Zora Neale Hurston famously asserts that “black women are the mules of the world.” In Joshua Bennett’s reading of Hurston’s collective works, he insists that “muleness moves through the text as an analytic of power.” Thinking with Hurston, Bennett brings forth that, as a “useful metonym for thinking about the nature of black social life,” mules and muleness can stand for both oppressive power as well as strength and resistance.
After a century of decline in black land ownership and farming, the promise of “40 acres and a mule” still resonates with black people trying to reconnect with the land. But what happens if we also reconnect with the mule? What can mules teach us about the black history of land and violence in the United States? Paralleling the history of arrieros in Mexico, the history of mules in the United States is as closely tied to mining and plantations as it is to black mobility and post-emancipation life. And, likewise, North American mules helped reestablish the same hierarchies of racism they slowly dismantled.
Along with racial categories, the mule gave industrialists a language for hybridity, which in turn influenced labor and scales of production.
In 1779 English inventor Samuel Crompton designed the spinning mule, a key innovation of the Industrial Revolution that enabled the mass production of high-quality yarn. Muleness inspired how Crompton combined two earlier yarn-making technologies: the spinning jenny, which spun multiple threads at once, and the water frame, which used rollers to draw out fibers. Crompton’s hybrid allowed a single operator to manage a large number of spindles simultaneously. Wide adoption of the spinning mule encouraged planters to cultivate more cotton, which in turn fueled demand for equine mule power on cotton plantations.
The mules that eventually populated the southern cotton plantation initially came from New England by way of Spain. As a cluster of British colonies, New England served as a breeding ground for horses destined for British sugar plantations in the Caribbean. While Spain had restricted trade to British colonies for generations, after the Revolutionary War the king of Spain presented President George Washington a prize jack named Royal Gift, whose offspring revolutionized labor in the United States and earned Washington the title “Father of the American Mule.”
Washington envisioned mule culture propagating across the United States, but mules gained the most traction in the plantation landscapes. As the legal slave trade came to a close in the early 19th century and demand for alternative sources of labor soared, New England farmers increasingly bred mules for export to the Caribbean and the U.S. South.