Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? Read online

  The Roman traditions still survive in our words. When we refer to an auspicious occasion, we are harkening back to this tradition. The term auspice comes from Latin, and derives from “observer of birds.” Augury—that is, divining the will of the gods by observing the natural world—is thought to come from the Latin root words that mean “directing the birds,” though it more likely stems from aug, meaning to prosper. Whatever the word’s origin, an augur was a state-sponsored Roman priest seeking to know the gods’ plan largely through watching birds. This was a serious job reserved for aristocratic men of dignity, notes the famous first-century BC philosopher and orator Cicero.

  Cicero was an augur himself. Before any major undertaking by the state, specialists scanned the skies to mark the behavior of eagles, ravens, or other creatures that flew in the heavens. Their movements, if properly interpreted, could reveal whether the gods favored a particular course of action such as starting a war or suing for peace. After all, in this era only birds shared the heavens with the gods.

  By Cicero’s time, in the waning days of the Roman Republic, cynical politicians had hijacked the hallowed tradition of augury. “Scarcely any matter out of the ordinary was undertaken, even in private life, without first consulting the auspices,” he writes. As the empire grew, however, watching for hawks or eagles or pigeons in the skies above the capital proved too haphazard. Wild birds come and go depending on weather, time of day, and migrating habits. They didn’t always appear when their assistance was required.

  Domesticated chickens, by contrast, could be kept close by for frequent consultations at any time of night or day, so the Roman government gradually shifted its focus to the fowl. A specialist called a pullarius cared for the sacred flocks, which were kept in temples near the forum, among legions, and even on ships. The primary means of extracting an omen from these birds was for the pullarius to toss grain, bread, or cake into the coop. If the birds gobbled up what was proffered, the action in question had the gods’ blessing. But if they refused to eat or, worse, made a racket and moved away from the food, this portended ill.

  In Cicero’s day, people still recalled what took place on the morning of a crucial naval battle two centuries before. The sacred chickens kept on a Roman warship refused to eat the grain, which wasn’t the omen desired by the arrogant consul, who had the offending birds tossed overboard, allegedly saying, “Let them drink, since they don’t wish to eat.” The enemy defeated the Romans. His blasphemy against the sacred creatures was not forgiven or forgotten.

  A senior Roman general likewise scoffed when an augur informed him that the chickens’ omens required that he remain in camp rather than fight. He and most of his army were slain within three hours as devastating earthquakes shook Italy. “A large number of towns were destroyed . . . the earth sank, rivers flowed upstream and the sea invaded their channels,” Cicero notes. Contradicting a chicken in ancient Rome was no laughing matter.

  This reliance on coop-bound birds naturally made the omens easier to manipulate. Chickens could be starved or overfed in order to produce the desired results. Cicero, Rome’s consummate statesman who would be assassinated for his opposition to dictatorship, had few illusions about how religious rituals could be twisted by self-serving lawmakers. “I think that, although in the beginning augural law was established from a belief in divination, later it was maintained and preserved from considerations of political expediency.”

  Our word sacrifice comes from Latin, meaning to make sacred. Chickens, along with other animals like pigeons or cows, were regularly sacrificed in Rome on both private and public occasions. Sometimes specialists called haruspices would then examine their interior organs, which provided data on whatever issue—illness, birth, money problems—was at stake for a person, a family, or the nation. The offerings then typically were cooked and consumed by priests and the laity taking part in the ritual. The echoes of this ancient practice are still found in Jewish kosher and Muslim halal rules. These laws are based on the knowledge that humans kill to live, and a set of methods and prayers are necessary to maintain a respectful relationship with the deities that make our lives possible.

  Now, of course, slaughter and evisceration of the animals we eat increasingly takes place out of the sight of today’s urban dwellers, removed from our daily lives. Even most modern kosher and halal killings are conducted in factory plants, and the prayers are often prerecorded and played on an endless loop. By arguing for their right to conduct ritual sacrifice, Pichardo and his church prompted a national debate about animal cruelty, witchcraft, and religious freedom.

