Mudbound (9 page)

By V-J Day, I had the money. I figured I’d work one more year to give us a cushion and start looking for property the following summer. That would give me plenty of time to learn
the land, purchase seed and equipment, find tenants and so on before the new planting season started in January. It would also give me time to work on my wife, who I knew would be reluctant to leave Memphis.

That’s how it was supposed to be, nice and orderly, and it would have been if that good-for-nothing husband of Eboline’s hadn’t gone and hanged himself that Christmas. I never trusted my brother-in-law, or any man comfortable in a suit. Virgil was a great drinker and a great talker besides, and those are stains enough on anybody’s character, but what sort of man ends his life with no thought for the shame and misfortune his actions will bring upon his family? He left my sister flat broke and my nephew and nieces fatherless. If he hadn’t already been dead, I would have killed him myself.

Eboline and the children needed looking after, and there was no one to do it but me. As soon as we buried Virgil, I started searching for property nearby. There was nothing suitable for sale around Greenville, but I heard about a two-hundred-acre farm in Marietta, forty miles to the southeast. It belonged to a widow named Conley whose husband had died at Normandy. She had no sons to inherit the place and was eager to sell.

From the minute I set foot on the property, I had a good feeling about it. The land was completely cleared, with a small river running along the southern border. The soil was rich and black—Conley had had the sense to rotate his crops. The barn and cotton house looked sound, and there was a ramshackle house on the property that would serve me well as a camp, though it wouldn’t do as a home for Laura and the girls.

The farm was everything I wanted. Mrs. Conley was asking ninety-five hundred for it—mostly, I reckoned, because I’d driven up in Eboline’s Cadillac. I bargained her down to eighty-seven hundred, plus a hundred and fifty each for her cow and two mules.

I was a landowner at last. I could hardly wait to tell my wife.

But first, I had some things to take care of. Had to find us a rent house in town. Had to buy a tractor—I wasn’t about to be a mule farmer like my father had been—and a truck. And I had to decide which tenants to keep on and which to put off. With the tractor I could farm more than half the acreage myself, so I’d only need three of the six tenants who were living there. I interviewed them all, checking their accounts of themselves against Conley’s books, then asked the ones with the smallest yields per acre and the greatest talent for exaggeration to leave.

I kept on the Atwoods, the Cottrills, and the Jacksons. The Jacksons looked to be the best of the bunch, even though they were colored. They were share tenants, not sharecroppers, so they only paid me a quarter of their crop as opposed to half. You don’t see many colored share tenants. Aren’t many of them have the discipline to save for their own mule and equipment. But Hap Jackson wasn’t your typical Negro. For one thing, he could read. The first time I met him, before he signed his contract, he asked to see his page in Conley’s account book.

“Sure,” I said, “I’ll show it to you, but how will you know what it says?”

“I been reading going on seven years now,” he said. “My
boy Ronsel learned me. I wasn’t much good at it at first but he kept after me till I could get through Genesis and Exodus on my own. Teached me my numbers too. Yessuh, Ronsel’s plenty smart. He’s a sergeant in the Army. Fought under General Patton hisself, won him a whole bunch of medals over there. Reckon he’ll be coming home any day now, yessuh.”

I handed him the account book, as much to shut him up as anything. Underneath Hap’s name, Conley had written,
A hardworking nigger who picks a clean bale.

“Mr. Conley seemed to have a good opinion of you,” I said.

Hap didn’t answer. He was concentrating on the figures, running his finger down the columns. His lips moved as he read. He scowled and shook his head. “My wife was right,” he said. “She was right all along.”

“Right about what?”

“See here, where it says twenty bales next to my name? Mist Conley only paid me for eighteen. Told me that was all my cotton graded out to. Florence said he was cheating us, but I didn’t want to believe her.”

“You never saw this book before?”

“No suh. One time I asked Mist Conley to look in it, that was the first year we was here, and he got to hollering at me till it was a pity. Told me he’d put me off if I questioned his word again.”

“Well I don’t know, Hap. It says here he paid you for twenty.”

“I ain’t telling no part of a lie,” he declared.

