The Woman Who Fried the Chicken

The plate hit the linoleum and broke into four pieces.

I remember the count because I picked them up. Four pieces of heavy white church stoneware, one thigh, one drumstick, a spoonful of green beans, a roll that kept rolling until it stopped against the leg of a folding chair.

And over all of it, my sister’s voice.

“Mother. You have had enough.”

She did not shout it. Cheryl has never needed to shout. She said it the way you would say it to a dog that had its nose on the counter, flat and tired and final, and her hand was still out in the air where it had come down across the plate.

Our mother stood there with her own two hands held out in front of her, empty, shaped around a plate that was not there anymore.

She is eighty-three years old. She was wearing the blue dress with the white collar she has worn to every harvest supper for twenty years.

The fellowship hall at Antioch Road Baptist holds two hundred people if you set the long tables close, and that Sunday evening we had set them close. Every seat was full. There was a line down the wall to the serving tables, forty people deep.

I have never heard two hundred people stop chewing at the same time. I had not known a room that size could go that quiet. I could hear the big coffee urn ticking in the kitchen.

Somewhere at the back a baby fussed and was hushed.

I was at the dessert table with a pie server in my hand. I set it down on somebody’s pecan pie without looking, and I walked across that floor.

I wanted to take my sister by the arm. I wanted to say things to her that I have never said in fifty-four years of being the younger one, and I wanted every person in that hall to hear them.

I got as far as opening my mouth.

Then I looked at Mom’s face.

She was not angry. That was the thing that undid me. She was looking at the floor with a kind of worry, the way she looks at a pan that has boiled over, and I knew exactly what she was thinking. She was thinking about the mess. She was thinking somebody was going to slip on that grease.

So I shut my mouth and I got down on my knees.

I should back up, because none of it makes sense unless you know about the chicken.

Our mother, Opal Pruitt, has fried the chicken for the harvest supper at that church every year since 1975. Fifty-one years. She started the fall after Cheryl turned seven, when the woman who had always done it moved to Sedalia to live with her daughter, and somebody in the kitchen said, “Opal, you fry a good bird,” and that was that.

For most of those years she did it in the church kitchen. There was a big commercial fryer back there and a crew of four or five women, and they would turn out two hundred pieces on a Saturday and fill the whole building with the smell.

Those women are in the cemetery on Highway 13 now, most of them. Wilma. Dorothy. Mrs. Kemper, who could cut up a chicken faster than you could say it.