  “In a world of instant gratification such as our own, the concept of sacrifice might seem strange,” writes Ócha’ni Lele about Santeria practices. “But in truth, in every moment of life sacrifices must be made for the betterment of oneself and one’s community.” To the Lukumi, sacrifice is at the very heart of the faith that came on the slave ships that crossed the Atlantic.

  All African slaves brought their particular traditions to the Americas. But they were often split up from their families and ethnic groups, weakening traditional links. Fearful of revolts and witchcraft, white owners and governments did their best to stamp out practices seen as pagan and substitute mainstream Christianity in its place. Some practices survived in places like the U.S. South, but in Cuba whole traditions remained largely intact. In the early nineteenth century, thousands of Yoruba were sent to this Spanish-run island dominated by sugar plantations. Their late arrival, large numbers, and concentration around Havana helped protect Yoruban traditions despite laws banning many of their practices. Under a semi-Catholic facade, orishas transformed into saints. Babalu Aye became Saint Lazarus, and chickens continued to be sacrificed, though often in secret to avoid punishment by wary whites.

  Testifying to the U.S. district court, Pichardo explained that only priests conduct the sacrifices by puncturing the carotid arteries in one move, much as is required in Jewish and Muslim religious rules. The animal’s blood then is drained into a clay pot and the head is decapitated. Like Rabbi Epstein in Brooklyn, Pichardo insists that the animals are well cared for and that their deaths are quick. Animal rights activists counter with numerous cases both among Hasidic Jews and Santerians where such humane intentions are ignored.

  For Santerians there is the added complication that those chickens designated to absorb spells or illness from individuals cannot be eaten and must be left outside to decompose. Sanitary workers at the Miami-Dade County Courthouse must clear the steps of dead and decapitated chickens that were part of various rites, and joggers along the Miami River periodically must be careful of treading on rotting carcasses. For urban Americans, this can be deeply disturbing. But for many Cuban emigrants, these dead animals are a necessary part of life.

  In June 1993, all nine Supreme Court justices, including the devoutly Catholic Scalia, strongly backed the right of Pichardo and his congregation to practice their sacred rites. Hialeahan officials “failed to perceive, or chose to ignore the fact that their official actions violated the Nation’s essential commitment to religious freedom,” scolds Justice Anthony Kennedy in the unanimous opinion. “The sacrifice of animals as part of religious rituals has ancient roots,” he wrote. “Although the practice of animal sacrifice may seem abhorrent to some, ‘religious beliefs need not be acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others in order to merit First Amendment protection,’ ” Kennedy adds, quoting an earlier decision.

  There were no birds sacrificed when Chief Justice William Rehnquist inaugurated Bill Clinton as president shortly before the Hialeah decision was issued, but ritual chicken killings in the United States are not confined to Miami and its suburbs. U.S. Park Police recently found the remains of sacrificed birds just a few miles from the high court in Washington’s Rock Creek Park. Pichardo and his congregation went on to build their modest church and community center. Other Santeria sanctuaries have since sprung up around the country, and
the fear and suspicion surrounding the tradition has largely abated. Cicero might have been pleased.

  10.

  Sweater Girls of the Barnyard

  My honest friend, will you take eggs for money?

  —William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

  Among African Americans across the South, the pastor had first dibs on the bird that typically graced the table after church. “He ate the biggest, brownest, and best parts of the chicken at every Sunday meal,” complains poet Maya Angelou, recalling the pious glutton Reverend Howard Thomas. Often called the preacher’s bird or the gospel fowl, echoing its sacred role among West Africans, slaves and their descendants laid the foundation for America’s love affair with chicken that is now spreading around the world.

