MUDBOUND
Hillary Jordan
March 2008
fiction, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Most folks take whatever they can while giving only what they must. Hillary Jordan uses this truth to create her debut novel, Mudbound.
It's 1946 and scarce housing, limited medical care and spotty transportation don’t mean good ole days for many Americans. White women as well as black men are expected to return to their pre-WWII subservient niches while war veterans endure nightmares in masculine silence.
About forty miles from Greenville live two families: the McAllans, white; the Jacksons, black. Here, Memphis-bred and college educated Laura McAllan struggles to raise her little girls with grace on the isolated Delta land her husband Henry has recently bought. It is no romantic plantation scenario. Their crowded home is a primitive sharecropper shack and she aptly nicknames the farm “Mudbound.”
Tensions between the McAllans rise but the real drama begins when Henry’s brother and the Jacksons’ son return from war. Charming Jamie McAllan is haunted by combat memories and hero Ronsel Jackson is dogged by his return to civilian “boy” status. Their unlikely friendship as they fight re-conformity drives Jordan’s drama to a wrenching confrontation.
Jim Crow/Southern racism is Mudbound’s obvious dramatic hook. The story’s deeper motif, however, is love. As Laura says in the opening pages: | It’s tempting to believe that what happened on the farm was inevitable... The truth isn’t so simple. Death may be inevitable, but love is not. Love, you have to choose. |
In her final contribution to the story, Laura defines love as giving “whatever you can while taking what you must.” The novel concludes, however, not with Laura’s words but with Ronsel’s as he lists all he’d have to overcome to find happiness. His future isn’t inevitable, he declares, but one he'll choose. A reader can't ask for a more hope filled ending. Inspired by stories from the year the author’s grandparents lived on a Lake Village farm, Mudbound’s six primary characters ring authentic as she lays opens each heart with convincing skill. Their voices narrate alternating chapters for effortless reading of a complex story about love at odds with honor, desire and hate.
Hillary Jordan grew up in Texas and Oklahoma and received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Mudbound was awarded the 2006 Bellwether Prize.
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