THE INSTITUTE OF TEXAN CULTURES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
EM: Today is May 23, 1981. I am intervi ewing this morning, in Austin,
Texas, Deolece Parmelee, who will participate in the Folklife Festival
at The Inst itute of Texan Cultures this year in August. I am Esther
MacMillan. Her particular forte is goose plucking .... a rather unusual
talent, art, folk art, call it what you will .... not very many people
know how to do it any more.
Deol ece , I would like to start first before we go into the subject
of geese . ... how you came to know about this; how you came to know how
to pluck a goose? \~hen not very many people still do.
DP : I was brought up on a Mississippi property that had been opened by
my great grandfather in the 1830's. The farm, by the time I was acquainted
with it, had a long history of animals and birds that were associated
with the daily life of the people. And among these creatures that we had,
was a flock of geese . When we were very young, we knew these geese as
somewhat hostile to us .. . especially in the mating season or when the
goose is laying eggs and bringing forth little geese called goslings ,
the gander, the male goose, or the papa goose, is very, very aggressive
and when he sees a person walking across what he considers his domain,
he will roar and hiss, extending his neck and his yellow beak very wide
and sticking out his tongue and making hostile noises. He can look like
a monster or a dragon to a small child . I remember my sister at age
three or four being pursued by a gander and s he would turn and face the
gander and say, "Go 'way, go 'way," and then she would call Daddy, and
turn the other way, "Daddy, Daddy, come get me."
Oeolece Parmelee 2.
EM: Did the goose actually ever bite?
DP: They would bite if you got too close but really most of it is for
show. They 1re not really bad as they seem, perhaps, but for a small
child or a small dog or a pet not any larger than the goose itself is,
they are fearsome creatures. So we knew them as a he rd of semi-hostile
birds to be given a wide berth.
EM: Sort of the enemy.
DP: We didn 1 t mingle with them very much. But when we were older, our
mother taught us how to help her pluck the goose. These are plucked
between April and October on a typical farm every five or six weeks or
maybe only three or four times during that span of months but the idea
is to relieve the goose of the down that makes the body exceedingly hot
in hot weather. The goose likes to have a place where he can swim and
cool himself off, and we had a creek or a s lough, or several creeks and
sloughs, where the birds could cool themselves. But mother taught us
how to pluck the goose so the goose would not be so hot in hot weather.
The down was used for making pillows and mattresses. The mattress
is technically made by using a very closely woven fabric ticking,
usually bought in wide widths. In the old days we didn 1 t have cloth
commonly woven in dimensions wider that 36 inches. But the fabric for
the matt resses was always 54 inches wide as long ago as I can remember.
You sewed that up in the style and shape you wanted into a kind of a
large bag the size of a mattress and you filled that with the down.
When you first picked the down, you usually kept it in a bag of
some kind and sunned it on the clothes line and made it a little less
animal -l ike. That is, the oil from the goose and the smell of the goose
was leached out by the sun. But after you had sunned it for a week or
two or three, then you put it in this mattre ss and put the mattress in
Deolece Parmelee 3.
DP: some kind of a storage area until you got th~ mattre~s filt~d and then
you sewed up the end. It was first sewed on three sides like a pillow
case and then when you got it all filled with the down you sewed the end
so that the down would not leak out.
Not all the feathers are taken off a live goose. All the feathers
are plucked off the breast, and the breast is very extensive, because
the goose is built quite differently from the duck. Its legs are set
farther back on its body and it has a very large expanse of breast and
it usually extends that breast so that it is very showy; very interest­ing.
You pluck the down from the breast and you pluck the down from under
the wings, to keep the wing area from being so hot and you pluck a
small area between the wings on the back . That 1 s about the extent of the
area for plucking the goose.
The goose may hurt a little when it 1 s plucked. People at the
Folklife usually ask if it doesn 1 t hurt ... some people of a very sensi­tive
nature stand there and wince as they see it being done .. .
EM: I do.
DP: But actually the pain is not any greater than the pain which the
woman reacts to when she plucks her eyebrows. Actually it is a natural
thing for that down to come off anyway in the season in which the pluck­ing
goes on, so it isn 1 t anchored very deeply at the time it is being
plucked. The person who plucks takes a small amount of down between
hi s forefinger and the thumb and plucks qui ckly so that there is not
any sustained pain for the goose. It 1 S no more painful than milking is
to the cow.
EM: Oh, really?