I believed him. A Negro is like a little child, when he tries
to lie it’s stamped on his face plain as day. Hap’s face held nothing but honest frustration. Besides, I know it’s common practice for planters to cheat their colored tenants. I don’t hold with it myself. Whatever else the colored man may be, he’s our brother. A younger brother, to be sure, undisciplined and driven by his appetites, but also kindly and tragic and humble before God. For good or ill, he’s been given into our care. If we care for him badly or not at all, if we use our natural superiority to harm him, we’re damned as surely as Cain.

“Tell you what, Hap,” I said. “You stay on and I’ll let you look in this account book any time you want. You can even come with me to the gin for the grading.”

He gave me a measuring look and I saw that his eyes, which I’d thought were brown, were actually a muddy green. Between that and his light skin, I figured he must have had two white grandfathers. It explained a lot.

He was still looking at me. I raised my eyebrows, and he dropped his gaze. I was glad to see that. Smart is well and good, but I won’t have a disrespectful nigger working for me.

“Thank you, Mist McAllan. That’d be just fine.”

“Good, it’s settled then,” I said. “One more thing. I understand your wife and daughter don’t do field work. Is that true?”

“Yessuh. Well, they help out at picking time but they don’t do no plowing or chopping. Ain’t no need for em to, me and my sons get along just fine without em. Florence is a granny midwife, she brings in a little extra thataway.”

“But you could farm another five acres with them helping you in the fields,” I said.

“I don’t want no wife of mine chopping cotton, or Lilly May neither,” he said. “Womenfolks ain’t meant for that kind of labor.”

I feel that way myself, but I’d never heard a Negro say so before. Most of them use their women harder than their mules. I’ve seen colored women out in the fields so big with child they could barely bend over to hoe the cotton. Of course, a colored woman is sturdier than a white woman to begin with.

Laura wouldn’t have lasted a week in the fields, but I thought she’d make a fine farmwife once she got used to the idea. Shows you how smart I was.

S
HE WAS AGAINST
the move from the minute I told her about it. She didn’t say so directly, but she didn’t have to. I could tell from the way she started humming whenever I walked in the room. A woman will make her feelings known one way or another. Laura’s way is with music: singing when she’s content, humming when she isn’t, whistling tunelessly when she’s thinking a thing over and deciding whether to sing or hum about it.

The music got a lot less pleasant once we got to the farm. Slamming doors and banging pans, raising her voice to Pappy and me. Defying me. It was as if somebody had come in the night and stolen my sweet, biddable wife, leaving behind a shrew in her place. Everything I did or said was wrong. I knew she blamed me for losing that house in town, but was it my fault the girls got so sick? And the storm—I suppose that was my doing too?

It hit the middle of the night we arrived, making an ungodly racket on the tin roof. The girls’ room was leaking, so we brought them into the bed with us. By morning they were both coughing and hot to the touch. They’d been sniffling for a few days but I hadn’t thought much of it, kids are always catching something. The rain kept up all that day and the next, coming down in heavy sheets. Late that second afternoon I was out in the barn mending tack when Pappy came to fetch me.

“Your wife wants you,” he said. “Your daughters are worse.”

I hurried to the house. Amanda Leigh was coughing, high, cracking sounds like shots from a .22. Isabelle lay in the bed beside her, making a terrible wheezing noise with each indrawn breath. Their lips and fingernails were blue.

“It’s whooping cough,” Laura said. “Go and fetch the doctor at once. And tell your father to put a pot of water on to boil.” I wanted to comfort her but her eyes stopped me. “Just go,” she said.

I told Pappy to put the water on and ran out to the truck. The road was a muddy churn. Somehow I made it to the bridge without skidding off into a ditch. I heard the river before I saw it: a roar of pure power. The bridge was two feet underwater. I stood with the rain lashing my face and looked at the swollen brown water and cursed George Suddeth for a liar, and myself for a gullible fool. Never should have trusted him to begin with, that’s what Pappy said, and I reckoned he was right. Still, it’s a sorry world if you can’t count on a man to keep his given word after you’ve sat at his table and broken bread with him.

