By H. V. Traywick, Jr.
If you are like me, you probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about mules these days, but a passage from Faulkner brought them to mind. Collectivism so far has not taken deep root in the South – at least among Southerners – but things are so rapidly changing with social media and the “Woke Revolution” that there is no telling the future. But whatever the future holds, the “woke” will have to contend with the ubiquitous individuality of the native Southerner, and one of the most individual of that breed is the mule. As William Faulkner wrote in Flags in the Dust:
Some Cincinnatus of the cotton fields should contemplate the lowly destiny, some Homer should sing the saga, of the mule and of his place in the South. He it was, more than any one creature or thing, who, steadfast to the land when all else faltered before the hopeless juggernaut of circumstances, impervious to conditions that broke men’s hearts because of his venomous and patient preoccupation with the immediate present, won the prone South from beneath the iron heel of Reconstruction and taught it pride again through humility and courage through adversity overcome; who accomplished the well-nigh impossible despite hopeless odds, by sheer and vindictive patience…
Although I’ve been around horses all my life, I never have had much occasion to come into contact with mules. My father had come home from the Second World War and was a manufacturer’s representative for a farm machinery company, but he said they still used mules in the tobacco fields, pulling the sleds down the rows where a tractor couldn’t go. Most of those broad tobacco fields that I remember seeing below Lynchburg when we were driving to South Carolina to visit my grandparents are gone now, and the mules with them, too, I suppose. One of the last I remember seeing was one day in South Carolina, when we passed a car load of colored men, with one man leaning out of the window leading a mule trotting alongside with harness jangling, in a picture surely worth a thousand words.
Mules, horses, and oxen were the farm tractors before steam power replaced muscle power as the prime mover of civilization, and they carried history on their backs. In my front yard when I was a little boy, there was a swale over which my tire swing hung. It was part of the remnant of General Jubal Early’s outer defenses of Lynchburg in 1864 when the Yankees came – the old road that connected Ft. McCausland (manned by McCausland’s cavalry and the VMI Cadets) on Langhorne Road with the redoubt held by the Lynchburg Home Guard (“The Silver Grays,” the young boys, and the convalescents from the hospitals) up on Rivermont Avenue, where Villa Maria is now. I would get a good running start and swing out over that little depression in the front yard where ninety years before teamsters pulling wagons, and artillerymen pulling guns and caissons once cracked whips and swore at hard-headed and recalcitrant mules:
… Father and mother he does not resemble, sons and daughters he will never have; vindictive and patient (it is a known fact that he will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once); solitary but without pride, self-sufficient but without vanity; his voice is his own derision. Outcast and pariah, he has neither friend, wife, mistress nor sweetheart; celibate, he is unscarred, possesses neither pillar nor desert cave, he is not assaulted by temptations nor flagellated by dreams nor assuaged by visions; faith, hope and charity are not his. Misanthropic, he labors six days without reward for one creature whom he hates, bound with chains to another whom he despises, and spends the seventh day kicking or being kicked by his fellows…
After The War, there were the “forty acres and a mule” that the carpetbaggers had promised the freedmen in exchange for their votes. It worked pretty well for the carpetbaggers, but not so good for the credulous freedmen. While they got top hats and cigars, the carpetbaggers got the votes and the forty acres. What they did with the mules is not recorded, but they did not need mules to plow the ground for votes, or to harvest taxes, or to foreclose on the forty acres.
In Richmond there has been some talk about replacements for the monuments on Monument Avenue that were desecrated and torn down by the mobs of Jacobins (the Lee monument has been thoroughly vandalized, but it is still standing, albeit fenced off and under litigation.) A number of replacement heroes of a “woke” multicultural nature have been suggested – fine and upstanding people, I’m sure, except that no one has ever heard of them – at least none that remotely match the international fame of Lee and Jackson who shook the Lincoln Empire to its foundation while Jeb Stuart rode circles around it in defense of our brief independence. Other monuments of a generic nature have been suggested by assorted virtue-posters to reflect our multi-cultural and multi-gendered “wokeness” these days, but these suggestions seem to sputter along without any fire, as though the end of history and the final leveling of society that we have for so long expended our righteous revolutionary energies upon to attain, have left us with a sense of malaise and ennui now that we have attained them. As the poet Allen Tate wrote:
Empty of heart the empty man
Of the Day of Jubilo…
But not to worry! Perhaps I can help. I don’t know how “woke” he is, but may I suggest a generic monument to the multi-cultural and ambivalently-gendered mule?