24 Replies to ““The forty acres and a mule follow-up to the follow-up post” (from the protein wisdom conceptual series)”

1. Robert Hayes says:

   November 13, 2005 at 12:32 am

   GET THAT ANIMAL OUT OF MY LOBBY!

2. RS says:

   November 13, 2005 at 12:43 am

   As someone who used to work summers in the Seventies “measuring crops” for the ASCS, the phrase “forty acres” has a physical (and painful) personal resonance for me.

   TW “order,” as in, my comment is nostaligic and of little wider interest and therefore likely out of order, but what the hey?

3. Beck says:

   November 13, 2005 at 12:50 am

   We got a bill of sale right here (he’s ours until he dies).

4. RS says:

   November 13, 2005 at 1:01 am

   ASCS memories above provide some blinkered inspiration – who out here knows what one of us Deep South types mean when we use the phrase “counting squares?”

   And no, it has nothing to do with toting up the Nielson numbers for Lawrence Welk reruns.

5. RS says:

   November 13, 2005 at 1:11 am

   [Does his best Phil Ken Sebben voice]

   Ha!  Conversation-killer.

6. early says:

   November 13, 2005 at 1:23 am

   There you are! Counting Squares? Does it have anything to do with those grand racist traditions from the ole deep south? Git along llittle doggie.

7. bobonthebellbuoy says:

   November 13, 2005 at 1:25 am

   Days Inn aroud here?

   Yep just down the road… CARPETBAGGER!!!

   TW “general” just an observance

8. RS says:

   November 13, 2005 at 1:34 am

   Early – And here I was thinking we had bonded over a shared fondness for Ozzie film and culture.

   But to answer your question, no racist associations with the phrase of which I’m aware – it’s a very utilitarian, agriculturally-related bit of terminology.  Probably not something that would come up in Oz, unless their staple crops have changed considerably of late.

9. Sean M. says:

   November 13, 2005 at 1:47 am

   Does it have anything to do with those grand racist traditions from the ole deep south?

   Asks anti-semitic early, without the slightest trace of irony.

10. RS says:

    November 13, 2005 at 1:51 am

    But Sean, he knows what the typical Southerner is like.  From his vantage point of Australia of course, and from having seen documentary works like Gone With the Wind.

    TW “That” – Yeah, that‘s the ticket.

11. Peter Jackson says:

    November 13, 2005 at 2:14 am

    Don’t badmouth a mule in front of my grandfather.

    He grew up the youngest of ten children of an Alabama sharecropper during the Great Depression. He told me that back then the difference between a poor family and a family that had enough to eat wasn’t whether they were black or white, educated or ignorant—it was whether or not your family had a mule. He’s still grateful to this day for his family’s jack mule of his boyhood and speaks of him in reverent tones.

    TW: french… I’m sorry, I just can’t.

    :peter

12. RS says:

    November 13, 2005 at 2:39 am

    Peter – sounds like my bunch as well, just shifted one state over to the left.  Mules were most definitely a status symbol and a prized possession in NE Mississippi up until the late Sixties.  I still remember one old farmer who was still working his sixty-acre spread with a team of mules on a double-tree hitch as late as 1967, and loggers were still using mule teams up there as late as 1973.

    TW “Home,” As in, I’m getting way too down home here, and I’ll stop.

13. Ric Locke says:

    November 13, 2005 at 3:31 am

    My grandaddy was uppercrust due to the profits from having grown weed—er, hemp—for the Navy during WWII. He had horses, big gelding work-horses with hairy legs, called “Laddybuck” and “Davey”. There were plenty of mules around, though, mostly (just to confirm Early’s prejudices) among the black people.

    That’s another three state lines to the left, by the way. In the geometric sense…

    Regards,
    
    Ric

14. Sticky B says:

    November 13, 2005 at 3:34 am

    I haven’t heard the term jack mule in a long, long time. And the last time I heard it, it was used by my head FB coach as a term of admiration for our tailback, whom he’d seen coming out of the shower the day before.

    TW: done

    So are we done here?

15. Tom M says:

    November 13, 2005 at 4:00 am

    “We in Goshen yet?”

