I Have a Persistent Thought About My Mother’s Thumb
The Chicken Chronicles, Chapter 6
©2009 by Alice Walker

It is just her thumb. I recognize it because I loved it so well, along with all the rest of her. But the reason I see it now is because of the chickens. She ordered them from a catalog, the postman delivered them to our mailbox at the side of the road, way in the middle of Beautiful Countryside, Georgia, and she carried the brown cardboard box carefully down the hill to our house. It is the moment of her opening the box that I notice her thumb. There is a deep scar on it, where she almost severed half of it with the butcher knife.

Sometimes, looking at the block of knives I use in my kitchen I am wryly amused: there is a knife for boning meat, a knife for paring fruit, a knife for chopping vegetables, a knife for slicing bread. There are knives I never use except to open jars. Who knows what they’re really for. But in our house, when I was a child, there was only one knife, the butcher knife, a ten inch blade screwed into a chunky brown wood handle, and it was used for everything. So she may have cut her thumb nearly off while cutting a hard cured ham that swung in the smoke house, or cutting kindling for starting the kitchen fire, or cutting a rope for tethering the cow... But cut it to the bone, she did. And then, because there was no doctor, and because she was learned in the ways of folk medicine, she put her two pieces of flesh together again using clay from the dirt daubers that built their nests under the eaves of our house, soot from the chimney, and spider’s web. Having applied these medicinals, she wrapped her bleeding thumb - which she had washed as well as she could in cold water from the spring - in a clean cloth, and gone on about her work.

What I see is the tenderness with which she lifts the lid of the box, already having rigged up a low wattage light bulb (we have recently acquired electricity) for heat, and how she kneels there, with the warm light bulb just where the sun would be, as the two dozen yellow chicks, with their bright orange beaks, fumble and stumble over each other, their just born faces gradually adjusting to the fresh air, the warmth, and the light. She’s not a talker, my mother, but she offers a few encouraging words of welcome, praise, concern. Did all of you make it? How many lost on the journey? Let’s move them out. How hungry are we?

She will raise these chickens, as well as chickens we have from hens and roosters already established in our yard, and with their help - their eggs and their flesh - she will feed her family of ten.

And something else will happen between my mother and her flock. I see this, now that I am old enough to see her so much better: She will sit with them when we are at school or at church and endless work has prevented her from leaving home, and she will enter the peace that I have found with Babe and Gertrude &Co., that elusive “eternity”- for someone so busy as she - that meditation has always been.

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