Pigeons ^(Myth)

The only problem with this consistently depicted scene in the Borden murder tale is, while Andrew did indeed kill some of the pigeons he kept in the barn in the months before the murders, there is no evidence that Lizzie considered these pigeons to be her pets, or that she was even particularly upset about it. She didn’t even believe he killed them with a hatchet; she thought he had wrung their necks. Here is Lizzie’s inquest testimony on the subject:

Q: [Knowlton] You are not able to say your father did not own a hatchet?

A: I don’t know whether he did or not.

Q: Did you know there was found at the foot of the stairs a hatchet and axe?

A: No sir, I did not.

Q: Assume that is so, can you give me any explanation of how they came there?

A: No sir.

Q: Assume they had blood on them; can you give any occasion for there being blood on them?

A: No sir.

Q: Can you tell of any killing of an animal? Or any other operation that would lead to their being cast there, with blood on them?

A: No sir. He killed some pigeons in the barn last May or June.

Q: What with?

A: I don’t know, but I thought he wrung their necks.

Q: What made you think so?

A: I think he said so.

Q: Did anything else make you think so?

A: All but three or four had their heads on, that is what made me think so.

Q: Did all of them come into the house?

A: I think so.

Q: Those that came into the house were all headless?

A: Two or three had them on.

Q: Were any with their heads off?

A: Yes sir.

Q: Cut off or twisted off?

A: I don’t know which.

Q: How did they look?

A: I don’t know, their heads were gone, that is all.

Q: Did you tell anybody they looked as though they were twisted off?

A: I don’t remember whether I did or not. The skin I think was very tender, I said why are these heads off? I think I remember of telling somebody that he said they twisted off.

Q: Did they look as if they were cut off?

A: I don’t know, I did not look at that particularly.

Note that Lizzie refers to the birds as “some pigeons” and not “my pigeons.” Nor does she give any indication that she thought of them as pets or that they were otherwise special to her. She seems not to have given much attention to them when they were brought into the house except to notice some of them had no heads. Emma, in her own inquest testimony, also refers to them merely as “pigeons,” telling Knowlton in answer to the question of potential blood on the hatchets found in the cellar, “Not unless father killed pigeons with them.” This matter-of-fact answer from indicates killing pigeons was not some sort of unusual event in the Borden household.

In the 1890s, squab, or pigeon meat, often graced the New England family dinner table, and many households kept pigeons, the same as they would chickens, just for that purpose. There is every reason to believe that Andrew did the same, and the fact that he brought them into the kitchen after wringing their necks indicates that squab was going to be on the menu that evening.

In fact, it appears that squab was tempting enough to entice pigeon thieves to break into the Borden barn twice in the months before the murders. This was relayed by Alice Russell when on the stand she described how Lizzie reminded her about the previous barn break-ins when she was trying to justify her fears of Andrew’s enemies coming after the family. “That,” said Alice to Lizzie, “was merely boys after pigeons.”

While Lizzie didn’t say that the two break-ins were the reason Andrew decided to give up on pigeon-rearing and dispatch the last of them, it has often been assumed that is why. And perhaps it is true that security-obsessed Andrew would rather have given up raising pigeons than offer enterprising thieves a reason to keep invading his barn. Or, maybe he was just tired of the work or the mess involved in keeping birds. Or, maybe he just got tired of eating squab. No one knows.

The Evolution of the Pigeon Myth

So how is it that Andrew quitting on pigeon-raising has become so commonly characterized as a callous slaughter that sent Lizzie on the path to murder? Once again, we can thank Victoria Lincoln, who combined a disregard for facts with her vivid novelist’s imagination to invent many of the myths that cling so tenaciously to the Borden saga. She even boasted that she was the first to convey the sinister significance of the pigeon-killing in this passage of her influential 1967 book, A Private Disgrace.

“In May, a minor incident took place that must have disturbed Lizzie at a fairly deep level, for she was passionately fond of birds and animals. She kept pigeons in the barn loft, and after the horse was sold, boys twice broke into the barn to steal a few. Andrew decided to put temptation out of their way, which he did by decapitating them with a hatchet. Where property or infringement of his rights was concerned, Andrew did not think widely or think twice. Strangely enough, I have never seen this mentioned by anyone who has written on the case.”

