‘Chicken Lady’ Serves Up Food and Faith

Standing over a steamy metal vat, using a worn wooden stirring ladle the size of a boat oar, the Chicken Lady is once again working her feed-the-masses magic.

For more than seven years, Ina Rae Brown has performed the unlauded and the improbable: using her meager fixed income to treat hundreds of poor or homeless people throughout Long Beach to her spicy brand of Louisiana-style cooking. Her devotion has won the palates, hearts and perhaps even a few souls of her growing legion of followers.

Every Saturday, the spirit of Thanksgiving carries on in the cooking and generosity of the simply-spoken Brown, her retired husband, their friends and seven grown children.

Through sickness, bad weather and the occasional drop in donations, the 62-year-old Cerritos grandmother has yet to miss providing a weekly feeding, visiting the same residential street corner at 4 p.m. to dispense the good word of the Lord as she and her brood serve up meals ranging from curried goat and seafood gumbo to shrimp meatloaf, with beans, rice and homemade peach pie as the fixings.

But Brown is most famous for her Southern-style chicken, made with a family recipe from her native New Orleans.

“I was making all kinds of different dishes and one day I said, ‘What do ya’ll want next week?’ ” Brown said. “And people said, ‘We like your chicken!’ After that, they just started calling me the Chicken Lady because most of them didn’t know my real name, anyways.”

Last Saturday, Brown broke her chicken habit for a special holiday meal of two dozen basted turkeys (with crab meat stuffing, string beans and butterscotch pudding) that drew long lines--340 people who knew the Chicken Lady wouldn’t let them down.

“In a life where you can’t count on a lot,” said Cheryl Woods as she stood in line clutching her two children, “the Chicken Lady is someone you can count on.”

Explained Brown: “I want to make sure everybody has a real tasty Thanksgiving dinner, a soul food Thanksgiving dinner, with a lot of seasoning. That’s the basis of my food. I put a lot of seasoning in it. I use Creole, onion, garlic, parsley, celery, thyme and sage--different things that give the food a special taste.”

Regulars appreciate both the cooking and the fact that--unlike many other meal services sponsored by churches or God-fearing individuals--they don’t have to endure any guilt-inflicting sermons. With Brown--also known as Mother Brown--it’s enough that they enjoy her meals and hear out her gentle urgings to turn around their lives.

She rarely thumps the Bible, preferring instead to simply share some of her own personal battles with people--most recently, her struggle to lose weight. She comes off not as any preacher but as a fellow sinner whose own life is far from perfect.

As Edward Brown and his children work the food line, Ina Rae Brown often rests in the passenger seat of her husband’s late-model Bonneville, providing many well-wishers with more than free food.

Last week, there were the shoes she brought from home for one out-of-work woman, the wool jacket fetched for another homeless man and the tables of free clothing.

Once, as she laid out some clothes, a woman asked how much a dress cost. Brown almost hugged her, telling her, “No, child, those clothes are free. Just help yourself.”

“Ina Rae and her husband are the two most givingest people in Long Beach,” said Trevor Hamilton, a 38-year-old unemployed man who has helped the Chicken Lady do her weekly meals ever since he sampled her cooking several years ago.

“People often give away things they don’t want themselves, but I’ve seen the Browns give what they could really better use themselves.”

Brown says she uses a few cash donations, but mostly taps her monthly Social Security check to pay the $300-a-week meal bill. Last year, she and Edward said, they mortgaged their home to buy an $8,000 truck needed to transport their movable feast and the tables on which to serve it.

Brown has even had her utilities cut off after funneling the bill money into her weekly cook-a-thon.

She says she does it all out of a fierce faith in God and because she knows so many people count on her.

One Saturday, after struggling to find money to buy food, she arrived six hours late at her usual spot--the grassy corner of Cedar Avenue and 14th Street in Long Beach.

She found scores of people still waiting for her in the darkness.

“People know I’ll be there, no matter what,” she says.

Brown, who worked for years in a sewing factory after arriving in Los Angeles at age 19, began her feedings in 1990 almost by accident.

Always an ambitious cook, she usually had food left over after feeding her own family, especially after several older children moved out on their own.

Said Brown: “To put all that leftover food in the trash, well, that just hurts you.”

So Brown enlisted two friends--Ruth Rhodes and Ethel James--to load up their car and set off in search of folks who needed a meal. They motored throughout Watts, Long Beach and Fullerton, stopping at gas stations and at corners where they now admit they probably had no business being.

“Ruth had a knack of spotting people in need,” Brown recalls. “We’d pull up and ask ‘Are you hungry? Do you need something to eat?’ We’d be happy if we fed 35 people.”

Soon they were using their Saturdays to comb Long Beach markets and cook meals exclusively for the poor. They chose a regular corner in Long Beach at which to distribute offerings--cooked on an open fire in Brown’s backyard because her kitchen was too small to handle the average weekly menu of two dozen chickens, 100 pounds of potatoes and thirty dozen eggs.

A local pastor finally heard about Brown’s mission and invited her to use the industrial-sized kitchen at his Long Beach church.

“In those early years with Mother Brown, it was a week-to-week struggle whether she could provide for all these people,” said Rev. James Shaw of Lily of the Valley Church. “And sometimes the cupboard was bare.”

Then Edward Brown retired from Hughes Aircraft and became more involved with his wife’s weekly calling. “I don’t know what drives her, but whatever it is, it jumped onto me,” he said. “I guess it’s just the spirit of the Lord.”

Resting on a kitchen chair, Ina Rae Brown keeps a constant banter going with her husband: “Brown, did you get that turkey over there? Brown, you need to get that cranberry sauce out of the refrigerator.”

Two years ago, while shopping for food, Ina Rae collapsed from a heart attack.

For two weeks, unable to do any cooking, she barked orders to her husband and children from her hospital bed like a downed general on the battlefield.

“I thought it was time for her to stop,” said son Darryl. “But her concern was that people got fed. When we went to see her, she’d say ‘Leave me! Go feed!’ ”

Brown can’t remember the last time she spent money to get her hair done, and matter-of-factly describes how she went 12 months without a hot shower after her gas was shut off, instead heating a pot of water on the stove to use for bathing.

One day, she hopes to have enough money to open a mission and offer the homeless--many of whom have become her friends--a place to sleep.

In the meantime, Brown aims to feed as many people as possible, choosing to use the story of her battle with her weight to inspire others to take charge in their lives.

“I was a glutton,” she says. “But now I’ve changed.” In the last few months, she has lost 25 pounds.

Last weekend, she swayed through the crowd, raising her voice like a practiced orator. “I’m gonna give this fat to the Lord,” she said. “And we’re gonna give our alcohol to him. And give him our drugs!”

Nearby, Eddie Ragland fixed Brown with a smile. “I hope she realizes how appreciated her efforts are,” he said. “There goes the patron saint of Long Beach.”

Times staff writer Doug Shuit contributed to this story.