By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
Sea View Inn’s fried chicken.
As evening shadows fell, I made my way home through woods. Overpowering the peppery smell of autumn leaves, the chicken frying in mom’s cast iron skillet came to me. For the rest of my life no fragrance said home like fried chicken.
At my church, cement tables stood beneath cedars. Days came when they held platters of fried chicken, and I looked for mom’s blue-and-white Corning Ware dish, but it’s a wonder I eat fried chicken at all. When I was 16, my mother made me an apron of tan oilcloth. Wearing that apron at 6:30 in the morning I took my place at the end of the line of people processing chickens at Reed’s poultry plant. The line began with the killer, the man who grabbed the neck of panic-stricken chickens hung on a conveyor belt. A swipe of his knife severed the head. For the next eleven hours, I shoveled ice into wooden crates of fryers and stacked them eight-high in a walk-in freezer. My pay? 75 cents an hour.
After my shift, I crawled through the chiller, a long circular tank filled with ice water where a large screw churned fryers stuffed with paper-wrapped livers and gizzards. I fished out the gizzards and livers that worked loose. At day’s end I smelled like a mixture of wet feathers and blood.
I cannot forget the killer. By day’s end congealed blood coated his face. All you could see were his eyes. Black suns set in a red sky. And so it went. The killer killed. The processors processed. I packed and stacked. Together we made that staple of Southern Sundays plentiful. Preachers knew what was for Sunday dinner and it wasn’t beef.
Another chicken memory. I was ten. My grandmother held two squawking chickens fast by their neck. Like Moses facing the Red Sea, she flung her arms wide and those arms windmilled until the chickens and their heads separated. The birds beat circles in the grass like, well, like chickens with their heads cut off. For me it’s hard to remember fried chicken without violence being involved. Today’s kids see plastic-wrapped fryers with fancy labels. For them chickens might as well drop from trees like hickory nuts.
A lifetime ago we regulars went to Herb’s Grill, habitués drawn by good food and no pretenses. A simple block building. Blue-collar vibe. Cement floor. Frosty mugs of beer. Sizzling fried chicken. Cole slaw. Fries. A roll. Friday nights meant waiting on a table. Fried chicken was the draw.
Along my back-road drives I pass sagging chicken houses. Rust drizzles down their tin roofs like cinnamon. I wonder. Did those houses feed me? I’d wager some did.
A fashion statement . . . over the years and chickens that made the ultimate sacrifice my attire changed. I went from oilcloth apron to Sunday go-to-meeting finery to tailgating’s Georgia Ts and How ’Bout them Dawgs caps, to corporate neckties, and finally to liberating blue jeans and white linen field shirts.
One the 1950s appeared. I should have been wearing seersucker and a hand-tied bow tie when this sea level change arrived. At Pawley’s Island an inn took me back to the good old days. No credit cards accepted. At the Sea View Inn I ate the one meal planned for the day. It happened to be Wednesday. Fried chicken day.
All my chicken dinners gave me another style of clothing — gowns with ugly patterns with strings that tie in the back. Now I worry my love for fried chicken will get the best and rest of me, but then my days are numbered. What does it matter if I eat some fried chicken. The other day I hesitated to order an entrée. The guilt. Said a friend, “Tommy, go ahead and enjoy yourself.” Well, I didn’t, and I don’t think I will. I’ve lost too much of who I was.
I lost, too, that tan oilcloth apron, but for most of my life I never lost my taste for fried chicken despite time spent in a slaughter house. Coincidentally, the best fried chicken I ever ate came from a shack back home. Ferguson’s Snack Shack. I hear tell it’s closed for good now. One less temptation and the end to my fried chicken history . . . for now at least.
