Hillary Jordan

This one took me by surprise. It had been on my bookshelf for close to a year and it may make my
2023 book of the year. Jordan's prose sears like the hot southern sun that bakes everything in sight. This is a magnificent novel, written in one of the most difficult forms of fiction: competing narratives told from the perspective of each character.

Hillary Jordan will weave you into her story so deep, that you will not only read this story you will learn each character so well that you will show more feel you are there watching this story as it unfolds. I was locked into this book by the third page and was only disappointed when I reached the end and had to stop reading. I continue to be saddened knowing that so many black families suffered such great loss and prejudice. show less

At the time it was published, there was a lot of hype about this book, and for that reason I avoided it. I'm sorry I did. In this case, the hype was deserved.
The novel takes on two themes still pertinent today:PTSD suffered by soldiers returning from war (in this case WW II), and race relations, which although this novel is set in 1946 don't seem to have progressed as much as we would have hoped.
Laura and her husband Henry have begun to farm on the Mississippi delta in 1946. They have show more several sharecroppers, including a black family. Henry's father, a virulent racist and member of the KKK lives with them. Shortly afterwards, Henry's younger brother, Jamie, a war veteran, comes to stay with them. The oldest son of the black sharecroppers, Ronsel, also returns from the war, and he and Jamie strike up a friendship based on their mutual experiences. This doesn't sit well with Henry's father Pappy, or with some of the other townfolk, and we are headed for a tragedy.
The novel is told in alternating chapters by the various characters, including (primarily) Laura, Henry, Jamie, Ronsel, and Ronsel's parents Florence and Hap. The characters are beautifully and realistically depicted, and the story is devastating. Highly recommended.

4 stars show less

5***** and a ❤

This is a work of literary fiction that deals with what it means to live in the Jim Crow south just after World War II, when being a war hero isn’t enough to get respect if your skin is black.

The story is told in alternate voices – one character per chapter. We have Laura, a woman from an educated household, a college graduate and “spinster” when she marries Henry McAllan at age 31 in Memphis. Henry is the oldest son of “Pappy” McAllan, a mean, prejudiced cur of a show more man who sold his wife’s family land at the earliest opportunity and moved in with his married daughter and her banker husband after his wife died. Henry has always longed to be back on the land, farming. And when his brother-in-law dies, and he’s left trying to fix his sister’s life and take on the care of his father, he makes a sudden decision (without consulting Laura) to buy a piece of land near Marietta GA. He plans to rent a house in town for Laura and their girls, but he is taken advantage of and without a lease he has no choice but to move the family onto the farm … a ramshackle building with a leaky roof, no electricity, no phone and no plumbing. Laura accepts her lot as Henry’s wife, but puts her foot down when it comes to having Pappy in the same 2-bedroom house – No. So Pappy is moved to the lean-to (after Henry puts in a floor).

As is typical of the South in 1947, they have sharecroppers on the land. Six families live there when Henry buys the place, but he lets three of them go, keeping the three he feels work the hardest. One of these families is the Jacksons – Hap, Florence and their children: Lilly May (who has a club foot), twins Ruel and Marlon (about age 10), and their oldest Ronsel who is away at war when the novel opens. Ronsel is a shining star in the black community – a handsome, strong, intelligent man who has more schooling than most of his contemporaries. He’s a decorated soldier of the 761st Black Panther Tank Battalion and has seen a different world in Europe, where a black man is accepted based on who he is, not shunned based on his skin.

Florence is a strong woman – physically, mentally and emotionally. She’s a midwife and tends her family and her “ladies” with a no-nonsense competence. She also begins to work for the McAllen’s as a cook and housekeeper, helping Laura partly out of pity but mostly because her family can use the extra money. Hap is a man of his race and generation. He’s strong, works hard and smart, is a preacher, and counsels his children to “know their place” in the white man’s world.

And finally we have Jamie, the youngest McAllen son, who has been a bomber pilot in Europe and returns a changed man … charming as ever most of the time, but drinking to excess to quell his demons. His inability to stand up to his father, and his shame over this is a central force in the book.

When Ronsel returns and begins a vague friendship with Jamie over a bottle of whiskey events are set in motion which can only lead to the inevitable tragedy. The ray of hope in the final chapter is a lifeline the author offers. I’m conflicted about accepting it. show less

In 1939, at age thirty-one Laura is considered almost unmarriageable. All of her siblings have married and left the family home in Memphis. She has resigned herself to the fate of spinster schoolteacher when Henry McAllen appears and wants to marry her. He seems like a kind man, even if he is ten years older than her and with a limp from his time in France during the Great War. Unlike her family, he prefers the country and wants someday to move back to Mississippi and have his own farm. show more Feeling that this may be her only chance for marriage Laura swallows her fears and agrees. World War II changes both of their plans and those of everyone around them, but when the war ends, Henry moves his family, now grown to include two daughters and his father, to a farm in rural Mississippi. The life and people they encounter there shape the narrative of Hillary Jordan’s powerful debut novel Mudbound.

Through a series of unfortunate events Henry and Laura do not get the lovely house and acreage Henry described for their farm. Instead, he is swindled and they must live on their land in a shack with no plumbing or electricity. Henry has not deliberately lied to Laura but it hardly matters; her life has gone from one of gentility to one of drudgery. In short order she has not only two children to take care of, but also Henry’s father, a miserable, belligerent racist, who makes everyone’s life as miserable as the inside of his own twisted mind. Their income is derived in part from their own crops and from another family who lives on a parcel of their land. The Jacksons have the same kind of dreams as the McAllens but as blacks in the 1940s South they are even less likely to achieve them.

Jordan gives all of the main characters in Mudbound a voice, and delineates them so clearly it never becomes confusing. As different as they are two of the most memorable are Ronsel and Laura. He is the hope of his parents, but is unable to reconcile himself to being relegated a second class citizen in the country he fought for with distinction. The intelligence and pride that served him so well in Europe only causes him problems in Mississippi. For Laura, life is a dreary, loveless existence acting as a maid to a bitter, racist old man who, despite having sold his son’s birthright, believes his word is law. That Jordan can slip into the skins of such a diverse and conflicted set of characters means that by the end she has laid her story down so skillfully that their actions, as repugnant as some may be, are the only option. Mudbound is filled with a strong, quiet sorrow that permeates the page the way the mud pervades every aspect of its characters’ lives. It is a portrait of a time in American history that is as shameful now as it was then. show less