DP: It really isn 1t very painful. No blood comes off with the down.
The down i sn1 t anchored deeply during plucking season . The down comes
Oeolece Parmelee
DP: off easily because it is semi-detached at the time the person is
plucking it.
4.
In the natural course of events , it will come off naturally. The
months between Apri l and October make up the moulting season for the
bird.
EM: That makes me feel better.
DP: I think that makes al l of us feel better because we don't like to
be cruel to anything, even a goose. The plucking of a goose has to be
done by a knowledgeable person because the average goose is hostile to
being handled . A person of some strength has to subdue the goose. You
pick it up by holding both wings and by putting the left hand over the
head to keep the goose from biting and then turning the bird over on its
back so that it feels a little helpless. The plucker ties the feet to­gether
and then after the feet are no longer free , he al so ties those
very splendid, strong wings together. When the goose is turned on its
back and the breastis extended for plucking the goose is fairly well
subdued because the blood is running down to its head and it may do
something like way "caw, caw, caw," but it isn't in a position to do
very much fighting. If you don't know how to handle the bird, it will
fight . .. it's very strong; its wings are exceedingly strofX2 . It can be a
menace to small animals . .. ! made a sort of joke a while ago about how
frightened small children are, but yet they will do well to be fri ghtened
because the goose is strong and if it really wants to attack, it has the
power to do so , and could in jure a child. It will attack a small dog
and cause a dog to go running into some kind of a covert crying because
the peck can be very painful. The goose can inflict hurt with its
heavy wings.
Deolece Parmelee
EM: Do both the gander and the goose get plucked?
DP: Yes. They 1re both going to moult anyway during the hot weather
and so the down is plucked.
5.
Down is saved from birds that have been butchered for eating but
commonly, that is a very rare part of the management of geese. A goose
may be fattened for Christmas or Thanksgiving or another high occasion
but goose is not something you want to eat once a week. Once a year is
about as often as a family gathering would care to have goose meat. It's
good; very good.
EM: I love it .
DP: But it isn't nearly as commonly eaten as chicken . So we don't have
opportunities to pluck butchered geese very often. It's the plucking
of the live goose which actually accumulates enough down to make a
mattress. On the old-time farm, even with very large families, the
farm wife commenced saving goose down when the children were small and
she made each child one of those mattresses to take with them when they
were married or on t heir own as householders . In the Scandinavian
countries, they make a very heavy mattress to sleep on and a smaller
mattress to put over the bed during the winter time because goose down
is much warmer than cotton or wool or any other coveri ng. And it's also
soft and pliable and very helpful in a bed. The Swiss sti ll use it in
the mountains ... one mattress underneath and one over the sleeper . They
put those mattre sses on the window sills to sun just as the people do
in the South. There was always one area in the farm yard which was
devoted to the sunning of beds. The farm wife call ed it a bed scaffold.
It was the size of a mattress , about t he size of a regular bed and it
was out by the garden usually. The li ttle boys or girls hel ped t ake thi s
mattress out and sun once a week to keep it ni ce and clean.
Deolece Parm,el ee 6.
EM: Once a week!
DP: Sometimes not that often but that was the tendency to sun and air
the mattress so that it wouldn 1 t smell 11 Close, 11 as they said. Have an
unpleasant odor of human bodies. That was the way you take care of it.
The typical down comforter that we have today is a much refined
version of that but the old time goose down mattress was an accepted
part of domestic life.
EM: All in cold climate areas. It occurs to me as you 1 ve been talking,
the French have a big thing about stuffing geese for the liver and making
pate and things like that. Are they goose pluckers?
DP: Yes, they pluck geese. All European countries pluck geese . I don 1 t
know that they do down in Italy so much because they have a warmer
climate. But northern Europe is very fond of geese and goose plucking.
They sti ll sleep upon one feather mattress and underneath another in
cold weather. Expecially in the northern countries where there isn 1 t
any sunshine in the winter.
EM: It used to be when a daughter got married that was part of her
dowry. A very important part.
DP: And frequently the son was given one of those mattresses, too, by
his family.
EM: Right now they make quilts. For instance, a farm woman say, is
collecting down to fill a mattress ... of course it depends on how big her
flock of geese i s , but have you any idea how long it takes her to fill
that mattress for a normal double bed?
DP: It depends on how often she plucks her geese and how carefully she
saves the down .
EM : Is it a pretty slow process?
DP : It 1 S a very slow process .