It was on the way back to the house that I thought of Hap Jackson’s wife, Florence. Hap had said she was a midwife,
she might know something of children’s ailments. Even if she didn’t, she’d be able to help with the cooking and housework while Laura nursed the girls.

Florence herself answered my knock. I hadn’t met her before, and her appearance took me aback. She was a tall, strapping Negress with sooty black skin and muscles ropy as a man’s—an Amazon of her kind. I had to look up at her to talk to her. Woman must have been near to six feet tall.

“May I help you?” she said.

“I’m Henry McAllan.”

She nodded. “How do. I’m Florence Jackson. If you looking for Hap, he’s out in the shed, tending to the mule.”

“Actually, I came to see you. My little girls, they’re three and five, they’ve taken sick with whooping cough. I can’t get to town because the bridge is washed out, and my wife . . .”
My wife is liable to kill me if I come home with no doctor and no help.

“When they start the whooping?”

“This afternoon.”

She shook her head. “They still catching then. I can give you some remedies to take to em but I can’t go with you.”

“I’ll pay you,” I said.

“I wouldn’t be able to come home for three or four days at least. And then who gone look after my own family, and my mothers?”

“I’m asking you,” I said.

As I locked eyes with her, I was struck by the sheer force of her. That force was banked now but I could sense it underneath,
ready to come alive at need. This wasn’t your commonplace Negro vitality—the animal spirits they spend so recklessly in music and fornication. This was a deep-running fierceness that was almost warriorlike, if you can imagine a colored farmwife in a flour-sack dress as a warrior.

Florence shifted, and I saw a girl of maybe nine or ten in the room behind her, white to the elbows with flour from kneading dough. Had to be the daughter, Lilly May. She was watching us, waiting like I was for her mother’s answer.

“I got to ask Hap,” Florence said finally.

The girl ducked her head and went back to her kneading, and I knew that Florence was lying. The decision was hers to make, not Hap’s, and she’d just made it.

“Please,” I said. “My wife is afraid.” I felt my face get hot as she considered me. If she said no, I wouldn’t ask her again. I wouldn’t stoop to beg a nigger for help. If she said no —

“All right then,” she said. “Wait here while I get my things.”

“I’ll wait in the truck.”

A few minutes later she came out carrying a battered leather case, a rolled-up bundle of clothes and an empty burlap bag. She opened the passenger door and set the case and the clothes inside.

“You got you any chickens yet?” she asked.

“No.”

She closed the truck door and walked around to the chicken coop on the side of the house, moving unhurriedly in spite of the pouring rain. She stepped over the wire fence and tucked
the bag under one arm. Then she reached into the henhouse, pulled out a flapping bird and, with one sure twist of her big hands, wrung its neck. She put the chicken in the bag and walked back to the truck, still moving at that same steady, deliberate pace.

She opened the door. “Them girls gone need broth,” she said, as she climbed inside. She didn’t ask my permission, just got in like she had every right to sit in the cab with me. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have stood for it, but I didn’t dare ask her to ride in back.

FLORENCE

F
IRST TIME
I
LAID
eyes on Laura McAllan she was out of her head with mama worry. When that mama worry takes ahold of a woman you can’t expect no sense from her. She’ll do or say anything at all and you just better hope you ain’t in her way. That’s the Lord’s doing right there. He made mothers to be like that on account of children need protecting and the men ain’t around to do it most of the time. Something bad happen to a child, you can be sure his daddy gone be off somewhere else. Helping that child be up to the mama. But God never gives us a task without giving us the means to see it through. That mama worry come straight from Him, it make it so she can’t help but look after that child. Every once in awhile you see a mother who ain’t got it, who just don’t care for her own baby that came out of her own body. And you try and get her to hold that baby and feed that baby but she won’t have none of it. She just staring off, letting that baby lay there and cry, letting other people do for it. And you know that poor child gone grow up wrong-headed, if it grows up at all.

Laura McAllan was tending to them two sick little girls when I come in with her husband. One of em was bent over a pot of steaming water with a sheet over her head. The other one was just laying there in the bed making that awful whooping sound. When Miz McAllan looked up and seen us her eyes just about scorched us both to a crisp.