Mudbound

Hillary Jordan, “Mudbound,” Algonquin Books, 2008, 324 pp.

In 2017 the tale in this book was made into a movie; I haven’t seen it.  The author was inspired to write this book because of family stories of her own grandmother's struggle to raise two girls on a mud-slogged Southern farm.  The author sets the story mostly in 1946 and is particularly focused on two returning veterans to the racist society of Mississippi: one black, the other white.  Mudbound is told in six first-person voices, starting with Laura, a city-raised teacher who is beginning to consider herself a spinster, when, in 1939, she meets Henry, a forty-one-year-old bachelor.  

They marry, and Laura loves their quiet domestic life in Memphis. But Henry has yearned since childhood to farm his own land, and when the opportunity presents itself, he buys a cotton farm in rural Mississippi, dragging Laura and their daughters there in the middle of the rainy season.  Laura names their new home Mudbound. When it rains heavily they are trapped until the water recedes.  Laura has a nice outdoor toilet and a pump And it is not only a lack of running water that Laura has to deal with, but it is also Pappy, her cantankerous father-in-law who comes to live with them - a "sour, bossy" bigoted misogynist.  They additionally have six tenant farmers on their land, the most interesting is a Florence, the Mother of one of the two returning soldiers.

At this point, it is 1946 and the two returning war veterans enter the story: Jamie, “Henry's dashing but emotionally scarred younger brother (20 years younger), and Ronsel, the son of Henry's black tenant farmers. Jordan perceptively sets the stage for the novel's seemingly predetermined denouement by giving each of these characters a voice.”  Ronsel seethes with resentment that his black comrades who gave their lives in the war are just "dead niggers" in white Mississippi's eyes. Jamie is a vulnerable soul who befriends Ronsel, opening himself to the town's prejudice-fueled rage.  Yes: the Klan makes its entrance near the end of the book.  I pondered whether evil and mean are varying degrees of the same thing.

My Notes:

Pg. 78:  Henry: “She was against the move from the minute I told her about it.  She didn’t say so directly, but she didn’t have to.  I could tell from the way she started humming whenever I walked into the room.  A woman will make her feelings known one way or another.  Laura’s way is with music: singing when she’s content, humming when she isn’t, whistling tunelessly when she’s thinking a thing over and deciding whether to sing or hum about it.”

Pg. 90: “You’ll move if I say so,” Hap said.  “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.”

Florence: “Only so long as he alive, for if the husband be dead the wife is loosed from his law.  Says so in Romans.”

Pg. 294:  Jamie:  “The Bible is full of thou-shalt-nots.  Thou shalt not kill, that’s one.  Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, that’s two.  Thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife.—three and four.  Notice how none of them have any loopholes.”