  British settlers brought their flocks to Jamestown in 1607, a dozen years before the first African slaves arrived on Virginia’s shores, and the birds helped sustain struggling colonists. Food grew so short in 1610 that the governor made unauthorized killing of any domesticated animal, including cocks and hens, punishable by death. In New England, where chickens arrived on the Mayflower, Edward Winslow in 1623 sent an ailing Native American chief two chickens to make a healing soup. Grateful for the exotic gift, the chief is said to have revealed a plot by another tribe to destroy the nascent colony.

  The bird, however, was rarely more than an incidental food in colonial America. On Winslow’s farm, wild bird remains excavated by archaeologists outnumber those of chickens three to one, and cattle, pig, sheep, and goat bones dominate. Virginians, meanwhile, feasted on turkey, goose, pigeon, partridge, and duck, along with venison, mutton, pork, and beef, as well as shad, sturgeon, and shellfish. ­“Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century descriptions of colonial foodways ignored the chicken for the most part,” says the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America.

  For enslaved African Americans, this humble status proved a welcome boon. In 1692, after several individuals bought their freedom with profits from animal sales, the Virginia General Assembly made it illegal for slaves to own horses, cattle, and pigs. Masters often forbade their human chattel from hunting, fishing, or growing tobacco. The chicken “is the only pleasure allowed to Negroes; they are not permitted to keep either ducks or geese or pigs,” one visitor to George Washington’s Mount Vernon remarked.

  On the expanding farms of the colonial South, African Americans began to breed, buy, sell, and eat fowl as they saw fit. Slaves in this era typically were allowed to grow their own vegetables, and chickens were fed garden waste, table scraps, and the roughage from ground corn. When Washington ordered cornmeal to replace the whole kernels formerly given to his Mount Vernon slaves, they complained, “as much from the want of the husks to feed their fowls, as from any other cause,” he wrote.

  Chicken bones account for a full third of all bones found among the African-American quarters of Maryland and Virginia plantations, and plantation records show frequent cash payments to slaves for poultry. Owners granted slaves authority over chickens because the birds were of negligible economic importance and reduced plantation spending on feeding field hands, and many slaves of West African descent retained skills in poultry raising inherited from their ancestors. Virginia planter Landon Carter, for example, mentions two hundred chickens “entrusted” to his slave Sukey.

  Just as European Jews gained expertise in money lending, a profession disdained by Christians, poultry became an African-­American specialty. Some planters required slaves to sell them all surplus meat and eggs in order to limit their entrepreneurial freedom. As early as 1665, Maryland governor Phillip Calvert sued Thomas and Elizabeth Wynne for buying ten chickens from his slaves, who had pocketed the proceeds. A century later, Washington’s neighbor James Mercer wrote that African Americans “are the general chicken merchants.” In one letter to his overseer he offered to exchange several yards of linen to “pay for some debt I am said to owe them for Chickens.”

  In what likely was a typical exchange, Thomas Jefferson in 1775 bought three chickens for two silver Spanish bits from two of his female slaves who worked at his Shadwell plantation. In the early 1800s, when he was away serving as president of the United States, Jefferson’s granddaughter Ann Cary Randolph recorded each purchase made while she helped manage the estate in his absence. Chickens and eggs were the items most commonly sold by slaves to the white household; the only ones not involved with poultry sales were the cooks and Jefferson’s mistress, Sally Hemings. Such commerce took place on South Carolina’s rice plantations as well, where slaves often were expected to grow their own food. In 1728, a white owner named Elias Ball paid one pound and fifteen shillings for eighteen chickens to his slave Abraham. A savvy businessman, Abraham then threw in one chicken for free. Planters bought up to seventy birds at a time from their human chattel.

