Commentary: Important role a mule played in a man's family history

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Commentary: Important role a mule played in a man's family history

Host: LYNN NEARYTime: 8:00-9:00 PM

LYNN NEARY, host:

Now commentator Aaron Freeman would like to present his own memorial to a very important player in his family's history.

AARON FREEMAN:

I owe my life to the mule. I know neither the mule's name, nor pedigree, nor gender. I would not recognize its picture. But the mule is why I've sipped coffee in Paris, nibbled falafel in Jerusalem and looked out on the misty trees of Machu Pichu.

My ancestors were among the lowest class of enslaved Africans. We were almost wholly unskilled; neither carpenters, nor smiths, nor cowboys. Not charming or cooperative enough for domestic work, we were field hands; inexpensively purchased laborers bought and sold by the dozen. Legend says our first two generations didn't even get names. We answered to a demand for `one of you-all.'

When freedom came, my ancestors, having few skills and less hope, stayed on the land and did what they had been trained to do: grow and pick cotton. They were sharecroppers. Then one day, Ananias Fuller, my grandfather-to-be, was spotted on the road by a skinny 18-year-old girl. According to that girl, my grandmother, it was not Ananias Fuller's good looks that attracted her, though he had them. He known was Uncle Love. But what attracted my grandmother to Ananias Fuller was the mule.

My grandmother was a bright girl who dreamed beyond the plantation. Cotton was fine, but she wanted to pick her own on her own land. She recognized the mule's excess value potential. Hitched to a plow, a mule was the technological innovation needed to put her onto the agriculture superhighway. A mule provided transport. It was a four-legged Model T. A mule could carry you to a far-off town where you could hear news from even more distant lands. A mule was the Internet. My grandmother envisioned all of this, at least when I tell the story.

Grandma Leona married Ananias Fuller and his mule. The three of them sharecropped successfully enough that they had money to move north from Mississippi to Tennessee. They bought land outside Memphis that produced enough profit to open a store, which allowed them to send their children to school, which made the children curious enough about the world that my mother married a man with a car and moved further north to Chicago.

But for the mule, Leona Fuller, my mother, remains another shabby but clean colored girl working the Mississippi soil. But for the mule, I am born into rural poverty, doomed to a life of representation by Trent Lott. But for the mule, my multilingual triathlete daughters, named after the goddesses Artemis and Diana, are called Addie Pearl and Fannie Mae. They grow up barefoot and badly educated by the poorest state in the union.

The mule was a genie that granted my grandparents' wishes for themselves and generations to come; it was a dream not deferred. But the mule has no face. It has no story. I do not know how the mule died, but I stand on its strong back still. So mule of Mississippi, wherever you are, for all that you did, a grateful man says thank you.

NEARY: Aaron Freeman, journalist and comedian, lives in Chicago.

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