Deolece Parmelee 7.
EM: You'd have to have a lot of patience. I notice, and this is just
a modern idea, but I have a very difficult time finding geese. I was
brought up to always have a goose for Christmas .. . apparently geese have
fallen into disfavor. At least in this part of the country.
DP: They have to have a wide range and as farms grew smaller, there was
not enough room for them. Geese and turkeys have to have wide range.
They get into the neighbors' property and they do harm to the neighbor
who resents having them come into his property. They fly over fences . . .
they capture them and cut their wing feathers occasionally to keep them
from flying into places where they're not wanted. As farms grew smaller,
the keeping of geese became more and more rare .
I understand Mrs. O'Neil Ford used to keep geese out where she
lives.
EM: She may still; she had all kinds of birds out there .
DP: You have to have a large range for them; they require a large
range.
And speaking of wing feathers, it was the wing feather, the strong
wing feather which was plucked for use as a pen. The typical frontier
family had no writing pens, steel nibs as they call them, they plucked
that heavy feather from the wing trying to get rid of the tendency of
the goose to fly away anyway and used those heavy feathers, sharpened
with a knife, to make the writing pen.
EM: What we call quill pens.
One of the things I didn't know until I watched you do this a
couple of years ago . . . would you explain how you go way into the skin ...
DP: Yes, you go in under the heavier feathers and pull the down out;
you don't want the heavier feathers. And so you slide your fingers up
under the heavier feathers and don't disturb them; just pull the down.
Deolece Parmelee 8.
EM: That was something I didn't know about. There are apparently two
layers.
DP: Yes. You could pull the heavier feathers but you don't have as
neat a product when you do that.
EM: An expert plucker, like you, can reach up and feel where the down
is.
DP: You can avoid getting the heavier feathers by reaching up under
and getting the down.
EM: When we were talking just now you told how you do it with your
fingers ...
DP: You just take your thumb and forefinger and maybe the little finger
to help, and pull it very gently, get it out rapidly, so the goose won't
object too much.
EM: A smal l amount at a time.
DP: Yes. You put it i nto a bag as you pull it out ... bag or basket ...
bag is really better because the basket may leak some ... a bag inside a
basket is fine.
EM: Suppose you have a normal size goose .. . how long does it take you
to pluck one?
DP: Oh, not more than ten or twelve minutes. You don't pluck al l of
the feathers; you just pluck part of them.
EM: I have a picture in my mind ... I wonder if you would put that on
the tape ... of how that goose l ooks . You said you tied hi s legs and his
wings. You used a piece of cloth or something that was soft.
DP: That's right. You use a rag; a soft cloth .. . not a harsh piece of
rope or anything like that, something soft ... an old rag is better than
a new one ... whatever you have. You make it a wide filament; you don't
make it so that it will cut into the f l esh ... you tie it not too loosely
Deolece Parmelee 9.
harshly ,
but not too ~ither because you ldon' t want to :hurt the '•bird. A 11
you're trying to do is subdue him enough to pluck the feathers.
You turn the breast up first and you put the head under your left
knee ... let him have his nose out so he can bre athe but he'll close his
eyes if you have his head under your knee and then you pluck all this
wide expanse of breast . Then you turn him over quickly . . . you also
pluck up under the wings . . . when he is up-ended like that . .. and do the
little bit of plucking on the back. Then you hand him over to the
person who is helping you, supposedly, unless you're doing it all by
yourself , you untie first the legs and then t he wings and it gets on
these legs that have been stultified for a whil e and he goes away and
he j ust squawks ... he is so angry he doesn't know what to do.
EM: You might explain, too, which I wouldn't have understood .. . you say
tie the wings. Explain where the cloth goes when you tie the wings
down.
DP: The wings' expanse, with the quil ls and the feathers ... is the third
part of the wing. The wing is three bones ... like a chicken wing ... three
parts. And you tie the first joint ... you get the first joint in each
wing and you put this ribbon or material around that and tie those first
joints together so the rest of the wing i s rather incapacitated but only
t hat first joint is actually tied.
EM: I can't remember ... does the cloth go around the whole bird?
DP: No. Just around those two joints ... from the left wing to the right
wing and then you tie it ... with a bow knot on top of the bird.
EM: On top of the bird in the back so there's nothing disturbing you
when you're doing the front part. I didn't remember how you did that.
DP : It' s an art, but it's easily learned .
Deolece Parmelee l 0.
