I remember the first time I saw Granddaddy kill a chicken. I remember it, dirty-white and squawking, and Granddaddy putting it down on a stump. I remember him telling me to hold it still. I remember the way the chicken made a high-pitched kind of purring in the back of her throat and scratched at me in an annoyed sort of way, and Granddaddy telling me to step back and bringing down the axe on the hen’s neck. I remember seeing the blood, beet-juice red, and I remember the chicken hopping clean over the top of the magnolia tree, flapping its wings, and then hitting the ground hard, the blood not squirting but flowing from its neck, and it jumping up again, this time not to the top of the tree, but almost halfway, and then up less high and less high until it couldn’t jump no more. It just flopped about, and then it just twitched. I remember looking at the head sitting there on the stump by itself and thinking that it looked kind of funny, like something off Saturday-morning cartoons, a filmy kind of eyelid half-closed and a long orange tongue slung out of its orange beak. I remember sometimes when Granddaddy would kill a chicken it didn’t jump but it would run and run fast, in a kind of womanish strut, as if somebody had told it some bad news and it was trying to run away and not hear it, all the while running with no head and blood just a streaming red over its dirty white feathers.

I remember Grandmamma didn’t chop the heads off. She would take a chicken in each hand by the neck and swing them around and around like small sacks and then let them loose, and they would flounce about, flapping their wings, their heads drooped down like balloons half full of water, turned around, beating against the chickens’ breasts, beating a rhythm. I remember a time a chicken jumped up into a old chinaberry tree and Grandmamma had to knock it down with a broom. I remember Grandmamma let me wring a chicken’s neck one time and it pecked me.

I remember my Grandmamma and my Great-Aunt Jonnie Mae and my Aunt Rachel and Aunt Ruthester and Aunt Rebecca tending great big pots of boiling water, and they would dip the dead birds into the scalding water and turn them over a few times. I remember the stink of the wet, hot chicken and the smell of the feathers that fell in the fire. I remember them hauling the birds out with sticks and yanking the feathers out. They would come out easier after being scalded. I remember Grandmamma letting me pluck a chicken. The feel of the wet feathers. The feel of the hot and cooling bird. The feel of the pinfeathers, stiff close up on the skin that was pale pink and white and beige.