"Mudbound"
by
Hillary Jordan

review: Tracy Durgan 1/20/10

     Hillary Jordan's first novel, Mudbound, tells a story of the McAllans and Jacksons, two families who live on a 1940s cotton farm on the Mississippi Delta. This is a story about love of land, love of family, and the love between a man and woman. It's about good people, black and white, hanging on to their dignity and their love of life despite hardship, and despite the presence of people in this world who are not good. It's also a story about hate — race hatred, hate between men and women, between father and son. Lastly, it's a bit of a murder mystery, although no one's investigating.

     Mudbound won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction, which is awarded biennially to a literary novel that addresses social justice issues. Mudbound is so gripping, it takes an act of will to put the book down. It also seems to be well researched. Jordan takes one specific setting – geography, time, lifestyle, social climate – and shows how two very different families manage to survive it. In 1946, both the Jacksons and McAllans see a son come home from World War II. Each of these sons comes home changed. Each family knows a hard life on this Mississippi Delta cotton farm: long days of overwork, hot summers, frequent floods and mud. No indoor plumbing or electricity. The two families' lives are so similar, and yet so different. At the same time, whether they like it or not, they are mutually dependent on each other for survival.
 
     But Mudbound is also about the individuals within these families. The story is told in the first person, through six main characters: Henry McAllan, who owns the farm, his wife Laura, and younger brother Jamie; and black tenant farmers Hap and Florence Jackson, and their oldest son, Ronsel. These characters each have life and authenticity. The way Jordan tells her story through their different voices is complex and really fine. Laura is the character we get to know best, at least partly because over one third of the book is written in her voice. When Henry out of the blue buys a cotton farm far from the city where she was raised, she tries to make the best of it, even though one part of the farm package is Pappy, her racist, misogynist, mean old coot of a father-in-law (whose homemade burial begins the novel). “Mudbound” is her personal name for the farm. Her husband prefers to call it “Fair Fields.” It's with Laura that Jordan writes the most poetically. Here are Laura's first words in the novel:

     When I think of the farm, I think of mud. Limning my husband's fingernails and encrusting the children's knees and hair. Sucking at my feet like a greedy newborn on the breast. Marching in boot-shaped patches across the plank floors of the house. There was no defeating it. The mud coated everything. I dreamed in brown.

     My only reservation concerns the book's villains. They're too obviously villainous. Perhaps Jordan was more interested in what they stand for, and in letting that — race hatred and the enforcement of strict white male rule — work in her novel like a force of nature. In this way, the novel can concentrate on the characters Jordan cares about. But, in real life, the KKK member with a zest for lynchings might be not only a pillar of his community and a church elder, but also, outwardly, a real sweet guy who knows how to behave in public. I'm not sure how I think Jordan could have handled this, better, though. And, in any case, Mudbound is an impressive accomplishment by a gifted author. It's a beautiful, polyphonic, infuriating, heartbreaking book.

     Mudbound. Hillary Jordan. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2008.