George Dawson's mule
George Dawson died a few years back but not before he reached 103 years old and walked without a cane, he told us. A sweet-spirited black gentleman. He was a good boy that grew into a good man. I never met him but I know it would have been a privilege. When he was a little boy his friend Pete gave him a baseball. (Pete was later lynched by irate white people.) When George was a twenty-one year old man he went north to find a job and got one working at building levees. They told him to pick out the mule and wagon that he wanted. The mule's name was Joe. George's job was to go get dirt and rocks that would act as filler and come back to the levee and pour it all in the right place. He spoke of "his" mule and "his wagon". He explains. "I say 'my wagon,' because when I clucked at Joe to follow along behind Henry's wagon I was so excited about 'my wagon' and 'my mule' as if I was a kid and not a man of twenty-one years of age. I may have been grinning like a kid, but I felt like a man, all right. I admit it. With my own mule and wagon, I was mighty proud of myself. I had never really owned anything of my own, except for Peter's baseball. And I knew that wagon and mule were mine, at least as long as I was working there."
I'd hate your thoughts to degenerate into making this "a white and black thing". I have a sense of the pain and shame of the history of so many of us white people in relation to many black people but this gorgeous piece of George's history rises way beyond that. It implies his poverty but I'm white and Irish, born in the late 30's of the last century, one of thirteen children and I know about in-your-face poverty (as millions of us do). But while that hovers around Geroge's experience, the piece isn't about poverty or deprivation or past mistreatments for which people should repent on their knees. It's about joy! It's about the loveliness of self-respect. It's about the sweet pleasure of honorable success. His passing remark of comparison—sweeter because it is a passing remark—underscores the poignancy of the whole scene and the emotions of it. "I had never really owned anything of my own, except for Peter's baseball." Twenty-one years of age and had never owned anything but a baseball his friend Peter gave him and now "my" mule and "my" wagon.
Haven't you—oh I hope you have—at some point in your life felt what George felt at that moment? The sheer can't-keep-from-grinning pleasure of having broken through a barrier, of rising higher than you had reason to think you might? I remember vividly when Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile barrier. The thought of it pleases me but George's mule and wagon beats it all to pieces. Ah, sometimes life hands you a lovely piece of news and it makes more than your day—it brightens your life. This sweet man still thrilled at it more than eighty years later.
What can you remember?
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.