This is a guest post from Pas de Deux series contributor Alexander Mandilow

It was the beginning of a new year but, unfortunately, I did not wake up with any new habits. I wish this were different, but the truth is that generally not much changes from year to year. This year I still woke up with the same views on life, the same values, and with the same urges. Many of which, if I acted on them, would drag me down to the deepest depths of un-holiness. For the most part I have been able to keep these urges in check, all perhaps except one.

The strong desire I have always had is for fried chicken.

I woke up with this desire. I must confess that I love fried chicken. And I don’t mean the kind of love that is really just infatuation that sometimes turns into marriage and ends in divorce or worse, matrimonial friendship. I mean real, genuine, I will abide by you through the good times and through George Bush’s presidency, love.

I have no idea why this is so; if it’s because my mother had some yearning for fried chicken while she was pregnant with me. Or because my father and uncles and aunts really loved fried chicken. Or, well, because I am black. I will not rule out this last as a possibility, but I also wouldn’t want anyone to push the stereotype too far or get the impression that whenever I drive pass a sugar cane plantation or see cotton I feel a sudden urge to go to work. But I do believe there is something, some love of fried things, that was planted in the black DNA and which, like fat on a Mississippi woman, has been accumulating ever since.

The urge I had for fried chicken brought me to think about Jamaica where I grew up; and to one of my aunts who loved all things fried. She loved cooking it and she loved eating it. Fried chicken, fried fish, fried pig’s skin, fried potatoes, fried yams….whatever it was, she loved it fried.

Now, make no mistake about it, my aunt was also fat. Seriously fat. When she moved you got the optical illusionary effect as if a million jellybeans were doing a gigantic jiggle beneath her skin, and her body would produce a massive ripple with waves of fat rolling like the ocean. Hers was a frame that was thick, huge and towering like a fortress. She lost her man to a young predator. Even though my aunt was an excellent cook, and her greasy fried food was ‘to die for’, she didn’t really stand a chance against the young viper. As everyone knows, you can’t keep a man with food if he is already full and content before he comes home.

Becoming too fat, however, was not the only reason she lost her man to the younger, cuter, slimmer, lighter-skinned predator. She also lost him because she was a woman who was unable to bear a child. In rural Jamaica this was unpardonable. In our village if a dog couldn’t cook it was fine, people would still call him dog. But my aunt couldn’t have kids and instead of ‘Auntie B’ people called her ‘mule’.

My aunt was hounded mercilessly by both adults and kids. Teased and taunted every day partly because they said she was a ‘mule’, partly because of her weight, and partly because of how she walked. They said that when she walked she waddled as though she alone was going to part the Red Sea. And then they laughed.

Because of the teasing and jeering my aunt rarely came out of her house. For years I pictured her, alone in her little house at nights, having a lifetime of ordinary dreams filled with unspectacular romances. In these romances there was a “Thanks for breakfast, see you later sweetheart” in the morning, “This food is delicious, honey, how was your day” at dinner, and perhaps a mutually satisfactory encounter ending with a kiss before bed. Not once, I thought, would she have dreamt of Rome, for she was just an ordinary rural person, with simple dreams.

While I was remembering my aunt, I also reflected on the nature of love. I thought that somehow love, by its very nature, should be boundless. But instead, the love I often saw in people tended to be the love that is limited, the type that will only go so far and no further. Once these people shared some for themselves, a bit for their kids, a little for their car and their home, and perhaps a bit for their favourite football team, then their love would run out and there would be no more left for anyone and anything else.

No one seemed to have had enough love left for my aunt.

The last time I went home to Jamaica I saw her.

And I told her, “Auntie B, I have always loved your fried chicken, and I have always loved you.” It was the first time I told her this.

Unfortunately, it was while I was standing over her open coffin.

Photo Credit: Getty Images – FoodPix

Pas de Deux Contributor – Alexander Mandilow

Alexander is an international development consultant who currently works in Asia. He recently started a blog (jamaicanmeditations.blogspot.com), and is working on a draft manuscript for a first novel. He is married and has two wonderful kids. You can also follow Alex on Twitter @alexmandilow

Song: Images – Nina Simone

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