Like a Delta storm
MUDBOUND
By Hillary Jordan
336 pp. Algonquin Books $22.95
Reviewed by Julie McGuire
In 1939, thirty-one-year old virgin Laura Chapppell is headed towards spinsterhood. College-educated, and Memphis-raised, she teaches English at a private school for boys, sings in her church choir, and plays bridge every Monday night with her married friends. Unlike her blond and beautiful sisters, Laura is plain, noted by the church women for the “loveliness” of her hands, the “curliness” of her hair, and the “cheerfulness” of her disposition. She is content to be a loving daughter, sister, and aunt.
When Laura’s brother, a land appraiser for the Army Corps of Engineers, invites his new boss Henry McAllan home for dinner, Laura finds herself falling in love. She is surprised and delighted when Henry returns that love. They soon marry. While not a passionate man, Henry is a steady, able provider, a supportive if unemotional husband and father. Laura’s life is fuller than she could have imagined until a family tragedy forces them to move from their comfortable Memphis home to a farmhouse on the rural Mississippi Delta.
Unaccustomed to life on a farm, Laura despises everything about her new circumstances-the dust, the muck, the unpredictability of the land, the lack of running water, and perhaps most of all, the way Henry takes to farming, leaving her lonely. After a particularly fierce rainstorm, when the McAllans are literally stuck on the farm, Laura nicknames her new home—Mudbound.
When her father-in-law Pappy moves in with the McAllans, life becomes unbearable for Laura. Pappy, among the novel’s many antagonists, represents the racist, narrow-minded Deep South of the time period. He is lazy and hateful, and disdains the Jacksons, the black sharecropping family who live and work on the McAllan’s land. Hap Jackson plows the land, and Florence Jackson works as Laura’s maid.
Despite the hardships on the farm, the McAllans and Jacksons live in a precarious harmony until Henry’s younger brother Jamie, and Ronsel, the Jackson’s oldest son, return from the war. Jamie is Henry’s opposite—handsome, outgoing, reckless, and disturbed by nightmares of the killing fields of Germany. Ronsel returns a war hero, a member of Patton’s celebrated 761st Tank Battalion, made up of African-American soldiers. Ronsel has become accustomed to being treated with respect and admiration. When he dares walk out the front door of the local store, the fury of the townsfolk reminds him that in the Mississippi Delta things have not changed. Ronsel tells us:
I never thought I’d miss it so much. I don’t mean Nazi Germany, you’d have to be crazy to miss a place like that. I mean who I was when I was over there. There I was a liberator, a hero. In Mississippi I was just another nigger pushing a plow. And the longer I stayed, the longer that’s
all I was.
Jamie and Ronsel become fast friends—a bond based on their shared war experience—unleashing the just-below-the-surface hatreds and prejudices of the town’s small-minded and bigoted individuals, both black and white.
Hillary Jordan’s Mudbound is an unsparingly honest portrait of life in the Mississippi Delta in the 1940s as told through the voices of Henry, Laura, Jamie, Ronsel, Florence, and Hap. In alternating chapters, Jordan’s characters tell the story of a shocking, brutal act that impacts each of them in profoundly different ways.
Mudbound received the 2006 Bellwether Prize created by author Barbara Kingsolver to recognize previously unpublished novels that promote social responsibility. Jordan, recognized for fiction that “describe[s] categorical human transgressions in a way that compels readers to examine their own prejudices,” received $25,000 and a publishing contract. Of Mudbound, Kingsolver writes:
This is storytelling at the height of its powers: the ache of wrongs not yet made right, the fierce attendance of history made as real as rain, as true as this minute. Hillary Jordan writes with the force of a Delta storm.
Jordan’s novel builds with slow tension, like a Delta storm on its path to an inevitable and violent conclusion. Mudbound is not a story to read while sipping mint juleps and fanning oneself in the summer shade. It is a harsh glimpse of a shameful time in the South’s history. Jordan challenges readers to examine their own prejudices, and to recognize that the past must be confronted, lest it be repeated. She promises to be a voice of social responsibility for some time to come.
Julie McGuire’s love affair with books began long before she could read them. When she was nine months old and just learning to walk, she delighted in removing all the books from her grandmother’s bookshelf and surrounding herself with them. Today, she is still surrounded by piles upon piles of books. A paralegal by day, Julie also freelances for Work Magazine, and Urge, both Richmond-area publications. Her work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor and in numerous small publications. She lives in Virginia with her two brilliant boys and her superhero husband. She does not currently have a website—she's too busy reading.
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