I cannot live without hens
“I cannot live without hens,” Nancy Luce wrote from her modest home on Martha’s Vineyard in the year 1865. The fact that Nancy Luce had to proclaim this in writing from the rural landscape of the Vineyard, an island six miles off the coast of Cape Cod, seems puzzling. Why should a lone woman, living amid meadows and farms and fields, feel the need to make such a proclamation? It could only be that she felt her right to her chickens was under attack by meddlesome townspeople who wished her ill. Who would begrudge an old woman her hens?
It’s a sad story, one that survives because Nancy Luce kept a diary documenting her life and her hens. And she wrote poetry, many many pages of homage to her chickens. Nancy Luce was born in 1814 on a farm in West Tisbury, in the western portion of Martha’s Vineyard known, then as now, as up-Island. Sheep, not chickens, were the livestock of choice for most family farms on the Vineyard, and Nancy’s father Philip Luce grazed sheep and cows on the family homestead at Tisbury Great Pond. Nancy was the only child of Philip and Anna Luce, and as such was destined to support her elderly parents, once infirmity and decline set in. At the age of 19, Nancy assumed the role of family merchant, riding horseback 10 miles to Edgartown where she sold homespun yarn, woolen stockings, and mittens to Edgartown’s postmaster/merchant, in exchange for the sorts of necessities such as coffee, candles, lace, and tobacco she could find in the bustling port city. Nancy was quite the horsewoman. She rode astride – side-saddle was reserved for the more elite class of women – and lived a rather independent life, coming and going between up-Island and Edgartown, down-Island, several times a week, during a time when most young women were lucky to venture into town two or three times a year.
But something significant, and likely traumatic, happened to Nancy Luce when she was in her 20s. She admitted she had nearly worked herself to death for 12 years, taking care of her aged parents. But in 1840, she says that she “met with the first heart-rending death” which, alongside the overwork, destroyed her health. The rest of Nancy’s life was plagued by excessive fatigue, “nerves,” stomach troubles, fear. Nancy suffered from “misery of mind & misery of body & no comfort in this world.” She could no longer ride horseback, and just the sight of a horse running in canter sank her spirits. She no longer had the strength to stand or walk, except for a few minutes per day in the safety of her own house. She suffered from crying spells. Any jostling of her body hurt; the wind hurt; loud noises hurt. She suffered from debilitating headaches. Her nerves were frayed. She didn’t eat much besides a simple porridge made from cornmeal and milk. This miserable condition plagued Nancy for the rest of her life.
When Philip Luce died in 1847, Nancy inherited the homestead lands and house, and one cow. Within the year, two meddlesome farmers, both neighbors of the Luce property, appealed to the town Selectmen to have a guardian appointed to handle the Luce estate, attempting to separate Nancy Luce, Single Woman, from her rightful inheritance. Other townspeople opposed the idea, and petitioned the Honorable Theodore G. Mayhew, Esq., Judge of Probate for the County of Dukes County (Yes, that is the official name of the county which includes Martha’s Vineyard: The County of Dukes County), arguing Nancy was perfectly able and willing to assume responsibility for the Luce homestead. At the town meeting held on March 20, 1848, a majority of those in attendance demanded the Selectman appoint a guardian, making claims of Insanity and Imbecility against Nancy Luce. Owing perhaps to a letter of support written by Nancy’s personal physician, the Judge turned down the request, and Nancy was allowed to manage her family’s homestead as she so desired. That is, The County of Dukes County determined that Nancy Luce, Single Woman, was, after all, entitled to inherit her father’s property and manage it on her own. When Anna Luce died three years later, Nancy became the sole human occupant of the tiny house at Tyers Cove.
Nancy Luce shared her little house with one cow and a few chickens. The cow lived in the front room, with its own door to the outside. The cow provided much-needed milk for Nancy’s porridge, practically the only food her stomach would tolerate. As such, the cow was critical to Nancy’s very survival and she loved it dearly. It was her chickens, however, who had Nancy’s heart. She loved her hens completely. She devised a subterranean chicken house, under the floorboards of her cow’s room, to keep her hens cool in summer and warm in winter. In her diary, which has survived the centuries, she wrote:
Some folks against my keeping hens & against my feeding them & against my keeping them warm, they don’t care how much poor hens suffer with hunger & cold, stop my having eggs to help myself with. I cannot live without hens. HOW WOULD YOU FEEL TO BE SERVED SO BAD AS I AM.
She spent a good part of her days sitting in an old chair, one hen under each arm. Her best friends, Ada Quenta and Beauty Linna, would chatter in her ear, would sit preening in front of the mirror when Nancy put up her hair, and would follow commands when she gently told them what to do. Little Ada Quenta “used to do all manner of cunning things as soon as I told her.” These hens were socialized.
