Viola and The Chicken (A Tribute to My Grandma Me-Me)

(Here’s a post from April 2010 about my Grandmother, Viola “Bush” Doggett

Truth, we didn’t call my father’s mother Grandma or Grandmama.  Her name was Viola but us grandkids called her” Me-Me” and her husband William H., “Pop”.   Me-Me was an amazing woman.  She was very tall and beautiful.  My daughter,  Catz aka CCL,  looks like her.  Me-Me raised my dad and his siblings with a tough hand in a predominately white neighborhood in Steubenville , Ohio, an interesting neighborhood choice for an African-American family in the 1920s.   You see, my great-grandfather  owned three houses in the neighborhood and gave one to his oldest son my grandfather,  “Pop. ”  Viola also desegregated a hotel in downtown Steubenville by staging a one-woman sit-in in the lobby at  the local hotel which had refused (up until the sit-in)  to let African-Americans enter through the front door.   Me-Me  could cook too. Thought about her today while making chicken which brings me to the story about her and a rather unique family pet.

Here’s the story:  my father (Bob) and his four siblings (Vivian, Janet, Delores and Harvey) and my Uncle John (Pop’s younger brother who was  the same age as my dad), well, ok you get the drift…lots of kids…and a pet chicken.  The chicken would prod and cluck and perform  about for the children.  However,  the chicken didn’t like Me-Me — to the point of  even hissing or whisping at her.   One day Me-Me went in the yard and the chicken pecked her  – and then —  it vanished.  To this day the chicken’s actual fate remains a mystery.   My aunt Vivian often  said  “I don’t know what happened to the pet chicken but I do know we had chicken stew for dinner the night it disappeared.”