  “Adjoining their little habitations, the slaves commonly have small gardens and yards for poultry, which are all their own property,” wrote Isaac Weld while visiting Virginia from Britain in the 1790s. “Their gardens are generally found well stocked, and their flocks of poultry numerous.” Free and enslaved African Americans created extensive chicken networks both on and off plantations, with free blacks serving as middlemen to distribute birds beyond the borders of plantations. One traveler passing through Virginia before the revolution was surprised “by a crowd of negroes” who showed up at his door eager to sell poultry and produce to the newcomer. In Charleston, black women at the city market sold chickens and eggs “from morn ’til night,” the South Carolina Gazette reported. In that setting, they were free to charge their white customers high prices and keep the proceeds. “The slaves sell eggs and chickens,” wrote Fredrika Bremer, an intrepid Swede who toured the antebellum South. “They often lay up money; and I heard speak of slaves who possess several hundred dollars.”

  The birds were also currency in the underground economy among African Americans. Chicken-rich slaves on one Virginia farm contracted enslaved carpenters to build wooden stools for their cabins in exchange for fowl. By the time of the Civil War, African Americans had been selling chickens and eggs for more than two centuries. This thriving business did not extend into the Deep South, where conditions were often harsher and entrepreneurship was more difficult. In one South Carolina rhyme from the era before the Civil War, masters threatened troublesome slaves with deportation to “Ole Miss’sip’ whar de sun shines hot, Dere hain’t no chickens an’ de Niggers eats c’on.”

  Slaves involved in the poultry business had a strong economic incentive to encourage their masters to eat more chicken. Since black women often did the cooking in plantation kitchens, West African foods like okra and kale crept onto plantation menus. But it was an aborted slave rebellion that helped launch fried chicken as a favorite Southern dish among whites as well as blacks.

  In 1800, as slaves fought a revolution against their French masters in Haiti, an enslaved Richmond blacksmith named Gabriel Prosser organized a revolt in the Virginia capital. The plan was discovered and he was jailed with his fellow conspirators. In a deposition, Prosser said that he had intended to make Mary Randolph, a well-known white Virginia hostess and chef, his queen in a new African-American-­controlled regime. Her infuriated husband, Richmond’s federal marshal, sought execution for all the plotters. Jefferson, then campaigning for the presidency, counseled Governor James Monroe to be lenient. Over Randolph’s objections, Prosser and two dozen men were hanged, but ten others were spared.

  The new Jefferson administration dismissed Randolph from his government post as tobacco prices collapsed. The couple lost much of their wealth, and Mary Randolph—known now as “Queen Molly”—opened a Richmond boardinghouse to make ends meet. Her fame as a chef spread and in 1824 she published The Virginia Housewife, considered the first Southern cookbook. Designed to replace reprints of old English cookbooks, Randolph’s list of recipes combined British and African traditions using American ingredients, including the first published recipe
for Southern fried chicken. She advised dredging pieces in flour, sprinkling them with salt, and frying them in lard to a light brown color.

  Fried chicken is not unique to West Africa; one ancient Roman recipe calls for frying the bird with spices, including pepper, and Scottish Highland cooks have an old tradition that came with them to the New World of placing chicken pieces in an iron pot with hot oil. But Randolph’s recipe, copied or heavily influenced by ­African-American slaves, became the template for the dish. A century later, another white, a Midwesterner named Harland Sanders, combined a variation of this recipe with the technological innovation of the pressure cooker to launch the world’s second-most lucrative fast-food chain, Kentucky Fried Chicken. After three centuries of cultivating flocks, cooking fowl, and laying the foundation for the modern poultry industry, African Americans found themselves relegated to the sidelines and stereotyped as chicken thieves even as fried chicken emerged as a quintessentially American food.

  A quarter century after Randolph published her cookbook, a virulent strain of hen fever jumped from Britain to New England. More than ten thousand people converged on a chilly Thursday morning in Boston’s Public Garden in November 1849 as politicians, businessmen, bureaucrats, and the general public crowded the nation’s first fancy poultry exhibition. “Everybody was there,” wrote eyewitness George Burnham. Daniel Webster, the nation’s greatest living orator, with a voice likened to a church organ, came with a pair of Javanese fowl. Urged to give a speech, his attempt was drowned out by the cacophony of roosters. One man that day paid thirteen dollars for a single pair of chickens, the price of two barrels of wheat flour.