Mules, John

John N. Henry, Turn Them Out to Die Like a Mule The Civil War Letters of John N. Henry, 49th New York, 1861-1865, edited by John Michael Priest (Leesburg, VA Gauley Mount Press, 1995), p. 159. 

Bond focused his research on the family of John Wilson, one of whose sons, Jerome Wilson, languished in Franklinton jail under sentence of death. Jerome s conviction had arisen from a bizarre shooting incident that took place on the Wilson family farm shortly before the Bonds arrived in Star Creek. A seemingly trivial dispute over a mule had led to a fatal exchange of gunfire that left a deputy sheriff dead, one of John Wilson s sons mortally wounded, and another son, Jerome, accused of murder. After a trial of indecent haste, conducted while a... 

John Wilson, the farmer and landowner whose life was shattered by the violent deaths of two sons in 1934 and 1935. He provided Horace Mann Bond with much of the material for Forty Acres and a Mule. ... 

When I got home this afternoon, I found that the Graves girl had put on a clean dress and come back to see Julia. She told her all about the killin. There was a preacher a stayin at John Wilson s house, and the white man came and quarrelled with the boys, John Wilson was agone away. The mule already had been dipped at another vat, and the... 

Bond started writing Forty Acres and a Mule with a view to helping the Wilsons. Offering the partially completed manuscript to Harper and Brothers, he explained that John Wilson should receive half of the royalties, and that a further quarter would be given to the Rosenwald School in Bethel—a memorial to Jerome Wilson. ... 

The older boys were thinking about getting married. One of them had said, Pa, I d like to get married, but I don t have no place to take my wife. I m not going to take my wife to some white man s place. So John Wilson, just before Christmas of 1933, had bought another plantation. This new place had 172 acres. He was going to run an eight mule farm. He didn t intend to put tenants on the place he wanted to put his boys on it, and he was going to direct them and settle them on... 

Not long after John Wilson left the house, the range rider, Joe Magee, rode up. There was a cattle dipping ordinance in the parish, and Joe Magee had come to see about an old mule that hadn t been dipped. All of the children were sitting down on the back porch when this range rider came up, and hitched his horse and started into the stock lot. 

John Wilson, plodding along on his mule, began to meet numbers of cars coming from Franklinton, but nobody told him anything. He was almost to Franklinton when a white man told him, John, I heard one of your boys done killed Delos Wood. So he came on back, hippity-hop on his mule as fast as he could come. 

Old Isom Wilson, who got his land through the help of Andrew Magee, would never have cursed that range rider nor would his son John. But you can figure it out another way. If there had been no Isom Wilson to get land, or John Wilson to start off with a Httle old mule, a heifer, and a wife, there would have been no Jerome Wilson who could think that he was at home and could ask a white man what he wanted in his stock lot. There might have been a Jerome Wilson, but he wouldn t have had a stock lot, and his landlord would have attended to the dipping of a mule. 

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