That Nancy Luce loved her hens, there is no doubt. But love alone, as we know, does not pay the bills. Nancy Luce began writing folksy poetry, which she compiled, sent off to a printer in New Bedford, and then sold as little booklets to the island’s summer visitors. By the end of the Civil War, the Martha’s Vineyard Railroad chugged along what is now State Beach road, from Oak Bluffs to Edgartown and then on to South Beach at Katama. Oak Bluff’s Cottage City became the island’s first summer colony in 1875. These visitors, “foreign folk,” as Nancy described them, bought Nancy’s book of poetry entitled Poor Little Hearts, and they bought the photographs she had made of herself holding her two beloved hens. She was an odd looking woman, aged and weary beyond her 40something years. Head covered in a kerchief, sitting straight as a rail in a wooden rocking chair with one hen in each arm, Nancy Luce’s image become quickly recognizable, and provided a visual cue to the woman who wrote poetry about chickens. Her poetry book and the photographs sold for 25 cents apiece. Nancy Luce, therefore, was a working (i.e.: paid) writer.
Nancy Luce put out many books over the coming years. Through the Mercury Job Press in New Bedford, she published A Complete Edition of the Works of Nancy Luce of West Tisbury, Dukes County, Mass. She called herself “a doctor for hens” and she published a treatise on hen husbandry, in which she wrote:
If the will of God could be done in full, it would be a great happiness among dumb creatures and human too… Be kind to poor hens in every way, and not let them suffer with hunger nor cold; cruelty not in any way, must not affrighten them; doctor them when they have diseases…
One has a hard time imagining a widespread cruelty perpetrated upon hens. It seems likely that Nancy’s own hardships, her fears, and her suffering, informed her essay on chicken kindness. For she was herself the recipient of impossible cruelties. In addition to “the first heart-rending death” that was the 1840 incident, and the meddlesome Selectmen who sought to have the Single Woman declared Insane and an Imbecile in order to strip her of her rightful inheritance, Nancy Luce was routinely persecuted by local troublemakers who found this woman-who-wrote-about-chickens an easy target. Living not far from the fairgrounds of the island’s annual Agricultural Fair, Nancy was often bombarded with dreadful noises, the banging of pots and pans outside her front door, at the hands of carousing local fair-goers. Anguished by the cacophony of noise, Nancy wrote a letter to the Vineyard Gazette, describing how the hooligans had tried to “murder [her] alive” with the racket; it had taken weeks for her nerves to recover. Another band of troublemakers dumped a load of cow dung in her house. In October 1882, she reported that someone physically roughed her up. She wrote to her doctor, the thugs “wounded me where my liver is…and wounded me back of my right side.” She asked if he couldn’t do anything “to stop them schoolboys.”
Over the course of several years, a handful of island newspapers reported that Nancy Luce was harassed again and again. One report described a band of fair-goers who, upon stopping by Nancy’s house for some perverse form of merrymaking, locked her in a closet and then attempted to make it up to her by purchasing several of her poetry books. In 1858 and 1859, her beloved hens Ada Queetie and Beauty Linna each died. In Poor Little Hearts, Nancy described what her feathered friend had meant to her: more, by far, than any human.
Poor little Ada Queetie has departed this life,
Never to be here no more,
No more to love, no more to speak,
No more to be my friend,
O how I long to see her with me, live and well,
Her heart and mine was united,
Love and feelings deeply rooted for each other,
She and I could never part,
I am left broken hearted.
The poem runs to over 14 pages. Nancy constructed a fenced graveyard for her hens on the side of her house, and asked that, when her time came, she be buried alongside her hens. When Nancy Luce died on April 9, 1890, this final request was not honored. She was instead buried in the West Tisbury Cemetery. Her personal effects were sold, including a small leather trunk filled with papers, letters, and ephemera. 50 years later, a Ben Clough bought the trunk from a Boston bookseller and then donated the trove to the John Hay Library at Brown University. Others of her papers remained on the Vineyard, some with relatives, and some with the Dukes County Historical Society, which is now incorporated into the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. The Museum sells a biographical sketch of Nancy Luce, which contains copies of her poems and diary entries.
Nancy Luce was much abused and harassed in her lifetime. She lived a pretty miserable life, by her own accounts. Throughout her adult life, her beloved chickens were her only family. Indeed, Nancy Luce’s entreaty, “I cannot live without hens,” was very possibly literal. She was treated abysmally in life, and her last request as to her final resting place was disregarded. More recent times have been kinder to Nancy’s memory, however. Her grave in West Tisbury, today, is festooned with chicken statues and little hen reproductions. Anonymous well-wishers have ensured that her final resting place, while not alongside her own beloved hens, is blessed with good chicken energy.
There, at last, is her epitaph.