16. RS says:

    November 13, 2005 at 4:18 am

    That about growing hemp – one of my grad school professors used to joke about an old maiden aunt of his who lived in Meridian, MS and who took extreme pride in her flower garden.  It had been in the family for generations, and had even won prizes, in particular one beautiful, delicate bloom that her great, great, great whatever had planted way back when.

    Great pride – until the State Bureau Of Narcotics paid her a call.  To her horror, the beautiful, delicate bloom was an opium poppy that had originally been planted back in 1862 for the Confederate Medical Service.

    The old fellow loved to tell that one – he had another that involved Mexican hookers, jalapeno consumption, and the Army Medical Hospital at El Paso – but as promised earlier, I’ll stop.

17. Sortelli says:

    November 13, 2005 at 4:48 am

    *perks up* Did someone say “Mexican hookers”?

18. maggie katzen says:

    November 13, 2005 at 4:49 am

    my father in law always likes to tell a story about when he was a highway patrolman, he pulled up behind this van, and the guy was loading it with plants out of the ditch. the guy stopped, looked kinda sheepish and said, “i guess i shouldn’t be taking these” my f-i-l replied, “nah, you can have all that you want.” the guy smiled, and then my f-i-l informed him that it was ragweed.

19. Ric Locke says:

    November 13, 2005 at 7:09 am

    Heh. I love revisionist history and whispering campaigns. The Harrison Act, which made opium illegal, wasn’t passed until 1914, and growing the plant ornamentally wasn’t actively discouraged until much later (don’t know the year).

    My grandmother had a good-sized flowerbed of opium poppies which she maintained until the Twenties. She used to describe how pleasant it was to sit on the porch in the late Summer afternoon, with the poppies blooming and releasing their fragrance… no, she wasn’t stupid. She knew what was going on.

    Opium prohibition was “sold” to the American people on racist grounds, that is, that the heathen Chinese were abusing the stuff and had to be controlled to prevent their corrupting the Youth. The campaign to prohibit marijuana involved much muttering about black people, juke joints, and dancing, and the remnants of that gossip persisted in the vernacular long enough for me to barely remember people repeating it, including my grandmother.

    She also used to say that my granddad came as close as he ever had to cursing right after the war, when he and the tenants were trying to eradicate the “durned old hemp”. His tenant, a (black) man called Mitchell, was an enthusiastic supporter of the eradication; he was just as rock-ribbed a Baptist as anyone might be, and disapproved of juking, zoot suits, and the like just as deeply.

    Time for bed. Y’know, if the majority of Jeff’s posts are as enjoyable as the ones I actually understand are, the erudite folks must be gettin’ some real delight out of ‘em.

    Regards,
    
    Ric

20. David Ross says:

    November 14, 2005 at 12:22 am

    Is this a reparations thread? Can it become one?

    Vermont sociologist and (in a former life) myth-debunker James Loewen has recently published a book called “Sundown Towns” which illustrates that a number of whites-only towns weren’t always that way, but got there from anti-Chinese (in Cali) and later anti-Black (elsewhere) pogroms. This may have been an outgrowth of Jackson’s expulsion of the Cherokee from Georgia and the various anti-Mormon troubles of the 1820-40s but Loewen doesn’t go that far back.

    Loewen then argues that among the best ways to remedy racial inequity would be to abolish the SAT in college admissions; also to pay out reparations to black people who can prove they were exiled in one of these pogroms or otherwise affected by the ensuing economic shunning.

    This last would mostly affect those living in the ghettoes and remaining interracial towns in the Midwest, Northeast, Ozarks, and Appalachians; because there never was much sundown in the proper South, where most of the black population always lived and still lives in integrated towns.

    The victims of Rosewood and Sicilian victims of West Frankfurt have already received some form of reparations, but not the Black victims of West Frankfurt nor those of the failed pogrom at Tulsa.

21. mojo says:

    November 14, 2005 at 4:42 am

    (checks spare change)

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    December 18, 2006 at 1:06 am

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23. fee says:

    April 16, 2007 at 3:32 pm

    *perks up* Did someone say “Mexican hookers”?

24. love love says:

    April 17, 2007 at 6:08 pm

    *perks up* Did someone say “Mexican hookers”?*

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