Forty Acres and a Mule (and the Open Field of Imagination)

Journal Entry: Saturday, November 8, 2025

Forty Acres and a Mule (and the Open Field of Imagination)

You’ve heard of “forty acres and a mule.” After the Civil War, it was the promise made to the freed slaves of America: forty acres of land and a mule to work it, so they might begin life anew as free people. It was an extraordinary idea - a momentary gesture toward restitution and independence. But the promise lasted only a year. The order was rescinded after Lincoln’s death, and the dream of true emancipation, like so many others, was left to fend for itself.

I sometimes think of artists as a kind of freed people, too - those who have walked away from the slavery of gainful employment in the chase after the American Dream, preferring instead the uncertain freedom of creative pursuit. We trade the security of wages for the open fields of imagination, where the only tools we have are our hands, our discipline, and our faith that something meaningful can grow here.

In jest, I have often said: I’m working my forty acres and a mule.
Except in my case, the forty acres are metaphorical - and I am the mule.

Every day in the studio is another inch of land to be turned, another stubborn root to pull up, another rock to carry to the never to be finished boundary wall. The work is slow, methodical, sometimes absurd. I joke about it, but the truth is that the joke carries weight. The artist’s field is made of time, imagination, and persistence - and each inch of it must be cultivated by hand.

I once did the math. A typical painting, say five by four feet, is about twenty square feet. It would take 2,178 paintings that size to cover a single acre of surface. One acre! Forty acres, then, would be 87,000 paintings that size. When I consider the thousands of collages, the drawings, the sketchbooks, the pages of poems, the essays, the stories - maybe, after fifty years of work, I’m getting close to that first of the mythical forty acres.

But the point isn’t the actual measurement. The point is the metaphor. To live a creative life is to cultivate one’s own land - land that no one else can see, or appraise, or repossess. It is a vast interior landscape, built square foot by square foot through imagination, intention and labor. Each artwork is a patch of ground reclaimed from the wilderness of potential.

The mule in me keeps pulling the plow. The artist in me keeps walking behind, trying to keep the furrows straight, though sometimes they curve or wander. Some seasons are dry. Others, abundant. The field grows thicker with experience, richer with composted failure, more alive with every new attempt.

After all these years, I’ve come to see that the promise of “forty acres and a mule” isn’t just a tragic fragment of history - it’s also a symbol of human dignity, of the longing to make something one’s own. Every artist inherits that same longing: to work a piece of the world into a field of purpose and meaning.

So here I am, still cultivating my small acre of imagination, one inch at a time. The plow moves slowly, but the soil is rich.