Thanksgiving and the Old Hen

The Nankipooh Enquirer

"Thanksgiving and the Old Hen" When you grow up on a farm, there is a lot you learn about growing crops and taking care of live stock.  Most any farmer, no matter what kind of crop he raises, has a milk cow or two, and usually a few hogs, and of course a henhouse full of chickens.  That's kinda the way it was down at the old farm in Nankipooh when I was a young-un.  Part of my job was milking the cow, and gathering the eggs.  Course most of the time Grandma Biggers took care of those things, but I was the backup, when I wasn't totin in firewood, and totin out the ashes. We had a couple of dozen chickens, but the queen of the henhouse was Old Hen, who was pretty much past her egg laying days, but was still the queen of the roost.  Old Hen took her status pretty seriously too, and she didn't take nothing off nobody, or no critter neither.  Even our dog and our cat was scared of her, cause she'd come right for you, if you crossed her path with the wrong look in your eyes.  I am reminded of one winter during this time that it got so cold in Nankipooh that almost everything froze over during the night, when it went down to about seven or eight degrees, which was about the coldest morning I can remember in Nankipooh. Well, I got up that morning and was worried about my dog cause he was outside, and even though he had a dog house full of pine straw, it was mighty cold.  I went outside to check on him when the sun came up, and there he was all snuggled up in the pine straw, and right next to him was our cat, and I'll be darned, but in between the two of them, warm as toast, was Old Hen.  Now, I ain't seen nothing like that before or since.  Imagine that, a dog, a cat, and a chicken all huddled up together trying to stay warm.  It seems to me that if the three of them could get through a cold winter night together, then them Skunks and Polecats up in DC could get along together a little better than they do, just to get the country through some of these cold winter nights. A couple of years later, we were all sitting down together at the Biggers farm for our big Thanksgiving dinner, and as usual I could hardly wait, because I always did love Grandma's turkey and dressing, along with all the trimmings.  Well this year the turkey seemed a might small, and I said something about it, and Grandpa said, "Well times have been a little hard lately, so this year we are having chicken instead of turkey."  Well it was a little disappointing, but I understood, and besides, I like roasted chicken too.  About then Grandpa starts to carve up the bird, and he seems to be having some trouble, and then he says, "I'm afraid this old bird is going to be pretty tough!"  And then it hit me! "You ain't fixing to eat Old Hen are You?", I said.  Grandpa says, "You just be quite and eat your dinner."  "I ain't eating Old Hen", I said, and I got up and run out of the dining room without eating a bite of that Thanksgiving Dinner. When I look back on it, that was about the worst Thanksgiving that I can remember, but it taught me something about life.  You see, Old Hen wasn't much good at being a chicken anymore.  She couldn't lay eggs anymore, and she was too mean to be a good friend, and she was too tough to eat, but I still loved her.  Sometimes the best things in life ain't all young and pretty, or bright and shinny, but Old Hen had character, and I not only loved her, but I had a lot of respect for her too.  You know, I have lived long enough on this old earth, to have found a few people like that along the way, and I am a richer man for seeing them for what they are, and I like to call them my friend. "Now that's the way I see it, and you can tell'em I said so."         Bascomb Biggers

Living in Nankipooh

"Living in Nankipooh"

 Everybody has got to be from somewhere, and I am proud to say that I grew up in Nankipooh, Georgia.  Now I wasn't born there, but my Mama was, and her Mama and Daddy was, and their Mama and Daddy was.  I came to Nankipooh in 1952, when I was a little more that five years old, and me and Mama lived with Grandma and Grandpa Biggers on the old Biggers farm, which had been in the family for more than a hundred years, and at one time it had belonged to Grandma's Daddy whose name was Livingston.  He had a big farm on the east side of the Hamilton Road about five miles north of Columbus, Georgia, and on the west side of the road Grandpa's daddy had a big farm.  In fact, back in the 1880's Nankipooh was mostly made up of five farms, which in addition to the Biggers and the Livingstons, there was also the Moons, Weems, and the Adams farms.  There were lots of houses belonging to kinfolk and there were shotgun shacks where the field hands lived who helped work the land.  Most of those field hands were the descendants of slaves who grew up right there in Nankipooh.

Right in the middle of Nankipooh was a crossroads where the Fortson Road and the Double Churches Road branched off of the Hamilton Road, and the railroad tracks belonging to the Central of Georgia ran right up through that intersection.  When I was a boy, the train called "The Man of War" went up and down those tracks two times a day between Columbus and Atlanta.  Some times the train even made a short stop in front of the old general store that was right there at the crossroads.  After Grandpa quit farming he ran the store for awhile and it was called "Biggers Grocery".

I asked Grandpa one time where the name Nankipooh came from, and he told me that at one time a branch of the Cherokees called the Muscogee had lived there, and the place was named for their most famous chief who was called Nankipooh.  I have heard other stories about the name, but I believe this one to be true, since Grandpa was born there in 1885..

