I’m fairly certain it was at “Second City” in Chicago where I saw a skit many years ago based on “40 Acres And A Mule,” a line frequently invoked, but hardly ever recalled as an actual effort in American history.

But it’s as real as Abraham Lincoln who actually signed the order that had originated with Blacks themselves and mandated the distribution of 40 acres each to every black family after the Civil War.

The ending monologue for the skit that night went something like this:

• “Let’s see. That’s 40 acres…” at a thousand or two-thousand dollars an acre, (pretty much the asking price today),

• and an off-stage voice intoning… “at 18 percent interest” (which seems like the permanent, enshrined, going rate);

• “times 156 years” (since Emancipation to the present day, but not including all those 200+ additional years since slave ships first showed up here);

•“PLUS my mule.”

The audience was on its feet and roaring.

Decades before Ta-Nehisi Coates was born, much less arguing the righteousness of reparations, Blacks in that audience were doing the math. And it was cogent.

That 40 acres, had it been realized instead of given back to the Confederate remnant by Andrew Johnson after Lincoln’s assassination, would have extended from Georgia and the Carolinas, past Mississippi and Louisiana, all the way to Florida — and all of that black-owned, and probably separated from today’s “Old South” and the rest of the country.

Freed blacks were the craftsmen; the builders then. They were the ones doing the work. They knew how. Imagine all that skill and effort turned to their own cause and land. Imagine the culture that would have sprouted and passed down for generations. Imagine the wealth!

But history took another turn. It resurrected the Old South in both economy and culture. It made “Aunt Jemima” not just the image, but the icon of the South. It enabled new ways to practice racism and injustice. It presents now as a storied, glorious past.

It spruced up. But it stayed the same.

But “Try to imagine,” as Harvard scholar and historian Henry Louis Gates wrote, “how profoundly different the history of race relations in the United States would have been had this policy been implemented and enforced; had the former slaves actually had access to the ownership of land, of property; if they had had a chance to be self-sufficient economically, to build, accrue and pass on wealth. After all, one of the principal promises of America was the possibility of average people being able to own land,…”

400,000 acres of land, folks!

That 40 acres and a mule would cost America at least $6.4 trillion today.

And that estimate was four years ago.

“They owe us a lot of money,” Dr. King said.

And to this day, they do.

So let’s see. That would be “40 acres”

…at 18 percent

times 156 years

Plus my mule!

Heads-up, America.

Yolande Robbins is a community correspondent for The Post. Email her at  yolanderobbins@fastmail.com