By Hartley Neita, ContributorMY FATHER kept chickens in our backyard. They were common fowls. He had about two dozen of them, and there was always one rooster. He was big-big in comparison to his brood of females. He had a bushy tail which curved into the air, and a red scalloped piece of what looked like flesh at the top of its head.
The fowls were not kept in coops. They slept on the lower branches of a cashew tree which grew at the back of the house. In the morning, the rooster woke them with his cock-a-doodle cry and one-by-one they fluttered to the ground. The rooster watched for a while and then chose one to begin his chase-and-capture, and held it to the ground while pecking at it. During the rest of the day he chose each, one-by-one for his pleasure.
PEEL-HEAD FOWLS
Those fowls were known as Dominick and peel-head birds. The Dominick was a fluffy round bird covered with tiny multi-coloured feathers. The peel-heads were exactly what the name described them. My mother grated the white of the coconut and squeezed out the milk to make a coconut meal which my father fed the fowls with every morning.
He also fed them with corn, some of which he grew in the backyard. The corn gave the yolk of the eggs a bright red colour. Throwing the coconut meal and corn on the earth also allowed the fowls to peck and swallow gravel which helped to masticate the food in its craw.
Later on, the 4-H Clubs organisation introduced him to Plymouth Rock and Rhode Island fowls. These were much larger than the common fowls and laid many more eggs. My father had to build coops for them. Previously, my sister, brother and I had to search the yard to find the eggs laid and hidden by the common fowls.
But with these new special breeds in coops, we had no problem finding their eggs. The only problem with them was that they did not want coconut meal and corn, and my father had to buy special feeds for them.
The 4-H Clubs also introduced rabbits to him. For them, he had to build hutches, and it was my siblings and I who had to walk far-far through the woods which surrounded our home to find clumps of guinea grass to give them. And because our village suffered from months of drought there were times the grass dried and died and we could find very little to feed these rabbits. My father therefore stopped breeding them.
GORMANDISERS
He also grew lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, beans, gungo, red peas and carrots in his kitchen garden. Again it was we the little ones who had the task of searching the leaves of the cabbages and lettuce for the worms and caterpillars which fed their juicy, green bodies from the vegetables. We, too, also collected ashes from the fireplace in the kitchen to throw at the roots of the tomatoes. I don't remember why we did this. It was also our job to nip out the extra stem which grew on the tomato plants. We called them gormandisers. And it was also our job to scrape up the chicken dung from the yard to fertilise these vegetables.
My family had eggs every day. Some mornings we had them hard-boiled. At other times we had fried eggs. On Christmas Day mornings we had a special treat of scrambled eggs and bacon. We also had vegetables regularly. I preferred these vegetables raw, but the rest of my family loved them cooked. Too "gooey" for me.
The fowls also served two other purposes. Once each week, my father selected the oldest fowl, caught it and placed it under a basket with its head sticking out. You could see him grinding his teeth and closing his eyes as he lopped the head off. He never hung around while the headless bird flip-flopped all over the yard, blood spewing from its neck. He went to his bedroom and closed the door. He was the only one at our table who did not eat chicken meat.
My mother plucked the feathers from the bird and stored them. At Christmas she had nuff-nuff feathers to fill three or four flour bags she got from Mr. Shim's grocery shop, and made new pillows for all of us. They were the softest
pillows I have ever slept on.
Now that I am writing this
article, and look back in time, I realise that we Jamaicans repeat words for emphasis. Like far-far, and near-near, and big-big, high-high, deep-deep, ugly-ugly, pretty-pretty, nuff-nuff, sweet-sweet, and straight-straight. We double up words, one half becoming an adjective and the other a noun to give them stronger meanings. There is also teeny-weeny, derived from tiny and wee. Oh, we are creative!
And that is why, I now wish you a merry-merry Christmas, and a happy-happy New Year. May your days of joy be long-long, and your sad-sad days be short.
