Mudbound (32 page)

It would take an extraordinary man to beat all that, with
an extraordinary family behind him. First he’d have to wean himself off laudanum and self-pity. His mama would help him with that, but then he’d have to make himself write his buddies and his former COs and tell them what had been done to him. He’d write it down and tear it up, write it down and tear it up until one day he got up enough courage to send it. And when the answers came back he’d have to read them and accept the help that was offered, the letters that would be written on his behalf to Fisk University and the Tuskegee Institute and Morehouse College. And when Morehouse offered him a full scholarship he’d have to swallow his pride and take it, not knowing whether they wanted him or just felt sorry for him. He’d have to leave his family behind in Greenwood and travel the four hundred miles to Atlanta alone, with a little card in his shirt pocket that said
MUTE
. He’d have to study hard to learn all the things he should have been taught but wasn’t before he could even begin to learn the things he wanted to. He’d have to listen to his classmates talk about ideas and politics and women, things you can’t fit on a little portable slate. Have to get used to being alone, because he made the others uncomfortable, because he reminded them of what could still happen to any one of them if they said the wrong thing to the wrong white man. After he graduated, he’d have to find a profession where his handicap didn’t matter and an employer who would take a chance on him, at a black newspaper maybe, or a black labor organization. He’d have to prove himself and fight off despair, have to give up drinking three or four times before he finally kicked it.

Such a man, if he managed to accomplish all that, might one day find a strong and loving woman to marry him and give him children. Might help his sister and brothers make something of themselves. Might march behind Dr. King down the streets of Atlanta with his head held high. Might even find something like happiness.

That’s the ending we want, you and me both. I’ll grant you it’s unlikely, but it is possible. If he worked and prayed hard enough. If he was stubborn as well as lucky. If he really had a shine.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

If James Cañón hadn’t been in my very first workshop at Columbia. If we hadn’t loved each other’s writing, and each other. If he hadn’t read and critiqued every draft of this book, plus countless early drafts of individual chapters, during the years it took me to write it. If he hadn’t encouraged and goaded me, talked me off the ledge a dozen times, made me laugh at myself, inspired me by his example:
Mudbound
would have been a very different book, and I would be writing these acknowledgments from a nice, padded cell somewhere. Thank you, love, for all that you’ve given me. I could not have had a wiser counselor or a truer friend.

I am also grateful to the following people, organizations and sources:

Jenn Epstein, my dear friend and designated “bad cop,” who was always willing to drop everything and read, and whose tough, incisive critiques were invaluable in shaping the narrative.

Binnie Kirshenbaum and Victoria Redel, whose guidance and enthusiasm got me rolling; Maureen Howard, friend and mentor, who told me I mustn’t be afraid of my book; and the many other members of the Columbia Writing Division faculty who encouraged me.

Chris Parris-Lamb, my extraordinary agent and champion, for seeing what others didn’t; Sarah Burnes and the whole Gernert Company team, for embracing
Mudbound
so enthusiastically; and Kathy Pories at Algonquin, for believing in the book and being such a thoughtful and sensitive shepherd of it.

Barbara Kingsolver, for her tremendous faith in me and in
Mudbound;
her help in turning the story into a coherent, compelling narrative; her passionate support of literature of social change; and the generous and much-needed award.

The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the La Napoule Foundation, Fundación Valparaiso and the Stanwood Foundation for Starving Artists, for the gifts of time to write and exquisitely beautiful settings in which to do so; and the Columbia University Writing Division and the American Association of University Women, for their financial assistance.

Julie Currie, for the price of mules in 1946 and other elusive facts; Petra Spielhagen and Dan Renehan, for their assistance with Resl’s broken English; and Sam Hoskins, for lessons in orthopedics.

Theodore Rosengarten’s
All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw;
Stephen Ambrose’s
The Wild Blue;
Byron Lane’s
Byron’s War: I Never Will Be Young Again;
Lou Potter’s
Liberators
(and the accompanying PBS series); and Joe Wilson’s
The 761st “Black Panther” Tank Battalion in World War II
, for helping me put believable flesh on the bones of my sharecroppers, bomber pilot and tankers.

Denise Benou Stires, Michael Caporusso, Pam Cunningham, Gary di Mauro, Charlotte Dixon, Mark Erwin, Marie Fisher, Doug Irving, Robert Lewis, Leslie McCall, Elizabeth Molsen, Katy Rees and Rick Rudik, for their unwavering friendship and belief in me, which sustained me more than any of them will ever know; and Kathryn Windley, for all that and then some.

And finally, my family: Anita Jordan and Michael Fuller; Jan and Jaque Jordan; my brothers, Jared and Erik; and Gay and John Stanek. No author was ever better loved or supported.

M
UDBOUND

An Interview With Hillary Jordan

A Reading And Discussion Guide

AN INTERVIEW WITH HILLARY JORDAN

What inspired you to write
Mudbound
?

My grandparents had a farm in Lake Village, Arkansas, just after World War II, and I grew up hearing stories about it. It was a primitive place, an unpainted shotgun shack with no electricity, running water, or telephone. They named it Mud-bound because whenever it rained, the roads would flood and they’d be stranded for days.

Though they only lived there for a year, my mother, aunt, and grandmother spoke of the farm often, laughing and shaking their heads by turns, depending on whether the story in question was funny or horrifying. Often they were both, as Southern stories tend to be. I loved listening to them, even the ones I’d heard dozens of times before. They were a peephole into a strange and marvelous world, a world full of contradictions, of terrible beauty. The stories revealed things about my family, especially about my grandmother, who was the heroine of most of them for the simple reason that when calamity struck, my grandfather was inevitably elsewhere.

