Opinion – Terra Vegana: Rita Lee’s paw and my grandmother’s chicken

My grandmother’s chicken had golden feathers, a red comb and shy behavior. I shared the house with five humans, who adopted it when it still fit in the palm of the family’s oldest child, my father.

He answered by the name of Amarelinha, despite living on dirt, thanks to his hobby of brushing himself in the vegetable garden in the full midday sun.

Nobody remembers where Amarelinha came from, it’s as if it had always existed, half a pet, half a little sister. Very little chicken. Rita Lee’s paw came from the fair, bought by her mother and given as a gift to Virginia Lee, her middle sister.

Named Débora, the paw, also yellow, was the “cutest little thing in the house”, as Rita Lee describes in her autobiography (“Rita Lee, an Autobiography”, Editora Globo). Débora was pampered as an only child, and grew up in the midst of a harem of six women, to use the singer’s expression.

Rita is the rocker, but it was my grandmother who had a very, shall we say, hardcore life.

Ensuring bread was not always an easy task, and there came a time when hunger tightened. Raising and killing chickens for own consumption was absolutely commonplace at that time, even in urban areas.

But Amarelinha wasn’t supposed to end up in the pot. It was almost family. A bitch that scratched.

The duck Débora was roasted on an Easter Sunday. Killed and prepared by Charles Lee, the father, while the six women attended mass, far from home.

Rita says that the harem screamed and got up when her father put the paw on the table “plucked and toasted in a pan surrounded by potatoes, apples and farofa”, and adds: “The executioner ate his victim alone”.

I imagine my grandmother’s situation when she ended Amarelinha. She tried to disguise the murder by hanging the chicken over a fence. My father says that he was eight years old enough not to believe that it had been an accident, whose unsuccessful flight would have culminated in a hopscotch fatally tangled in the wires.

Also in the Lee family home, no one believed that Deborah the paw had been attacked by the cats that inhabited the basement.

Total silence at the table. Everyone helped themselves to boiled cabbage, rice and beans. Amarelinha remained untouched, and my father can’t say what they did with the remains, but I suppose they ended up in a neighbor’s house, or in the garbage.

I called my grandmother to hear her version of Amarelinha: “it never existed”. He confessed that he raised and killed chickens, yes, but that Amarelinha was just a plastic chicken, with a belly full of eggs that fell out with a nice squeeze.

Maybe Yellow is just an Ex Machina Chicken, hanging in my father’s memory to relativize the fact that he eats meat despite loving animals.

Or maybe my grandmother’s guilt in plucking Amarelinha despite hunger was so great that she erased this fact from history, immortalizing her loved one in a rubber toy.

If my father lived with every chicken that ends up in his pot to this day — a nameless, faceless chicken, now unrecognizable, dismembered and bought in styrofoam trays with plastic — his chicken would be a “chicken” made only of rice, peas , corn and tomato sauce.

Maybe with the shredded green jackfruit instead of the Amarelinha that he loved so much, or that he never knew.