Director’s Notebook
November, 2009
Mudbound by Hillary Jordan is a book I have avoided for a while. I started avoiding it when I first read a review about it in my favorite book catalog Bas Bleu. I continued to avoid it when I saw it on the bookshelves in the library. But when my friend Joanne raved about it, having recently read it, and eagerly offered to lend me her copy, I knew I couldn’t avoid it anymore.
Why would I avoid a book? In this case, not because I knew it would be poorly written, trite, or unjustly praised, although that certainly has been my reason enough times, with enough books. In this case, however, I avoided the book because I knew it was going to be tough to read, or perhaps more accurately, tough to stomach. I knew this because I knew the book was about Mississippi sharecroppers in the deep South of the 1940’s and that one of those sharecroppers would be a returning WWII hero, Ronsel Jackson, who also happened to be a black man, unwilling to return to business as usual in the Jim Crow South. I knew there would be a culminating act of violence that would leave me breathless, and I didn’t think I really wanted to deal with it.
This was a mistake, however. Although the violent ending of Mudbound is very difficult to read, the violence is not gratuitous. Such violence against Blacks was a very real part of life in the Jim Crow era. Knowing this, the courage of those, both black and white, who defied the status quo, putting themselves in the path of that violence, becomes even more remarkable and worthy of the deepest respect.
Mudbound is not just the story about a defiant black man, however. Central to the story is the narration of Laura, a plain looking but spirited woman whose life takes a challenging turn for the worse when her new husband, Henry McAllan, takes her to live on a ramshackle farm in the Mississippi delta, stinking and just about sinking under the weight of torrential rains. Laura is not the typical uneducated farmer’s wife of the time, but instead is a sensitive, perceptive and well educated woman with her own opinions. But even she is at a loss for how to handle her husband’s aloof and cold treatment of herself and his tenant farmers; or what is worse, her father-in-law’s violent prejudice towards blacks and his determination to undermine her fragile new marriage.
Entering this bleak scenario comes Jamie McAllan, Henry’s younger brother and also a returning war hero. Jamie is everything Henry is not; he is handsome to Henry’s plainness; charming and talkative to Henry’s dour seriousness, and attentive to Laura in pleasing ways the awkward Henry would never consider important or necessary. This almost sounds like the plot of a syrupy romance novel, doesn’t it? The difference is that Mudbound is written in taut, powerful prose that brings each character and every incident, no matter how seemingly slight, into sharp focus. It is obvious from the very beginning that the people who inhabit this novel are hurtling along a dangerous trajectory, and the only question is, who will survive the crash?
Reading Mudbound is a powerful experience, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone without letting them know that. But having forewarned them, I would encourage all readers of serious fiction to read Mudbound. It is an award winning novel with impact that will stay with you for a long time.