To my mother and aunt, the year they spent at Mudbound was a grand adventure; and indeed, that was how all their stories portrayed it. It was not until much later that I realized what an ordeal that year must have been for my grandmother—a city-bred woman with two young children—and that, in fact, these were stories of survival.

I began the novel (without knowing I was doing any such thing) in grad school. I had an assignment to write a few pages in the voice of a family member, and I decided to write about the farm from my grandmother’s point of view. But what came out was not a merry adventure story but something darker and more complex. What came out was, “When I think of the farm, I think of mud.”

So, your grandmother’s voice was the one that came to you first as you started writing this?

Yes, hers was the first, and only, voice for some while. My teacher liked what I wrote and encouraged me to continue, and I tried to write a short story. My grandmother became Laura, a fictional character much more fiery and rebellious than she ever was, and the story got longer and longer. At 50 pages I realized I was writing a novel, and that’s when I decided to introduce the other voices. Jamie came next, then Henry, then Florence, then Hap. Ronsel wasn’t even a character until I had about 150 pages! And of course, when he entered the story, he changed its course dramatically.

But you never let Pappy speak.

Nine drafts ago, Pappy actually narrated his own funeral (the two scenes at the beginning and end of the book). And people—namely, my editor and Barbara Kingsolver, who read several drafts of
Mudbound
and gave me invaluable criticism—just hated hearing from him first, or in fact, at all. Eventually I was persuaded to silence him. The more I thought about those two passages, the more fitting it seemed that Jamie should narrate them.

Still, even without having his own section, it’s clear that Pappy really struck a chord with readers. Why do you think that is?

Yes, people really do seem to hate him! Which is as it should be—he’s pretty detestable. He embodies not just the ugliness of the Jim Crow era but the absolute worst possibilities in ourselves.

What was the hardest part of writing
Mudbound
?

Getting those voices right—the African American dialect especially. I had a number of well-meaning friends say things to me like, “even Faulkner didn’t write about black people in the first person.” But ultimately I decided I had to let my black characters address the ugliness of that time and place themselves, in their own voices.

Your book takes on racism on many levels—the most obvious forms, but also the more insidious kinds, like the share-cropping system, for example.

In researching this book, I was astounded by what I learned about the perniciousness of the sharecropping system. Owning your own mule meant the difference between share tenancy, in which you got to keep half your crop, and sharecropping, in which you got to keep only a quarter. A quarter of a cotton crop wasn’t nearly enough for a family to live on, so people went further and further into debt with their landlords. And they were so incredibly vulnerable—to misfortune, to illness, to bad weather conditions. Being a sharecropper wasn’t that far removed from being a slave.

The climactic scene with Ronsel is absolutely wrenching to read. I imagine it was equally wrenching to write.

Yes, it was. I’d been unsure for months what was going to happen in that scene. And when it finally came to me, all the hairs on my arms stood up, and I called my best friend James Cañón (who is also an author and was my primary reader during the seven years it took me to write
Mudbound
), and I said, “I know what’s going to happen to Ronsel,” and I told him. And there was this long silence and then he said, “Wow.”

I dreaded writing the scene, and I put it off for a long time. When I finally made myself do it, I cried a lot. I was reading it out loud as I went—which for me is an essential part of writing dialogue—and having to speak those horrific things made them that much more real and terrible.

What books would you recommend to those who want to know even more about the period?

All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw
, by Theodore Rosengarten. This is a true first-person account of a black Alabama cotton farmer who started out as a sharecropper and ended up owning his own land, with many adventures along the way. Nate was an indelible character, smart (though illiterate) and funny and wise about people. He was eighty years old when he told his life story to Theodore Rosengarten, a journalist from New York. And what a fascinating life it was.

James Cobb’s
The Most Southern Place on Earth.

Pete Daniel’s excellent books
Breaking the Land
and
Deep’n as It Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood
and
Standing at the Crossroads: Southern Life in the Twentieth Century.

A PBS series of documentaries about black history from
The American Experience.

Clifton L. Taulbert’s
When We Were Colored.

And of course, the works of James Baldwin, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright, among others.

Have you begun working on another novel?

Yes, and it’s absolutely nothing like
Mudbound
! After seven years of working on it, I was extremely ready to leave the Deep South, the past, and the first person. My second novel,
Red
, is set in a dystopian America roughly thirty years in the future. It begins in Crawford, Texas, and ends—well, who knows?

A READING AND DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. The setting of the Mississippi Delta is intrinsic to
Mud-bound
. Discuss the ways in which the land functions as a character in the novel and how each of the other characters relates to it.

2.
Mudbound
is a chorus, told in six different voices. How do the changes in perspective affect your understanding of the story? Are all six voices equally sympathetic? Reliable? Pappy is the only main character who has no narrative voice. Why do you think the author chose not to let him speak?

3. Who gets to speak and who is silent or silenced is a central theme, the silencing of Ronsel being the most literal and brutal example. Discuss the ways in which this theme plays out for the other characters. For instance, how does Laura’s silence about her unhappiness on the farm affect her and her marriage? What are the consequences of Jamie’s inability to speak to his family about the horrors he experienced in the war? How does speaking or not speaking confer power or take it away?