Letters to Lily: Curtis and the Stubborn Mule

Dear Lily,

At my house, we plant food on a lot of land, too much of it to move the soil around with just a shovel. So when it was time to plant a brand new garden patch, we borrowed a machine called a tiller to help us cut through all the grass and roots and stir up the soil so we could plant our seeds and they would have plenty of room in the soil to grow. I guess you could compare it to a lawnmower – it’s a machine you put gas in and it’s loud when you turn it on, but it works way faster than trying to do everything with just hand tools.

But when your great great grandfather Curtis Conner was a boy living on a farm in Alabama in the 1920s, they didn’t have machines that you could put gas in and start up and make quick work of all your chores. But they didn’t do it all by hand, either. Instead, they had mules to help them. The mule would pull a plow through the field to break up the soil and make rows to plant seeds in. His plow would have looked pretty much like this:

Except that’s two horses instead of a mule. And Ohio instead of Alabama. And the 1890s instead of the 1920s. But the technology was pretty much the same. This image is in the public domain. The photographer was a Miss Julia Jay Coon, who took this around the 1890s before she got married, became a housewife and mother, and apparently stopped doing photography altogether, which is a shame, but that’s the way it used to be when you were a woman of her particular social class and ethnicity. Women had to fight to be able to have their own money and vote and have jobs other than being a housewife and mother (or if you weren’t middle class, being somebody else’s housekeeper and/or nanny). And they did fight. And so now you can be a rocket scientist or the president or the founder of a series of halfway houses for recovering heffalumps and woozles trying to earn their dinner honestly or basically whatever the hell you want to be when you grow up, as long as you keep reading your books and saving your money and being skeptical of the latest social trends. Personally, I encourage you to go to trade school. You definitely should not go to grad school in the humanities – at least not unless you’ve gone to trade school first. Trust your grandmother. I learned this firsthand.

As a boy, Curtis helped on the farm like all his siblings. His sister Jean “Hermione” wrote down her memories of one time 12-year-old Curtis was plowing the corn field with Old Doc the mule pulling the plow. Apparently Doc was a hereditary mule name, because Grandma Conner had a mule named Doc when *she* was little. Aunt Jean explained, “This was in the days of one-mule plows, ten cent cotton, and watermelons cooled in the creek.” And this particular one mule did things at his own pace.

“Move along, Doc!” Curtis urged with a flip of the reins. . . . Doc changed to a slightly faster pace, lowering his head a bit as if deep in thought. “I know what you are thinking, Doc, and don’t you dare try it!” Curtis said.

Doc glanced at Curtis, who was walking barefoot and wearing a straw hat against the sun. As it got hotter, Curtis would fan himself with his hat and Doc would flap his ears and tail. At lunchtime, they found themselves on the far edge of the field, so they had to plow a row on their way back to lunch.

But as Aunt Jean wrote, Doc “had an inner timer of his own.” He seemed to know it was about time for food and water and a lunchtime rest, and he picked up his pace a bit starting back in anticipation. Then about halfway back, he decided it was officially noon and thus officially shortcut time. Aunt Jean wrote,

The shortest way to the house and barn was across the rows. Doc never hesitated. He took the shortcut as he had many times before, cutting across the rows of corn, dragging the plow and Curtis with him. Curtis pulled the reins tight and dug his heels in the dirt.

“Whoa, Doc, whoa!” he demanded, but Doc was not about to listen to a twelve year old boy at twelve o’clock noon. He snorted, flipped his ears, and plowed through five more rows of corn.

“Whoa, you mangy, flap-eared, miserable idiot of a jackass!” Curtis yelled, using all the derogatory words he felt he could use with his parents near enough to hear.

At the edge of the field, Doc stopped and waited for somebody to take off his harness. But Curtis had had enough of that mule. Jean concludes,

But Curtis’ brother Lloyd would have to unhitch the mule, for Curtis threw his hat down and walked away. “I quit,” he declared to Lloyd and to all ears listening. “All that fool mule thinks about all morning is how much fun he is going to have pulling me across the rows plowing up corn!”

I’ll tell you the story of the *other* mule named Doc another time. That mule tried to go ice skating!

Goodnight, Lily.

Love, your grandmother