddies and waterfalls. Bali enchanted me. I was returned to a relaxed openness of spirit I had thought lost. (Back home the heat was on because of a novel I had written and a movie that was about to be based on it.) One afternoon, returning from a fire dance (real fire, not criticism) and the stunning Ubud market (that would change drastically and not for the better I would observe in later years) I noticed, as if for the first time, a chicken and her brood crossing the path in front of me. She was industrious and quick, focused and determined. Her chicks were obviously well provided for and protected under her care. I was stopped in my tracks, as if I had never seen a chicken before. And in a way, I hadn't. Though I grew up in the South where we raised chickens every year, for meat and for eggs, and where, from the time I was eight or nine, my job was to chase down the Sunday dinner chicken and wring its neck. But had those chickens been like this one? Why hadn't I noticed? Had I noticed? I wrote about this episode in an essay: "Why Did the Balinese Chicken Cross the Road," which appears in a collection of essays that charts my re-awakening to the Natural world, called Living By the Word. In that essay I interpret this odd encounter with the mother hen and her chicks as an attempt by “the Universe” to help me along in my vegetarianism. Having been raised on a diet that prominently featured Southern Fried Chicken, it was proving difficult to stay the vegetarian course.

Years went by. As they do.

Once I stopped moving about quite so much my interest in chickens, and memory about that particular chicken, asserted itself. I realized I was concerned about chickens, as a Nation, and that I missed them. (Some of you will want to read no further). I also realized I ate so many eggs, I should get to know the chickens laying them. Whenever I visited someone with chickens that they tended with respect, I felt reassured. I wanted chickens of my own.

One night at dinner with the Garcia-Balandrans, a young couple and their sons who are my neighbors, I broached the subject of my longing. The youngest boy’s eyes glowed at the mention of chickens, which I thought a good sign. He is five. The older boy, nine, seemed interested as well. Their parents and I, and my partner, theorized about how to handle the logistics of raising chickens for their eggs, and of course, sharing the eggs. At first we thought we’d have a cage on wheels that we could drive back and forth from my house to theirs, letting the chickens fertilize our respective gardens on a rotational basis. We soon dropped this idea because it seemed cumbersome and messy. Plus we both have raised beds. What we decided might work would be for them to get the chickens started, when they were chicks, and then transfer them to my place when a chicken house I was dreaming of building had been completed.

This actually happened. The boys loved the chickens, and enjoyed caring for them. By mid-summer when the beautiful chicken condo was ready for occupants, more chicks had been ordered to raise at their house, and their parents had bought them a dog. The day of transfer was joyful. Everyone loved the chicken house and yard, right next to my garden, so the chickens would have plenty of fresh produce, and admired the spacious interior of the chicken house, it’s roosts and its laying nests which I had lovingly and with hopefulness filled with straw.

Sitting on the ground inside the chicken yard, I was astounded when a chicken strolled over and hopped up into my lap. The boys had interacted with the chickens so tenderly that they had no fear of humans. Instead this one sat very still, as I instinctively cradled it and began to coo and stroke its reddish colored feathers. I instantly named her Gertrude, and later would call her by her full name: Gertrude Stein. She looked nothing like Gertrude Stein, of course, but I found whenever I called her Gertrude (I soon abandoned “Gerty”) the Stein naturally followed. Over the next few weeks there would be Babe, Babe 2, Hortensia, Splendor, Glorious, Rufus and Agnes of God, to name a few.

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