EM: It doesn't sound easy to me! When I watched you doing it at the
Folklife Festival two years ago, you had somebody help you. Could you
do it alone if you absolutely had to?
DP: I could do it alone but it would be very hard for a woman who weighs
only 100 pounds ... to subdue a heavy goose like that. And be dexterous
and fast enough to tie both the wings and the legs without any help. We
commonly on the farm, when I was learning how to do this, had a boy help
the women folk.
EM: But that was woman's work, wasn't it?
DP: It was woman's work; I never knew a man to pick a goose.
EM: Did your mother learn it from her mother ... was it handed down?
DP: She learned it from her mother; her mother learned it from her grand­mother
because my great grandmother died when her daughter was three
years old ... my grandmother learned it from her grandmother. It was just
something handed down to the women in the family. And that was a duty.
EM: Thi s is really a folk art.
DP: It is. A family needed feather beds and who was going to provide
them if the matriarch of the family didn't do it, so the mother and her
daughters took care of that part of the f arm work. I never knew a man
to pluck a goose.
EM: I can't see a man doing it.
When you were talking about the bird and the heat in the summer. I
thought of the other animals like the horses and the cows who grow
heavier fur for the winter, surely those early people, reaching back as
far as we know when they were gooseplucking for the down, for the beds
and stuff, they weren't very concerned about the happiness of the goose,
were they?
Deolece Parmelee ll.
EM: They were more intent on the pragmatic use of the goose.
DP: They were, in self defense, trying to get whatever fabric they
could. Food and fiber was a big thing with them and they didn't con­cern
themselves too much ...
The Scandinavians are supposed to have begun domesticating geese ...
oh, perhaps a thousand years ago ... long, long ago. Perhaps 1800 years
ago would be more like it. Geese may have been domesticated as long ago
as 3,000 years because cavemen (apparently) found out about the warming
protection of feathers. They discovered that down was a product that
was needed in their li ves so they commenced subduing, domesticating,
geese long, long ago. So did the northern Chinese.
EM: That' s interesting because they really needed it, didn't they?
We were talking about padding their clothes. Did they use goose
down or vegetable fiber or what? For those coats?
DP: Whatever they could get, but the choice was goose down because it
was so soft and more comfortable.
The story is told of the pioneers who came to America . . . poor because
of the ravages of famine in Europe ... who couldn 't bring things that they
needed to bring because they had sold every thing t hey owned wherever
they lived . . . Ireland, Scotland, wherever, in order to get passage on the
boat to come over.
There is a story of one young bride, she was a Lady Somebody .. . she
had a title in Scotl and, she was a bride of one of the men in the family
and the women in the family told her that she should make her first
temporary mattresses out of corn husks, corn shucks. She wouldn't have
time to get down even if she had the resources to buy it ... before winter
time. So they turned her l oose in t he corn crib where she could get
Deolece Parmelee 12.
DP: enough corn shucks to make a mattress; gave her the materia1 , the
pillow-case-like mattress cover ... and left her there and went on about
their duties, thinking that they'd come back in an hour or so and she'd
have the thing stuffed. They came back and she had a pair of scissors
and she was cutting these corn shucks into very small widths because
she said they were much too harsh in total. Wel l, these farm women,
these frontier women had never seen anybody do that; they thought that
was exceedingly strange ... that this woman would think that she could
ever make enough corn shucks into small bits to stuff a mattress. They
helped her stuff it without the cutting business.
EM: I have felt corn shuck mattresses in antique stores; boy, they must
have been uncomfortable.
DP: Corn shuck mattresses are very hard on the human f rame . Yet, if
that's all you have, that's better than sleeping on a board.
EM: Did the early people, for instance in this count ry, domesticate
the wild geese?
OP: No, they usually brought them with them.
EM: They brought them?
DP: From western Europe. That is one of the things they brought ap ­parently,
a goose and gander. The goose and gander are monogamous;
they mate for life; usually propagate a dozen or two dozen l ittle gos­lings
every year. It doesn't take long to get a large herd of geese.
You may not get that many; it depends on the goose but the goose lays
a good many eggs. She lays enough eggs that she thinks to make a brood.
Geese are not silly and dumb ... there's an expression, "Silly as a goose, "
but that's not really an apt expression . . . geese are very, very astute.
You remember it was the sacred geese at Juno's temple who discovered
that the Gauls were coming in to sack Rome and gave the alarm so that
Deolece Parme.lee 13.
