The (More Than) Chicken Chronicles

What I found really neat about The Chicken Chronicles is the way that Alice Walker seamlessly weaves so many insights about life, her memories, and herself into her discussions about her chickens. Her prose is deceptively simple; informal, even at times childish, language when she is speaking directly to the flock, easy to follow sentences, but she packs so much wisdom and information about herself into her short chapters.  I especially saw this feat accomplished in chapter 17 “Leaving You” and 18 “St. Michael.” At the beginning of chapter 17, Walker frames a very elegant, heart wrenching discussion on her feelings of sadness and abandonment as a child when her siblings left home by pausing as she leaves the chicken house and imagining how the chickens feel about her leaving. Were the chickens really sad about Walker ending her visit to them that day? Does Walker have a psychic connection with her birds to the extent that her emotional attachment makes her feels she does? Either way, it does not really matter because the important part is that with these chickens, Walker has the opportunity to unconditionally love, take care of, and be present for these dependents and so work through the abandonment she felt by making sure she does not continue and participate that cycle of stoicism. She muses, “But when you’re really little, or even not so little, what do you do with this feeling nobody names? So in a way, Mommy, with you, is just waking up. Isn’t that funny? And this was one of those times.” (78). These chickens help Walker tap into the emotional and physical role of the mother and recreate a mother/dependent relationship that is full of the stability and emotional openness that she wished for as a child.     

Another moment I found very significant in its universality was in chapter 18 when Walker is thinking about freedom and her desire to let the flock loose in her garden to eat the bugs there. She is warned by a friend with chickens that she would regret such a decision because the chickens would peck at all of her plants and vegetables too, yet Walker decides to let the chicken have freedom, again projecting all of her human desires onto these birds. Watching them destroy her carefully maintained garden, Walker says “And in fact, the more I let go caring about the damage, the more I relaxed, even exulted, in the freedom you seemed to feel” (85).  There is no doubt the chickens enjoyed the experience—easy, plentiful food and new territory to explore, but again it seems that Walker is the one learning the lesson and getting the most emotional satisfaction out of the moment: she learns to let go of petty concerns about maintaining order and control of her garden space in order to give her beloved “girls” this freedom. Then again, later in the chapter when Glorious goes missing, Walker is heart broken but she realizes: “There is no reliable protection we can guarantee for another being, as much as we would like to do so. Freedom is a big risk, as is loving…Mommies can’t be everywhere. Only Nature can be everywhere. It has its ways” (87). The risks of freedom and of loving—of making yourself emotionally vulnerable—are universal experiences, that have nothing to do exclusively with chickens, but it is a testament to Walker’s way of seeing value in everything that she has learned such lessons through her “girls”. Another example, perhaps, of how Nature “has its own ways”—both heart-breaking and beautiful.