She then bemoaned that in so many accounts of the murder that “the slaughter of Lizzie’s pigeons doesn’t rate a line.” Maybe it didn’t rate a line because it wasn’t true. And, if it had never been written about, one wonders where Lincoln, who wrote this passage more than 70 years after the murders, came up with her version of the story. Was it another one of the Lizzie-critical rumors whispered about in the upper crust circles of the Fall River of her youth? Wherever she got the idea, other authors have taken her version as gospel, and over the years have added their own embellishments to it. Here is Arnold Brown’s 1991 version:

“The barn’s sole occupants became Lizzie’s pigeons. No one ever questioned Lizzie’s love of animals, and as far as we know, these pigeons were her pets and the only pets she had, allowed by Andrew for the simple reason that, on occasion, they graced the dinner table. Eating pets, and pigeons at that, is almost unknown today, but anyone who knew Andrew would understand it fully; his credo was “You do not feed animals who do not feed you.”

Meanwhile, Walter Hixson, writing his chapter on Lizzie Borden in his 2000 book on sensational murder cases, went all in on the myth, pumped it up further, and even suggested that the killing of the pigeons triggered Lizzie to choose a hatchet for the murders of her parents:

“Although she apparently would have preferred poison, Lizzie may have rationalized the choice of the hatchet by recalling her father’s own willingness to decapitate pigeons that Lizzie had fed and nurtured in their roosts around the house and barn. Andrew had killed the birds, only weeks before his own murder, despite Lizzie’s pleas that they be spared.”

These are just a few examples of the way the simple act of killing pigeons raised for food has ballooned to such mythic proportions that no writer can resist using it to increase the dramatic stakes in the alleged life-and-death struggle between Lizzie and her father. When such a myth takes hold, it is almost always because it employs symbols to which our minds readily respond.

Why the Myth Persists

In 1992, a centennial conference on the Borden murders was held at Bristol Community College in Massachusetts, and many of the papers presented there were written by psychologists who took a closer look at Lizzie-as-killer through a lens of a more modern understanding of mental illness and dysfunctional family dynamics. Only one of the 22 papers published in the proceedings from the conference suggested that Lizzie could possibly be innocent; they all assumed her guilt. From this basis, Lizzie was retroactively diagnosed with different mental health issues, from borderline personality disorder to the post-traumatic stress disorder of an incest survivor. Several of these papers used the story of the pigeon killing to support their conclusions.

One of the more interesting takes was by Stephen Kane, who wrote, “Jung discussed the ‘ancient conflict between symbols of containment and liberation’ and viewed the bird as the symbolic vehicle of release. The earthly constraints of existence that grant security also are in conflict with a need for freedom.” Lizzie, said Kane, wanted liberation from life under her father’s thumb yet was thwarted. The pigeons were symbolic of her longing to fly away, and Andrew’s killing of them represented the death of her hope for freedom. “Pigeons,” said Kane, “have a long record of significance in symbolic and superstitious literature. The presence of pigeons have been repeatedly implicated with bad luck and death,” especially a death in the family. “Upon the horror of seeing her headless pigeons and Andrew’s indiscriminate cruelty, [Lizzie knew] that there was no escape or transcendence … He killed the spirit of her individuation and the objects of her love, her pigeons. And shortly thereafter, there was a death in the family.”

When we try to understand why a woman like Lizzie might have killed her parents, the pigeon-killing myth is so evocative that we are compelled to believe it without evidence of it being true because it feels true in a symbolic sense. As another psychologist named Margaret Judge Grenier wrote of Lizzie’s response to Knowlton at the inquest, her “extreme emotion” could be “felt in her description of the use of a hatchet in the killing of her pigeons … She drew a verbal picture. Some still had their heads on and the skin of their necks looked tender … She mentally connects hatchets with the death of her pigeons.” Andrew Borden, Grenier concluded, “Pushed too far when he attempted to maintain control [of Lizzie] with the slaughter of her birds … The death of the pigeons enmeshed in Lizzie’s mind with the killing of Andrew.”

These are grand pronouncements drawn from the bland answers Lizzie offered Knowlton when he pressed her to speculate on why blood could be on hatchet in her cellar. But maybe there is something to this rooting around in the subconscious of Lizzie Borden. Maybe there is indeed a glimpse of motive in something else she told Knowlton about the trip to the barn she said she took while her father was being hacked to death. Maybe there is a subtle confession peeking out from the enmeshment of pigeons and murder. Lizzie said that before entering the barn she first stopped to pick up some pears from beneath the pear tree. “I think I was under there very nearly four or five minutes. I stood looking around. I looked up at the pigeon house that they have closed up. It was no more than five minutes, perhaps not as long. I can’t say sure.”

Author’s Take

Did Lizzie kill her father at least partly because he killed “her” pigeons? I don’t think so. I don’t think they were her pigeons at all. I don’t think one thing has anything to do with the other, despite the enmeshment created in Victoria Lincoln’s imagination and handed down for our symbolic enjoyment. But I can’t say sure.