DP: the soldiers could defend Rome against the Gauls. This was 390 B.C ..
The goose is not a silly animal.
EM: You see them in the hieroglyphics in Egypt . .. the goose.
DP: Yes. The goose was honored because it was very worth while.
EM: It's an old, old creature.
DP: Yes, it's an old, old creature. Our geese were usually brought
from Europe. A few may have been domesticated. People even today domes­ticate
geese occasionally because the geese fly over in the f all and in
the spring on their regular rounds from their breeding grounds up in
Canada down to the -Gulf states areas for wintering; some of them get
hurt. And sometimes the injured goose will remain on the farm if it 's
treated with care and affection. The goose will domesticate even today.
There used to be a man up close to Hereford, Texas who was known as
"Goose Ramey" because he was famous for domesticating geese . He got
into the business without design. He befriended a hurt goose and then
the hurt goose would cal l to his wild mate, wild f riends, as they came
over and they would come down and visit him and Mr. Ramey would some­times
be able to domesticate those geese, too. It produced a new breed,
crossing domestic geese with wild geese.
EM: Is anybody doing it now with the onslaught of all kinds of arti ­ficial,
man-made fibers? Are people still using goose down for any­thing?
Yes, they are for hunting jackets, aren't they?
DP: And they're very expensive. Hunting jackets and trousers, too,
sometimes. People at football games wear these down-filled cloth ing;
so do the people who ski .
EM: Well, I'm thinking, when you come to buy a goose down pillow you
pay a fortune for one now. So it's not a common commodity, is it?
Deolece Parmelee 14.
DP: No, it isn't. And the down which ... sometimes you buy these ''down­filled"
products and they're half chicken feathers.
EM: When you were goose plucking a couple of years ago, you were saving
the down for somebody. What was she going to do with it?
DP: She combined it with silk and (wove) made a fabric which was ir­regular
of course but very lovely. But she didn't find it was practical.
She made a ribbon or two of it. She couldn't make a fabric that was
wide enough.
EM: Too fragile. I wonder how she could do that.
DP: Well, she 's an expert weaver.
EM: When you come to the Folklife Festival in August, is somebody
going to provide the geese?
DP: When my son went to Switzerland as an exchange student and went up
into the mountains with this family, he slept between two pads of goose
down.
EM: There ' s nothing more delightful. I did it once and it's light and
so warm on a cold night ... below zero weather ... it's absolutely divine.
DP: He took a picture of a chalet with the goose down pads on the window
sills, sunn ing, the next day. They sun them every day.
EM: This is one of the wonderful things about the Folklife Festi val at
The In stitute- -it's preserving these arts of the folk that are just fast
disappearing. I bet you when you didn't come down last year that they
tried to get somebody and just could not find anybody in the st ate of
Texas to come down.
DP: That's what John told me ... they couldn't find anyone.
EM: You ought to be teaching somebody ... you know that.
DP: I imagine there are plenty of people who know but they haven't
happened to find them.
Oeolece Parmelee 15.
EM: Oh , I don't know; they have pretty good resources . I have the
fee ling always when the Folklife Festival is in sess i on that a lot of
these things are going to be l ost if they don't pass them on . I asked
the wheelwright man if he was training. He said there were people who ...
young man who wanted to learn but didn't have the time to because they
had to earn a living. And there wasn't time on the weekends. So maybe
that' s being lost.
DP: Perhaps we shourld get an understudy this year and have her learn
so that next year if I'm out of pocket, she can do it.
EM: I think that would be a very smart move on their part to have an
understudy.
DP: You might speak to them about it.
EM: I will , indeed. You do it twice a day, eh?
DP: Yes, twice a day.
EM: From my observation, you got a good deal of i nterest , didn't you?
DP: Oh, yes. We always have crowds.
EM: People are fascinated with it.
DP: It i sn't one of the more sensational sports ... but people are curious
about it .
EM: They really are.
T~anks ever so much!
END OF INTERVIEW
PARMELEE, DEOLECE
Goose Plucking
Biographical, 1,2
Geese, 1,2,4,7,11,12
INDEX
Plucking, 2-10
Uses, 2 ,3,5- 7 ,13 ,14
Goose plucking, a vanishing folk art, served a very
real purpose in the early days. The down was used for light
warmth for matresses, pillows, quilts, etc. and also relieved
the goose during hot weather.
It seems to have been solely ''woman's work" and the art
was passed down from mother to daughter.