Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Front Porch

Front Porch When I was a child, back in the 1950s, mules were still a receding presence on the southern landscape. On visits to country kinfolk, they stood in idle, flop-eared mourning around nearly abandoned barnyards—dark brown mules with bulbous white noses, white mules, even yellow ones. Like the guinea fowl that screeched from nearby coops or the mincing hens that high-stepped around the weedy cor- ners of collapsing sheds, aging mules were kept on as pets mostly, ever since trac- tors and supermarkets filled the real needs of daily life. Once in a while you saw one in town, pulling an old man’s wagon with rubber automobile tires. Other than that, I don’t think I ever saw a mule at work. Outside of a petting zoo, I won- der if my children have seen a mule at all. About the time mules began to disappear from southern barnyards, literary critic Jerry Mills began to notice them somewhere else: in the pages of southern literature. But unlike the mules of my childhood, these literary mules were not just dying but altogether dead, some of them reduced to bleaching skeletons in the rank underbrush of postwar southern fiction, others demolished by spec- http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Southern Cultures University of North Carolina Press

Front Porch

Watson, Harry L.
Southern Cultures , Volume 6 (4) – Nov 1, 2001
Download PDF
6 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-north-carolina-press/front-porch-Ue0qx0TAqC

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 Center for the Study of the American South.
ISSN
1534-1488

Abstract

When I was a child, back in the 1950s, mules were still a receding presence on the southern landscape. On visits to country kinfolk, they stood in idle, flop-eared mourning around nearly abandoned barnyards—dark brown mules with bulbous white noses, white mules, even yellow ones. Like the guinea fowl that screeched from nearby coops or the mincing hens that high-stepped around the weedy cor- ners of collapsing sheds, aging mules were kept on as pets mostly, ever since trac- tors and supermarkets filled the real needs of daily life. Once in a while you saw one in town, pulling an old man’s wagon with rubber automobile tires. Other than that, I don’t think I ever saw a mule at work. Outside of a petting zoo, I won- der if my children have seen a mule at all. About the time mules began to disappear from southern barnyards, literary critic Jerry Mills began to notice them somewhere else: in the pages of southern literature. But unlike the mules of my childhood, these literary mules were not just dying but altogether dead, some of them reduced to bleaching skeletons in the rank underbrush of postwar southern fiction, others demolished by spec-

Journal

Southern Cultures – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Nov 1, 2001

There are no references for this article.