Chicken-and-Dumplings and Stuff Such as That for Thanksgiving

Living in upper South Carolina farm country as a child in the 1950s, I learned lots about chickens, fried chicken and chicken and dumplings.

My mother, father, sister and I usually ate Sunday dinner – city folk called it “lunch” – at my paternal grandparents’ home. My dad’s only sibling, Uncle Fred, and his wife, Frances, usually joined us. We all attended the same rural church.

If his sermon ran a little long and people appeared restless, a preacher in those days might say, “Y’all stay with me, now. That fried chicken will wait.” That elicited chuckles from some Sunday morning pew-dwellers who would later pucker up to poultry. Nobody I knew back then ate “out” on Sundays; they all headed home for Sunday dinner, which was usually the largest meal of the week.

When I was old enough to feed myself, Mama let me choose my Sunday piece of chicken. I always chose a leg, because other parts seemed too prone to hide bones that might get stuck in my throat.

Most farms kept chickens, and Southern fried chicken was a staple. I’ve seen my grandfather chop off a chicken’s head and seen my mother wring one’s neck. I have visual memories that help me understand the meaning of that old expression: “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”

Martha Brown, a friend and a retired nurse, told me she was eight years old when her mother let her try her hand at “wringing.”

“We lived in town [Greer, S.C.] but had chickens,” Martha said. “After spinning the chicken's neck around several times, I threw down the chicken. She was alive, but quite drunk, and ran to the street. A car hit her on busy Cannon Avenue. I can still see that car and that chicken. That was my first and last attempt at wringing a chicken's neck.”

Martha's family ate that chicken, despite the miserable creature’s mode of demise. A hen or rooster’s death by vehicular chicken-side probably doesn’t rate much lower than that of a chicken meeting its expiration date by “wringing.”

My mother’s side of our family was known for chicken and dumplings. Mama was one of nine children, and I guess an old chicken (or chickens) had to go a lot further when served as the main course at a meal for that crowd. My maternal grandmother put lots of dumplings (cooked balls of dough) with the chicken. Those dumplings were good enough to eat by themselves. Maybe that’s what Grandma counted on.

I’ve seen Grandma cook chicken and dumplings in a huge dishpan. Chicken and dumplings seemed to satisfy the hunger of Grandma’s offspring, who tended to look more like dumplings than some people on my father’s side of our family.

I can’t think about chicken and dumplings without remembering a Thanksgiving Day I, as a child, spent with my paternal grandparents. We gathered at the home of my grandfather’s brother, Jay, and his wife, Nell. Their small house, sided with asbestos shingles which were painted a pale, foliage-green color, sat beside a flat, paved road in rural Taylors, S.C.

During the previous summer, I had wandered into Great Uncle Jay’s sugarcane field, cut a section of a plant and sucked sweetness from that fibrous stalk. The ancients defined sugarcane as “reeds that produce honey without bees.”

Sugarcane stubs dotted that gray-hued field by Thanksgiving morning, when my grandfather, Uncle Jay and a few other male relatives, wearing faded coats and hats or caps, cradled shotguns and traipsed over sprawling acres of Southern landscape. They returned mid-morning with their harvested game – rabbits. Their wives prepared the main course for our Thanksgiving meal: rabbit and dumplings.

I’d never hesitated in dining on Chicken Little or Henny Penny, but putting a fork into Peter Cottontail didn’t appeal to me. That day, I dabbled at the dumplings. Who wants food that has a hare in it, anyway?

The REV. WILL B. DONE* HURTS HIMSELF ... and thinks about blaming God

A few years ago, the Rev. Will B. Dunn battled a bruised bursa in his right hip after he fell on some ice while walking to get his morning newspaper. (He believes in preaching with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, so to speak.)

Will’s driveway is cement and has an upward incline to it as you walk toward his mailbox. One day in November (as I said, a few years ago) some ice came during the night, and Will couldn’t wait till it melted. He had to have his newspaper to read about world events in order to see if the Rev. John Hagee was on the right track as to how end-time events might shape up.

So, Will put on a coat and trekked to his mailbox. He has a little holder underneath the mailbox where his paper person puts the newspaper. Will made it to the box, but on the way back, his leather-bottomed shoes failed him. Whoop-sy! He fell backwards and twisted as he went down. He whopped onto his right hip. Ker-splat!

He lay sprawled flat on his back for a few minutes. During that time, he thought about “predestination” and wondered whether his falling was “meant to be.” He thought about his wife, who died from cancer a few winters ago, and wondered why that was “in God’s will.”

He then thought, “Lord, why did you let me fall?”

He quickly repented and prayed silently, “I’m sorry, Lord. I didn’t mean to blame you. I should have waited till the sun melted the ice.”

Will felt a bit better after he repented of blaming the Lord. But his hip was hurting “like the devil,” as some of his Bypass Baptist church members might say. They like to blame most everything on the devil, though Pastor Will B. knows they bring lots of stuff on themselves.

“The devil don’t have to work all that hard,” Will B. once said from his Bypass Baptist pulpit. “Most of y’all bring a heap of hardships on yourselves.”

As Will lay on his cold driveway, reflecting on why he was lying there, those words he delivered to his flock came back to bite him and “hit home.”

“I’m a-laying like a turtle on its back,” Will thought. “I better get up from here.”

The words Jesus said to the paralytic came to Will’s mind: “Rise, take up thy bed and walk.” And Will thought of these words in an old chorus his church used to sing: “We’ve got the power in the name of Jesus.”

Will longed for that power. He wanted to touch his own hip and have it become well. Wouldn’t that be some more kind of testimony to give at the church-house?

Will laid his hand on his hip and prayed out loud. Nothing happened. Then he thought, “I don’t want one of my members riding by and seeing me in a discombobulated condition. I need to present an ‘I have it all together’ image before my people.”

