The Great Stony Hill Chicken Massacre of 1955
By: susan peterson stamis
Tags: chickens, family, jamaica, machete, pictures, thanksgiving, travel, turkey
Category: foreign service, Uncategorized
One afternoon in Jamaica, my five-year-old little self had been left to wander. The kitchen was a place of comfort for me, because it was there that I found the maids and nannies of my life, the women who greeted me with a great deal of patience and good humor, hugs and stolen treats.
The kitchen was empty and quiet, but the courtyard outside its back door was filled with a cacophony of raucous noise. I headed there just in time to find the entire household staff chasing a flock of terrified chickens, grabbing each squawking and flapping one to place its head under an upside down bucket, while the gardener whacked through its neck with a machete.
The headless goosestepping chickens careened blindly through the courtyard, crashing into walls and leaving a bloody spattered wake as I stood wide-eyed and breathless in the doorway, trying to make sense of the carnage.
Although shocked to my five-year-old core, I remember thinking that it might have been a better idea to put the chickens’ bodies under the buckets, leaving their inert heads outside them, but then I wasn’t the one who had to deal with the gory mess. Maybe the maids, as they set about their gruesome task, covered the chickens’ heads in an act of mercy, preventing the poor little things from seeing the descending blade.
Sometime after the chicken massacre, my family and I were invited to a friend’s plantation, where I was introduced to this big beautiful turkey. Judging by the look on my face, I’m pretty sure that the grown-ups around me were discussing Thanksgiving dinner and while I can’t be sure of the turkey’s fate, I think he was doomed.
Whatever his end may have been, I hope he didn’t see it coming.
3 comments on “The Great Stony Hill Chicken Massacre of 1955”
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About Me
My father was a Consular Officer in the United States Foreign Service. He was first stationed in post World War II Berlin, where I was born in 1950. Subsequently, we lived in the Philippines; Jamaica; Guatemala; Washington, DC; Greece; Ceylon and Mexico; visiting many places in between. I was reared by my parents and nurtured by the various amahs, nannies, and housemaids who, every two years or so, entered and exited my little life.
I was educated in American Schools in “foreign lands,” but the most fascinating classrooms were the exotic locales where we lived, and the most inspiring teachers were the colorful people of those exotic and ancient cultures.
The bi-annual “home leaves” which my family spent at my grandparents’ homes in Los Angeles, California provided a sense of constancy to our nomadic lifestyle. My many aunts, uncles and cousins lived there and I eagerly looked forward to those vacations. We were 1st and 2nd generation Greek Americans (all 4 of my grandparents had immigrated at the turn of the century), and thus had foreignness stamped onto us even though we were Americans.
Two of my father’s siblings were also in the diplomatic service, and we world-traveling cousins were a source of endless curiosity to our domestic counterparts when we came home speaking English with unusual accents, reducing the statesiders to hysterics.With his various cameras, Kodachrome, Ektachrome, 16 millimeter, Super 8 and Polaroid, my father rarely lost an opportunity to document the events unfolding around us. After years of waiting patiently in boxes under the stairs, these photographic records are now fulfilling their purpose as mnemonic retrievals of my little life.
Mnemonic Retrievals 
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I relate to this, Susie. Unforgettable because my dad took a hatchet to Bob’s & my pet ducks. “So the coyotes wouldn’t get them.” To this day I cannot eat duck.
I hope you are saving your stories so you can bind them into a book for your family. I love the picture. You look worried for the turkey. Julie
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