Chickens Indeed

by Gary Clifton

I grew up in an African-American slum on the edge of an all-white neighborhood. Each morning I walked past the taverns, up the hills to the all-white public school while my friends from the neighborhood were herded on a bus for transport to the “n-word” school (their term) across town. Although several teachers busted their creative bigoted asses to remind me that I was not really one of the anointed, my fifth-grade teacher — I’ll call her Mrs. Brown — must have been a founder of the KKK and, quite possibly, a fugitive Nazi prison camp guard hiding in the U.S. school system.

She constantly referred to me as a smart-ass — which I was — or a troublemaker, which I was not. In those days, if you came from “down there,” the progressive school system found it perfectly acceptable for a teacher to knock said “down there” refugees on their butts. There weren’t many, making me a far more wary youngster. Mrs. Brown was a big old gal with a passing fair roundhouse right, particularly if she could catch somebody off guard. Her husband was an auctioneer who committed suicide — so they said. I figured later, she’d probably caught him with one of those round house rights while holding a brick and goodbye, Mr. Auctioneer.

I almost responded once when a punch caught me pretty good: “You hit like a girl.” Oddly, that response almost always dumped ice water on a bully’s ardor, except when the cops rounded us up and applied the same method. Then, the “girl” taunt was often not such a good idea.

Probably one of Mrs. Brown’s biggest demons was grade card time. Nobody — that’s nobody, not no time — from “down there” apparently ever made straight A’s until she became saddled with my dufus carcass. Classes were overcrowded, around forty or so at a batch. Desks were bolted to the floor and thus immovable. Diligent Mrs. Brown made doggone certain I took all tests while sitting on a straight-backed chair away from classmates for a week or three after report cards to prevent any hanky-panky. Pity. Isolated, all those little tikes with ironed shirts couldn’t see my test papers to steal answers as shamelessly as those big brown sewer rats stole garbage down my way.

Call it psychological rebound, but it was the year I entered Mrs. Brown’s class that I started hanging around the Wesley House, hopefully for eventual infusion into the Golden Gloves. They gave us free soup after the workout. Quite possibly, Mrs. Brown’s second-rate roundhouse right gave me a false reading on just how hard a boxing glove could strike a human skull and not cause instant death. Later, I realized it sometimes did.

I had to grow older to realize how much it must have ground sand into Mrs. Brown’s armpits when the school principal made me captain of the school patrol boy squad two years later. Holy bananas, one of “those” was in a position that gave him a badge and portable stop sign. Where could this horror lead?

I finished college, funded, among other jobs, by working the night shift in a mental hospital. Incredibly, one of the kids from “up the hill” was a patient in my ward. I’ll call him Oscar. Crazy as a fruit-orchard boar in elementary school, he’d deteriorated to an empty shirt in the ol’ mental ward.

Mrs. Brown had never landed a blow on him, because he was a quiet, model child who always wore clean clothes and had innocent blue eyes. Innocent, because Oscar comprehended little of what he saw. In my sober reflection, she should have tagged him once or twice. Inside that “hospital,” the atmosphere was public school multiplied by a factor of twenty. And Oscar had drifted to where he could not keep both those blue eyes pointed in the same direction.

I signed a contract to teach and coach in my old school district. The system was so proud that one of their own had “achieved” a college degree they wrote and said I’d have a sponsor at the all school meeting for faculty newbies. I guess they forgot I had never been one of their own but rather a dirty-neck little puke from down where all the rest were bused to the “n-word” school. I figured “sponsor” was code for “guard” to be posted to prevent me from stealing the silverware.

You got it. Opening day and there stood my sponsor, Mrs. Brown, only what: twelve or so years removed from Roundhouse Right Elementary? A stooped, shot in the ass old woman, she had the naked audacity to say she always knew I’d turn out “right.” She babbled that she was retiring at the end of the year so her only duty would be to feed her chickens.

Chickens, for God’s sake! When she and other enlightened educators were using my head as a sounding board, folks down in my neck of the woods had chickens up the wazoo in back yards. It was called dinner. Stealing a chicken was a shoot-to-kill offense.

I have a lifelong history of telling folks to kiss off. Often, it’s good therapy for all involved. But I could not bring myself to tell Mrs. Brown that she smelled like chicken crap which seemed to be a perfect persona. I stood there that day, eyeing the old relic, convinced she ate one of those chickens — live of course — that very morning.

I also lacked the cojones to tell her Oscar was caged in a rubber room and, after crapping his pants a requisite number of times, didn’t get clean clothes until the next week.

Life carried me far from the area. She died a few years later, and I flew back. Great God, I went to Mrs. Brown’s funeral! In honest retrospect, Mrs. Brown had contributed in no small part to a healthy dose of just what the doctor ordered.