When I got to Nankipooh in 1952, it was a pretty little place, and everything was in walking distance.  It was about two miles from Grandpa's store up to the Hog's store and in between was Nankipooh Elementery school with thirty or forty houses near it.  Around our old farm house was eleven other houses filled with kinfolk either from the Biggers or the Livingston families who were living on land that used to be the two farms.  There were also four or five of those old shotgun shacks still occupied by the descendants of those slaves who had worked the fields so long ago.  It was like one big family where everybody knew everybody, since their grandparents and great grandparents had all known each other also.  Almost every Sunday afternoon me and the grandparents took a little five or six mile "Sunday Drive" around Nankipooh so they could see if anybody new had moved into the neighborhood.

It was pretty country with good land and many branches of the two main creeks running through it everywhere.  Those two main creeks were the "Standing Boy" and the "Mulberry" which eventually found their way into the Chattahoochee River.  Nankipooh also had many large outcroppings of granite, mostly near the creeks and branches, and the old farms were dotted with small ponds where Nankipooh's kids could go "skinny dipping".  On the backside of the old Biggers farm was a large branch of the Standing Boy about ten feet wide which had a small water fall going down some of that granite into a small pond, where Great-grandpa Livingston had once had a small grist mill.  I believe Grandma and Grandpa did some "sparking" down by the old mill pond back in the early 1900's before they got married.  They were sweethearts for life, and it was only natural that Grandpa would marry a girl from the farm across the road.

When I lived in Nankipooh as a young boy, the center of my life was Nankipooh Elementary School , where I learned to read and write and do math and geography, and also where I learned how to play baseball, softball, football and basketball.  When we weren't playing ball we were out exploring the woods or walking up and down the train tracks, or headed to one of the many swimming holes.  The school was small with grades one through seven and probably about one hundred and fifty kids from as far as seven or eight miles away.  When I was in the fourth grade they added a kindergarten and a cafeteria.  Nankipooh school was the meeting place for the whole community, even though there were also several churches nearby.

After school everyday I would walk about a mile down to Grandpa's store and get my daily treat, which was a dime's worth of whatever I wanted.  In those days you could get a coke for a nickel and a big candy bar for a nickel, so that was the usual.  I had a real dilemma on my hands when cokes went to six cents.  In Nankipooh all sodas were called "cokes", so if someone asked you what kind of coke you wanted, you might say a Pepsi or a Nehi.  I was partial to Nehi Orange.

Nankipooh was so safe and peaceful that we either walked or rode our bikes everywhere, sometimes for miles and our parents never worried about where we were or if we were safe.  In the summers we might be gone from our house for ten hours, and they didn't worry unless we were late getting home for supper, and then you were in big trouble.  If we were at a friend's house their mama treated us just like we were one of her kids, and if we got in big enough trouble they might give us a whipping and send us home to get another one for being bad at somebody else's house.  That didn't happen very often.

In the afternoons, after school, we played in the school yard or out on the ball fields, and were supervised by someone who worked for the county parks and recreation department.  It was usually one of the mothers from the neighborhood, and we called them all the "Playground Teacher".  She was in charge of the playground equipment and supervised our pickup ball games, dodge ball  games, and monopoly tournaments.  The county had organized leagues which include other schools in our area, like Double Churches and Britt David Elementary schools.  We played against the other schools in football, softball, basketball, soccer, and volleyball.  In the summer we had track and field events.  One year when I was 12, we were tied with Double Churches at the end of the touch football season for first place, and played a playoff game in January for the championship.  It was about forty degrees, but we still played barefooted so we could run faster, and we won, but it was so cold, that I thought my toes would fall off.

In the summer, we went barefooted wherever we went, except to church on Sundays, and we were always covered in a shade of reddish brown, from a mixture of sweat and dust, from all of the Georgia red clay that Nankipooh sat on.  By the start of school in the fall, we could hardly stand wearing our shoes every day.  In those days school was from Labor Day until Memorial Day so we had three full months of summer to be ball players, cowboys, indians, pirates, or army men, on the playground, or in the woods which covered most of the Nankipooh area.  It seemed like summer lasted forever, but it always came to a close.

In 1960, I graduated from Nankipooh and moved on to see what the rest of the Columbus area was like, and by the time I was twenty years old, I left Nnakipooh and Columbus to go up to Atlanta, "The Big A", to go to college and see what the big city was like.  I always wanted to get away from the little country village and see what the great big world outside of Nankipooh was like.  I never lived in Nankipooh again, and when I look back, I wish I had never left.  Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer never had it as good as we did living in Nankipooh in the 1950s and 1960s, and I know that old friends like Carney and Mickey know what I am talking about.

Norman Biggers Bentley