Chickens in Morris Holler

I was about eight or nine and we lived up in the Morris Holler. The house was old but sturdy and we didn’t have electricity. I have to say that it truly never bothered us though.

It was summertime and I heard a chicken loudly squaking and then mama and daddy got out of bed and went looking for it. Mama knew old Clementine was setting somewhere for she would come to the house looking for a handout and then disappear. We looked and looked but couldn’t find her but on this dark night she kept squaking until they found her on a nest of hatching babies! There were so many eggs and little scared fellows climbing all over their mama but my mama calmly picked up the wounded hen and handed her to daddy as he handed me the flashlight. Mama then put chicken and eggs into her apron and we made it back to the house. Now back in a holler at night, it’s very dark and a bit scary. But Clementine was hurt. Something had nearly gotten her for the top of her head was messed up badly.

Mama doctored the hen up with some sort of salve then built a fire in the cookstove as the little chickens tried to jump out of the wooden box looking for their mam and despite all the confusion chickens kept hatching!

Mama put eggs, baby chicks and mama hen on the oven door that she had opened. Since she had built a fire she made daddy some coffee. I’ll always remember that night. The three of us huddled in the kitchen with a softly glowing light from the coal oil lamp, with a half dead hen and around two dozen eggs and babies. Mama figured the other hens had laid in the nest too, which was not uncommon.

I think that we got little sleep that night, getting up checking on the baby chicks and their mama. Clementine lived and so did the babies and it was just one of the incidents we had with animals back in the holler. If mama had been a cussing woman I think she might have done some swearing over something trying to get her chickens.

Our chickens would roost in trees around our house, but when one began to set she stayed with her eggs. We had a high porch and they had nesting boxes under it to lay in but they frequently found their own spots. The smallest girl in the pic is me, the man is my uncle and the older girl is my sister.