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Atchafalaya Voices: Reminiscing on life around Uncle Sam’s store

Linda Connolly Tribe

In order for my mother Mildred to stay in school, she would work for her uncle Sam and his wife Josephine. The small salary was enough to supply my mother with the essentials she needed for school and a bit left over to help her parents.

One winter, my mother had to work even harder to buy the rest of the Landry children — her siblings — school supplies. Early in the morning, Aunt Jo started to brown ground meat, mix it with a bit of roux, onions, celery and bellpepper and make sandwiches with her fresh bread for the area working men. My mother used a pail lined with a dishcloth to stack the fresh sandwiches and she went out into the fields to sell the delicious treat. The poor, hungry men, who otherwise had no food until they went home, eagerly paid a nickel for each sandwich. Jo also carried a pail of fresh lemonade to sell.

In the front of Sam’s store lived an army of chickens, each in their own cage. The cages were on the wooden sidewalk outside the storefront and the chickens lived there until someone decided their fate of frying, baking or roasting. Within a block of the store, one could smell these chickens. Whether it was the feathers or the feed or the droppings, the odor was putrid and very offensive to the nose. And it sure did wake up the senses.

Once inside the store and toting the chicken of choice, Sam would wring the chicken’s neck and wrap it in stiff brown paper. Or, if the customer preferred, he would dip the chicken into boiling water for a few minutes, pluck the feathers, gut out the insides and take off as much of the hard feathers as he could. To really clean the chicken of teeny, tiny feathers, Sam would singe the chicken over an outside flame. My mother said to think of the most offensive smell and quadruple it. Nothing matched the putrid odor of burning chicken feathers on an open flame. She said the closest smell would be a rotting carcass.

Uncle Sam had many jars and containers filled with hard candies, cookies and hardtack crackers. Aromas of sweetening and yeast filled the air. Since my mother helped at the store, she was rewarded with a sampling of each delicacy.

My mother had such wonderful memories of Uncle Sam’s store.

Linda Connolly Tribe of Broussard is a grandmother of four who documents memories of her mother’s life.

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