Sam and Laura

I was thinking about the fact that Mike's place is called Brown Mule Farm--though there's not an actual mule on it--and I asked him when he started liking mules.

There was an old man in town named Stuttering Sam.  He had a mule and a wagon.  I was a little bitty boy and I thought that mule was tall as the Empire State Building.

Stuttering Sam loaded up that wagon with tomatoes and peppers, cabbages and onions, and other things from his garden. He let me ride around with him selling them.  I loved him.  He had white hair, and was a peaceful man.  

He was the only person I knew who stuttered besides me.  It took us a long time to greet each other, but I felt good riding in his wagon with him.  I'd go up to the doors of the houses and ask people what they wanted--corn or cantaloupe or beans, watermelon or tomatoes. At the end of the day, he'd give me a nickel and I could go to the country store and buy a Coke or a Snickers.  That mule looked like he was fifty-feet tall.  

Sam was probably the son of slaves.  Lived in a wooden shotgun-style house, no paint.  I loved his house.  It had a certain smell to it.

People used to say Stuttering Sam taught me how to stutter.  But he didn't.  I was a little bitty boy when I first met him and I already stuttered real bad.  That's just what people said. 

Kids used to tease me cause I stuttered, but Laura [the black woman who kept him while his mother worked as a legal secretary] taught me not to let it bother me so much.  Laura was tough.  She taught me to be tough.  

"You have to keep your eyes on where you are going and ignore all that noise," she said. And that's when I learned not to care what other people thought about me.

My mom used to take me to all these speech therapists and one day one of them took me to the fire station.  That was my favorite part of speech therapy, going to the fire station, seeing that brass pole and curved door, the fire trucks.  I got to talk to the firemen and all.

Then one day, when Daddy and I were cleaning out the septic tank, I got to see the Goodyear Blimp.

"Why were you cleaning out the septic tank?" I asked him.  

It was a grease trap.  We had to clean it every two years or so, take heavy buckets to the dump.  It was a gravel pit really.  It had lots of fossils.  I still have the fossils I picked up there.  

We never did figure out why I stuttered, but I think it was a wiring in my brain thing.  Most people when they talk, their words go from their brains to their speech.  Mine take a different route.  

I only realize now that Stuttering Sam and I had a real marketing hook for selling watermelons and cantaloupes.  Cause where you gonna see a little white boy and an old black man stuttering together?  It was almost like a side show at the carnival.  We were good sellers!