Then he wondered just how much human pride was in that thought. And he mused about the pride behind his idea of wanting instant healing. In his mind, he saw himself standing before his congregation, bragging about his healing, about how he laid hands on himself and got healed without anybody having to help him. He saw himself elevated in the eyes of his congregation. No longer would they question his authority. No more would his members be thinking, “Maybe we need a new pastor.”

Will then thought about this concept found in the book of James: “When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives.”

“Uh-oh,” Will said to himself.

He realized his thoughts were playing ping-pong in his head, so he decided he’d done enough thinking while lying on his backside. He managed to struggle to his feet, and, holding his newspaper like something he paid a price to get, he limped to his front steps, hobbled up them, and made it through his front door.

Soon, Will sat, hurting, in his easy chair. He prayed a blessing over two pieces of toast and a small glass of orange juice and he gazed at a nearby photo of his deceased wife, Nancy. A tear ran down his cheek as he prayed softly but out loud, “Lord, I trust you in all things and ‘lean not to my own understanding.’ In all my ways I acknowledge you and ask you to direct my paths . . . in Jesus’ name, amen.”

(*The Rev. Will B. Done is a character in "Kudzu," a comic strip that was discontinued after its author/artist Doug Marlette died in a car accident in 2007. I enjoyed Marlette's work and wrote this fictional story based on his created character "the Rev. Will B. Done.")

The Halloween Party and Pastor Jimmy Thompson

When I was a kid in rural South Carolina in the 1950s, Halloween wasn’t considered too evil, as I remember. I don’t recall much being said about it being a bad thing. During my childhood days, my church wasn’t big on bashing the occasion.

All I knew back then about Halloween was that you dressed up like somethin’ and went to houses to get goodies—we wanted candy and not just apples. Living on Groce Meadow Road near the Mountain View area of Greenville, S.C., my younger sister, Shirley, and I only got to say “Trick or treat” at the doors of a few houses.  Walking on a country road on Halloween night was scary in itself.

I recall learning this song in third or fourth grade at Mountain View Elementary School: “Hallowe-ee-een, the witch is riding high / Have you see-ee-een her shadow in the sky? / So beware, don’t you dare to even boast / Or a ghost to your dismay / Will hear you say that you don’t care / Say a prayer / Or it may come and pull your hair.”

We heard that song on a school record player. I sort of knew there weren’t any real ghosts around Mountain View, so that little ditty didn’t frighten me much. My family attended Gum Springs Pentecostal Holiness Church, and I’d heard about a witch trying to call up Samuel the Prophet after he died. King Saul requested that the witch get in touch with Samuel, and both he and she were scared silly when Samuel actually appeared. At least that’s the way I understood that Old Testament story, which led me to believe that seeing a ghost would be a very rare experience. I learned at church that “a great gulf” was “fixed between the living and the dead,”  and my family told me that ghosts weren’t real.

I heard lots of preaching about the Holy Ghost but not much talk about Halloween-type ghosts. Church folk now tend to talk about the “Holy Spirit” instead of the “Holy Ghost.” I reckon “Holy Spirit” sounds more comforting than “Holy Ghost,” which comes from the King James translation. 

The first Halloween carnival I attended was staged at Fairview Elementary School, near Greer, S.C., when I was in sixth grade. My sister and I were new to the school because our family had moved that summer from Mountain View to “Burgess Hill,” located in the suburbanized outskirts of Greer. Fairview School had a Halloween fundraiser. I bought a ticket to visit one scary room at the carnival.

An older girl in charge of that room blindfolded me and led me to “exhibits.”

“OK,” she said, “Put your hand in here to feel a dead person’s brains.”

She guided my hand into a container. I felt some cold, slushy stuff that seemed to have cooked macaroni in it. A chill went up my spine. The power of suggestion was working on me.

She led me a few more steps.

“Now, these are the dead person’s eyeballs,” she said.

Again, the solution my hand touched was cold, and I felt “eyeballs” that must have been grapes. Before I left that room, somebody jumped out of nowhere and scared me.

Trick-or-treating over the years on Burgess Hill yielded some good eats. Word got around about which houses had the best treats. One lady up on the hill served candy-apples. 

I had my driver’s license by the time Faith Temple, the church my family attended, held a Halloween party for the church’s youth at the Greer home of Josie and Bruce Foster. (They might have called it a “costume party” rather than a Halloween party; I don’t remember.) Randolph and Hendrix were the Foster’s sons. Recognition was to be given to the person who could best hide his identity at the party.

At home, before that party, I dressed up as an old lady. I had a rubber mask that was made to look like the face of a weathered old sailor with a hooked nose. In the rubber mouth of that mask hung a half-smoked rubber cigarette. A little red color on the end of that cigarette made it appear real. The half-smoked replica of that cigarette hung from one side of a sagging mouth. The mask had no simulated facial hair, so its image could pass for either a man or woman. I put a kerchief over my head and tied it underneath the mask. I wore a shawl over some kind of old dress that went to the floor. I was over 6-foot, 2-inches tall, but when I arrived at the Foster’s home, I exited my car and walked bent-over (I think I had a walking stick) to the door of their basement, where the party had already begun.

Pastor James H. “Jimmy” Thompson, always supportive of our church youth, was there, and he kept on following me and trying to guess who I was. All the costumed people except me were identified before the evening drew to a close. But I guarded my identity. People asked me questions, and I replied in a disguised voice. Pastor Jimmy, especially, continued following me, trying to figure out who I was.

Finally, after winning recognition for being the unidentified costumed person, I stretched to my full height and took off my mask. Pastor Jimmy said he failed to identify me because I stayed bent over the whole night.

I miss those old days – back in the days when I didn’t know too much about Halloween.