Mudbound

I read this book standing up. I read this book waiting for pasta water to boil. I read this book one blissfully sunny day, with my feet up on the couch when I should have been outside. Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan, is that good. I have friend Liz to thank for the recommendation, but I took my time getting around to it because a story about a Mississippi farm, post-WWII, with the inherent racism and share- cropping and unhappy southern women didn't speak to me. Well, I was wrong. This is an amazing book

Laura is a smart, educated, slightly pampered old maid (30ish) from Memphis who gets swept off her feet at last by a man who turns out to want nothing more than a piece of land to call his own, deep in the Delta. Not that he tells his new bride this. He takes this city-bred woman back to a place he wants to call Fair Fields but that his horrified wife and young daughters christen Mudbound, with good reason. Henry McAllen plunks them down on his dream farm, with no running water, no electricity, an iffy bridge that washes out civilization at the least downpour, and his racist, lazy, angry father to boot.


Laura does her best. She does well, but then you add in a young, smart black man just back from his enjoyed freedoms and responsibilities as a tank driver during the war in Europe and Henry's charming, damaged younger brother Jamie, and things go from tenuous to awful faster than you can say "yessuh."


The story begins at the end, with Pappy's death, a literary ploy that I usually hate, but I once the story proper began and I got a sense of his awfulness, I really couldn't wait for the old man to die. Hillary Jordan's descriptions and her voice rang so true that I caught myself marvelling at how people could have thought that way back then, as if I'd forgotten that, actually, the book was written in 2008.
Bad things happen, but there's good, too, and it wasn't as tragic as it could have been. The ending, while not exactly happy, allows for the future of both race relations in this country and, on a smaller scale, love. Jamie, the younger brother, is a tragic figure here. You want to like him--to love him even--but the character I trusted the most saw him for what he was, so there's fair warning. Before things can get too bad, Florence tries to run him out of town in the only way a black woman who works as a maid could resort to. I ran the broom over his foot three times. Said, "Sorry, Mist Jamie, ain't I clumsy today." The third time Miz McAllen gave me a scolding and sent me out of the house, finished the sweeping her own self. I didn't care what she thought, or him either. I just wanted him gone. But he didn't go, not even after I threw salt in his tracks and put a mojo of jimsonweed and gumelastin under his bed. He kept right on coming back, turning up like the bad penny he was.


That's our first inkling that Jamie will set into motion a series of tragedies around Mudbound and Florence knows she's got the most to lose in this business. After all, it's her son, just back from the war, who's already stretching himself well beyond the small world of Jim Crow Mississippi. He's not long for that world either. All Florence wants is to keep Ronsel safe and if Jamie needs to be gone for that to happen, then she'll move him along.


I love that the book doesn't make room for a big hugfest between the "good" whites and the "clever" blacks. Even Jamie, in his spiraling awakening, his confused about his seeming friendship with a black brother-in-arms. Florence may seem wise, but she's not about to give Laura absolution or much advice. She knows her place (of the era), but she knows times are changing and she will take charge where she can. I suppose Hillary Jordan takes some liberties with hindsight, but they aren't obvious. Laura is still the perfect little 1940s wife, even when she puts her foot down occasionally. Henry isn't a bad person, but he doesn't exactly dispute the racist attitude pervasive around him. He just doesn't approve of the local methods. It's a reminder that these "younger" characters are the bridge to the future, that the sixties are coming. It's just slow coming to the Delta. Perhaps the book's a bit sugarcoated, but it's got all the realism and tragedy I can handle and still love it. This may be the best book I've read this year.



Scene I enoyed:Laura and Jamie singing the Doxology over evil Pappy's dead body (Praise Him from Whom all blessings flow...).