By Sylvia Tomlinson
Redbud Publishing Company
www.redbudpublishing.com
Softcover $19.95 USA
Reviewed by Karen Davis, PhD
“Growing chickens doesn’t
have to be a nightmare. It can be a good life.” p. 171
This is the premise of the people who raise chickens
for the poultry industry in rural America, the contract growers
in Sylvia Tomlinson’s 2003 novel concerned about their plight.
If instead of perfidy, greed, corruption, and lack of conscience,
the industry would grant equitable contracts and profit sharing
to the men and women who put up 50 percent of the capital investment
in the form of land, chicken houses and equipment—only to
reap one or two percent of the profits—the growers could
get on with the business of “growing” chickens and
enjoying the agrarian lifestyle that, in this book, consists chiefly
of barbecues, church suppers, cold beers, lattes, and stop-offs
at the local diner, along with cell phones, microwaves, beepers,
and automated chicken houses liable to power outages and fires,
with a loss of income to growers in the form of 27,000 dead and
dying birds per house to be disposed of.
Plucked and Burned casts a misty backward
glance at the years between 1959 and 1970, when the more or less
equitable arrangement between the growers and the chicken companies
of the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s dissolved, and the consolidating
poultry industry crushed growers’ attempts to organize.
Growers retaliated against the companies and each other by burning
down one anothers’ chicken houses and shooting out company
truck tires, but to no avail.
The novel is narrated by college-graduate grower
Doug Blackwelder, whose wife Dena quit teaching to raise chickens
with her husband, both of them expecting and initially enjoying,
a pretty easy life. Set in contemporary rural Oklahoma, the story
opens with the suspicious death by electrocution from an ungrounded
fan of a 14-year-old Mexican chicken catcher “splayed out
and fried, lying face down in chicken litter, in Jimmy and Stella
Rawlins’ broiler house.” From here the reader is led
through the grotesque events, told in plaintive accounts, that
bedevil chicken catchers, growers, and “processors”
(slaughterhouse workers) in their dealings with the industry,
embodied by the Bible-hugging Randall Witherwax—a Bo Pilgrim,
Frank Perdue, John Tyson, George W. Bush composite whose eyes
exude “the cold fire of evil masquerading behind a cloak
of religiosity."
Gazing at Witherwax’s “Mansion on Mt.
Pluckmore,” Doug laments the decline from the golden age
of poultry growing to the iron age of today, from the grower’s
point of view: “When we were in high school Randy’s
parents ran a mom and pop poultry company. They treated their
growers as part of the family. They lived modestly and invested
the profits back into the company, sharing with the growers.”
While the overt conflict in this novel is between
the growers (and peripherally the chicken catchers and slaughterhouse
workers) and the industry, a deeper tension resides in the growers’
ambivalent self-image. On one hand they long only to restore a
world of paternal care bestowed on them by an earthly poultry-industry
Heavenly Father; on the other hand, they see themselves as models
of “rugged individualism” and “independence,”
though most of the growers Tomlinson interviewed were too fearful
even to allow her to use their names, like the one who complained
that the companies “have the ability to give you crappy
birds forever and literally bankrupt you,” but who “would
rather not have even a first name listed in my case.”
Despite industry corruption on every front, the
majority of growers are not anti-industry, any more than are their
clerical advocates, like the real-life Rev. Jim Lewis of Delaware,
who throws pieces of the dead bodies of chickens to his audiences,
not to confront them with the suffering comprised in those bodies,
but to gain sympathy for the suffering of the catchers impressed
on those bodies. As one grower says in the book, “I’m
not looking for trouble. I’m just asking for people to do
the right thing and show a little respect.” To achieve this
goal, it is necessary, says former poultry grower, Mary Clouse,
in her Foreword, to get “informed citizens, all eaters of
chicken and all patriots to join in the struggle for fairness
and the basic civil rights” for poultry farmers.
At the end of the story, a few characters decide
to do something else for a living, as did Clouse and her husband
finally, though not out of moral concern for the chickens. The
birds, immured in dark “tunnel” houses, are glimpsed,
as it were, in parentheses, as in: “They’ve got a
million frickin’ ways to pluck us. Pardon my language, ladies,
but I just got delivered 22,000 sorry biddies for my houses that
are supposed to hold 27,000. On top of that, besides being puny,
I think most of them are blind [and] arrived half dead. If that’s
not retaliation for us trying to organize, then I don’t
know the meaning of the word.”
It’s rather the way Doug looks periodically
in on the current flock, and checks the automated feeders and
drinkers, just long enough to make sure everything’s on
schedule, and the cash will flow, or to report and clean up a
disaster, between the things he actually cares about. With their
microwaved hamburgers and frothy beer, Doug and Dena watch the
moon rise over the chicken houses from their cozy outdoor deck,
without any sense that there is something wrong with the landscape
much bigger and uglier than their dream-world in ashes.
United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization
that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic
fowl. http://www.UPC-online.org
United Poultry Concerns, Inc.