Rhode Island Reds and Dominiques

Georgie Moss Lewis and my sisters Betty and Barbara.

The first thing I do every morning is go down to the kitchen and look out the window for my chickens.  There should be three black hens, three red ones, three grey striped ones, and Roy.  The Black Sex-Linked hens came to me by accident.  My usual breeds are Rhode Island Reds and Dominiques.  I like them because they are the breeds my grandmother raised. 


My grandparents have been gone for more than 40 years now, but when I was a child they had a farm in Tennessee.  Their white frame house stood on a piece of high ground with cotton fields in front and pasture behind.  It had a fireplace in the living room and a hand pump just outside the back door.  It had a concrete front porch, a single bedroom, and a kitchen with cold running water.  When my sisters and I were infants, our parents used to bath us in the sink.  When we grew too big for that, they heated water on the stove to fill a tin basin on the floor.  I can remember sitting in that tub surrounded by family going about their business.  My baths were public and drafty, but to their credit, they were better than running to the outhouse in rain.

The house was surrounded by cotton fields.

The chicken house stood behind the house, near the storage shed and the milking barn.  Other than the space for these buildings and their yards, and for the garden and pasture, my grandparents planted every foot of their land in cotton.  Growing crops occupied their lives; it bound them to the soil and the seasons.  My grandparents' farm was not like mine.  It did not have tractors or pet sitters.  It did not have  hay delivered.  My grandparents did not name their chickens or give their roosters away. 

In the year when my father was dying of lung cancer, we talked about his upbringing.  "We didn't have nothing," he said.  "We never had nothing."  But as I remember it, my grandparents had quite a bit.  For one thing, they were healthy and, I couldn't help noticing even as a seven-year-old, inordinately handsome.  For another, they liked each other.  They smiled a lot and their eyes crinkled, and they had four doting sons who visited often and sent money when they couldn't.

My father Jim Lewis and his father Noel.

But good looks and good cheer don't necessarily put food on the table and the money must not have gone far.  In a climate that ranges from 10 inches of snow to 100+ degrees, my grandparents never lived in a house with insulation, they never had an indoor toilet or a telephone, never owned a car or a home.  Until they moved to my father's farm, they had been tenent farmers.  Their last house, in Mississippi, had only a deep well on the back porch -- that's right, the kind you dip water out of with a bucket, and the porch was built right over it -- and when it went dry, my grandfather hauled water on foot from the neighborhood store, a mile up the road, on the highway.  That was in 1966, and he was almost 80 years old.

It's no wonder their lifestyle has passed away.  And no wonder chickens are not always welcome these days, reminders as they are of such times.  I'm glad for the comforts I have and for the ease my animals share.  But I am also glad for the people and places I loved as a child and grateful for the memories.  And for my Rhode Island Reds and Dominiques who keep them alive.