"The Powers
of Chicken Man"
by Mary Miller
In September 1998 I was in New Orleans for the first time. My company had sent me down for a trade show in Metarie, and I had booked a room at the downtown Comfort Inn.
I arrived on Sunday, September 20th, checked into my room, and took a cab to the French Quarter to find a place to have dinner.
The cab driver let me out somewhere near Decatur street, along the river. I wandered around a little, having no idea where I was really, eventually finding Bourbon Street.
It was (I would someday learn) an average crowd on Bourbon for a Sunday night, (at the time it seemed very busy to me).
The street smelled like liquor before you even got to it, with a blaring mix of noise; blues and jazz and disco and yelling and laughter all blending together until it was just one low roar of sound. Drunks, tourist, drunk-tourist, mimes, tap dancing kids, barkers outside of bars, everyone lost in their own world, enticing and insistent.
Chicken Man must have spotted me before I saw him, because when I glanced in his direction he was a half block away, across the street and coming toward me through the crowd. Our eyes locked and I stopped in my tracks, waiting for him.
Chicken Man never lost eye contact as he wove his way through the crowd. I was mesmerized by this little man. He looked kind of like Bob Marley would have looked if he would have been a lot shorter, and gotten a lot older, and had started carrying a staff and wearing gris gris and feathers in his dread locks.
We shook hands and smiled at each
other for a few minutes without saying a word. Something about his face made
me happy and I’m not the mystical type, but I had an odd feeling that our
meeting had been coming for some time.
He began to talk to me in a quiet voice. I wish I could tell you now his exact words. I remember he complimented me, and talked about me needing something.
When he finished, he took something out of his pocket, took my hand again, and placed it in my palm, using his other hand to close mine before I could see what he had given me.
He said something good was about to happen to me, that my life was about to change completely, and that good things would continue for a year from this day.
He suggested I find him at the end of that year, not in a threatening way, just in kind of a gentle, instructional tone. I nodded.
He let go of my hand, and started down the street.
I watched him for a few minutes, carrying his staff and slowly working his way through the crowd. His walk was tired.
I opened my hand, there was a large brown seed resting in my palm.
I ran to catch him, searching my purse as I called for him to wait. I wanted to give him something too, but the cab ride had taken most of my cash, I only came up with a few dollars.
"Thank you" I said
breathlessly, handing him the money.
He smiled at me, "Next year, pretty lady".
"Next year" I agreed.
As I stood there smiling at him, I didn’t know that there would never be a next year.
People who knew him would later tell me that Chicken Man knew he was dying even then.
He lived for another two months, dying only a few weeks before I returned to New Orleans.
I never got to tell him the story.
How, as soon as he walked away that night, my life completely changed. How I
had walked into a club a few feet from where we stood and looked right into
the face of the man I would marry. Isaac (my husband) says he knew it too,
knew as soon as he saw me that we would be married.
By the end of the year, I had moved down to the French Quarter, living only a few blocks from where Chicken Man and I had met on that destined night. I kept his obituary folded neatly in my photo album.
Isaac and I went around in circles trying to decide on a wedding; how, and when, and where we would have it. Finally, out of the blue, we decided one day to just go get our license and get married.
On our wedding night I was laying in the bathtub thinking about how funny things work out sometimes, how many options we had come up with for getting married, and then how we just ended up running down to the court house out of the blue.
Suddenly I knew. I didn't have to wrap the towel around myself and walk, still dripping water, into the living room. I knew before I found my photo album and his obituary. I just wanted to see it on paper; the date that day, November 16th 1999, and November 16th, 1937, Chicken Man’s birthday.