Birdy

has some bad notes; these notes run in the family. His great-grandfather had been a roller but the rest of the family are choppers.
    Mrs Cox tells me about another bird breeder named Mr Lincoln. He’s black and lives a square off Sixty-third Street on the other side of the park. She says he has all his birds in an upstairs bedroom in a row house. He’s married and has five children. He doesn’t do anything but raise birds and the whole family is on relief. Mrs Cox tells me all this in the same voice she talks about the birds and what they’ve done or haven’t done.
    The first time I go to Mr Lincoln’s, he acts as if he doesn’t have any birds. It’s only after we’ve talked about birds a bit and he’s seen Birdie that he shows me three or four birds he has in a cage downstairs. We talked about them for a while and then he winks and tells me to follow him upstairs.
    He’s fixed up a terrific aviary. The only trouble is it’s all inside and smells strongly of birds. He keeps it clean but with a couple hundred birds and no air, it gets smelly. He says he can’t screen and open the windows because of his neighbors. He’s afraid they might tell the relief people he has birds.
    The birds are all in one room. One side is breeding cages and the other is flight cages. The door of the room opens onto a hall. He makes all his breeding cages by hand and paints them different colors according to his breeding plan. Color is what Mr Lincoln is interested in. He shows me the different projects he has. He experiments with breeding canaries to different kinds of birds to get new colors. He has some canaries he’s bred to linnets; they’re a nice buff red-orange with pale stripes. Other canaries he’s breeding to a little North African siskin; these are dark with bright red-orange breasts. He’s also breeding to something he calls an Australian fire finch. These come out with red heads and dark bodies.
    Mr Lincoln talks about first crosses and second crosses and shows me birds he calls mules. He has to explain to me that a mule’s a bird who’s sterile. I don’t tell him I always thought a mulewas a special kind of horse with long ears. He tells me most of his first crosses are mules. He says sometimes he has to breed ten times before he gets a fertile bird. The only way to check is by breeding.
    Mr Lincoln has tremendous books with diagrams and drawings of his breeding charts. He explains line breeding to me. He has different special foods he’s developed to make birds want to mate. He says if a man ate any of that stuff he’d probably be able to breed with a bird himself. Mr Lincoln never says ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ or stuff like that. It’s always ‘breed’ or ‘mate’ and ‘droppings’. Maybe it’s because I’m young or white but I don’t think so. Mr Lincoln doesn’t seem to mind my color much.
    The main thing he’s trying to do is get an absolutely black canary bird. He says he wants one so black it’ll look purple. He says there’s a lot of black hidden in green birds and he’s trying to get it out. The way he does this is breed the greenest birds, the ones with the least yellow in them, to white birds. The first time they come out white or gray or spotty. He takes the darkest ones with spots and breeds them back to the dark green father or mother bird. He’s been line breeding back like that for nine years and some of his birds are blacker than street sparrows. There isn’t a yellow feather on them; the parts that are black are deep dull black and the lighter feathers are deep gray. Mr Lincoln shows me a feather he keeps in his wallet. He says when he has a whole bird as black as that, he can die happy. This feather must be from a crow or a blackbird, it’s that black.
    The interesting thing is, his dark birds are such fine singers. Mr Lincoln couldn’t care less about this but most of the young males in the black cages are singing away, beautiful deep-throated rollers. Mr Lincoln says it’s ‘’cause us niggers is always singin’.’ Mr Lincoln doesn’t really talk that way at all. He smiles and looks at me closely when he says it.
    He lets me put Birdie in the female flight cage. I can tell he doesn’t think much of Birdie as a bird; she’s just a dumb blonde to him, but he’s impressed with the way she lets me pick her up and handle her. He says he’s never seen a bird so tame and I must be good with birds. He says I can sit up there in his aviary and watch the birdsall I