The Parable of My Chicken Boy

THE PARABLE OF 

MY CHICKEN BOY

It was the fall of 1968.  I had just turned 28; I was a wife, mother of two daughters; and a fan of Elvis Presley and Daphne du Maurier.  I was in my 5th year as a public school speech therapist (that’s what we were called then).  The Caddo Parish schools were in their second year of integrating racially segregated schools.  Geographically, Shreveport, is the urban center of otherwise rural Caddo Parish (called county in the other 49 states, but Parish in Louisiana).  

In those chaotic times, I was actually working three jobs, but none of the job titles reflected my main task.  As unprepared as I was, I was acting as a cross-cultural linguistic anthropologist, struggling to help Black teachers and children understand White teachers and children, and vice versa.  Note, I am not primarily talking about spoken language.  As it turned out, non-verbal communication differences created more misunderstandings than verbal differences.

In the midst of this crazy period, I met my “Chicken Boy.”  In some strange way, this comic/tragic story remains vivid in my memory as a parable for the madness of the era.  Now, read to the very end, and pay attention, to the details because there will be a test.

I call him “Chicken Boy” or Chick for short, not to be callous, but because his “real” name was never fully established.  His adopted Mothers —and don’t get excited, in those unenlightened days, “Mothers” referred to the two women who raised him, a middle aged woman and her adult daughter —  had changed his name several times, and could not agree on what his “real” name should be.

I met Chick because one of my jobs was as an Audiologist/ Speech-Language Pathologist on a Pupil Personnel Evaluation Team.  We had four team members, including a Coordinator who was an Educational Specialist, a Psychologist, a Social Worker, and me.  Our job was to figure out what was interfering with each child’s progress, and to make recommendations to correct the problem (really simple, right?).  We were working our way through a backlog of referrals, but Chick came to us as an “emergency” case. 

Chick had just entered kindergarten, and was non-verbal; but being a five-year-old who didn’t talk did not constitute an emergency.  Rather, it was Chick’s persistent successes in escaping his teachers and running away that brought him to us.  The school hadn’t succeeded in restraining him, and they feared he would get into the street and be run over.  This was a real possibility since Chick was fast and fearless.  Our Educational Specialist had visited the school and gathered this information.  She offered no insights into Chick’s academic abilities, reporting that the teachers had not succeeded in getting him to sit in a chair.  He just sort of wandered around.  No one was sure if he could hear, or if he even understood speech.

Our social worker did a home visit and interviewed Chick’s mothers to collect his history.   His younger adopted Mother, was in the hospital for gynecological surgery when Chick’s biological Mother gave birth to him. During recovery, they shared a room.  Chick’s mother really didn’t want him, and his adopted Mothers thought that it would be really great to have a baby.  His birth mother just gave him to her roommate, and the new Mothers took him home.  There was never any paperwork or any of that legal stuff.  Chick’s adopted Mothers never heard from his birth mother again.

The Mothers had a little home in a rural area.  They raised yard chickens, and the yard was tightly fenced to keep the fowl safely inside.  They were very fond of Chick, and fed and clothed and petted him.  When he was annoying, they put him outside in the yard to play with the chickens.  They considered him a sweet, pretty little boy (and he was those things). I had the background, and thought I was ready to see Chick.

Before proceeding, I should tell you about the physical environment.  In case you are imagining a lovely clinic — forget it.  Our team operated on the third floor of a closed urban high school building.  It was a beautiful old building, but deteriorating, and less than desirable for our purposes.  I used a former classroom, with large, high windows, kept open to provide cooling ventilation since schools had no air-conditioning in those days

Chick was actually adorable.  He hopped into the room, and proceeded to explore the entire space, while clucking, cackling, and crowing.  His chicken noises were absolutely authentic, and seemed to match his mood and the discoveries he made as he explored the room.

After observing his behavior, I finally attracted his attention with a collection of toys and puppets.  He hopped around me for a while, and then climbed up on a chair, and sort of perched or squatted.  I worked to explore his receptive language, and established that not only could he hear, he understood words as well as the average 3 to 4 year old,  However, his comprehension of syntax and grammar was only at a 2 year old level.

By this time, Chick and I were friends, and he began to communicate with me.  He clucked, squawked, cackled, and pantomimed the things he wanted to tell me.  We were having a great time.  Chick began to run around and around the room, flapping his arms wildly.  Then, before I could react, he leaped up on a desk, and from the desk top, I swear, he flew, flapping his arms and going up, up to the wide sill of the big open window.  There he perched, alternately looking back at me, and then down three floors to the ground and parking lot below.  As I watched, terrified and open-mouthed, he strutted back and forth along the window sill, crowing loudly and flapping his arms.  

There was nothing wrong with Chick’s social perceptions.  He knew he had me.  If I approached him, he moved toward the edge of the window, as though preparing to fly.  He watched me closely, obviously wanting to see what I would do, and how much fun he could have with me.

“Oh, My God,” I prayed.  “Please help me.” And that was a real prayer.  I tried to talk to Chick, but he ignored me.  Then I tried clucking, and that sort of fascinated him.  He stopped pacing the sill to look at me.  I tried clucking and crowing, and he laughed at me.  Suddenly, my panicked brain focused on my “bag of tricks,” my collection of things I used to engage children.  There, among the toys, and magic tricks, and puppets, were two potential saviors — a chicken puppet and candy. 

I grabbed the chicken puppet, and began pretending she was eating the candy.  I ignored Chick, concentrating on the chicken clucking and pecking at the candy.  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him watching.  When he was certain I was no longer was interested in him, he leaned further into the room to see what I was doing.  I held one of the candies up and then popped it into my mouth.  Chick leaped from the window, flapping his arms, and landed with a clunk beside me.  I grabbed and embraced him, and he was delighted, clucking warmly in my ear as I clutched him tightly to my breast, tears of thanks forming in my eyes.  In my delight, I fed him the entire box of candy corn.

The ending is relatively happy.  All Chick really needed was time with children instead of chickens; and we recommended that along with a fenced-in playground for his kindergarten class. (Wonder how that would read on a modern IEP?)  Chick would never be a an academic whiz, but he became a happy boy instead of a happy chicken, and grew up to be an exceptional basketball player.  He really did seem to fly on the court.

AND NOW, DEAR READER, FOR YOUR TEST — If you have been imagining Chick as Black, think again, and see him as White, and ask yourself what biases caused you to assume he was Black?