Emergenc(e/y) of the First White Male

Well, the tall skinny white hen with the striking red comb and the Aracauna-like beard has finally come out of the closet, and she's a rooster. I had suspected as much: her stance was too upright, her tail held too high, her run too vigorous and direct, her profile narrow rather than beamy. And yet she never crowed, and she didn't seem to be interested in the other hens.

But this morning, when I went out in the high winds of this grey November to let the birds out of the hen house, he flared his wing like the flamenco dancer he clearly is, and immediately began to tred a willing hen. No crowing yet, but he is definitely rooster number 2 in my flock of only 22 birds. The other rooster is a year older: a beautiful cross between a Salmon Faverolle and an Australorpe that we acquired from a breeder in Belleville who swore she had sexed them all. Humph. I'd be happy to have two roosters, but they won't be happy to share the hens and the feed and the space in the hen house and yard. The last pair we had fought til they were bloodied, and then finally the younger dispatched the older. I don't want these birds to repeat that experience: it was too hard to watch. And yet I'm attached to both of them. We'll see what emerges. In any case, the emergence of this particular White Male marks a moment of closure, reminding me of Ruth Ozeki's story, "The Death of the Last White Male," which she wrote in dialogue with one of my earliest pieces for the book, "Chicken Auguries." Very fitting realization--of the existence of my First White Male--on the day I've just learned the first copy of PSCC is on its way to me. [The book title is too long: it'll have to be an acronym in this blog, but at least an acronym without the violent overtones of the defense intellectuals' acronyms in Carol Cohn's brilliant essay, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals." There, the acronym served to distance human beings from the material horrors of nuclear war: here, the acronym merely helps me get past texuality to the actual materiality of my living, maturing, changing birds.]

Violence does loom in my hen house, but I can't abstract it into an acronym.