Mudbound

by Hillary Jordan

WHEN I THINK of the farm, I think of mud. Limning my husband’s fingernails and encrusting the children’s knees and hair. Sucking at my feet like a greedy newborn on the breast. Marching in boot-shaped patches across the plank floors of the house. There was no defeating it. The mud coated everything. I dreamed in brown.

I suppose the beginning depends on who’s telling the story. No doubt the others would start somewhere different, but they’d still wind up at the same place in the end.

They gave us the dregs of everything, including officers. Our lieutenants were mostly Southerners who’d washed out in some other post. Drunkards, yellow bellies, bigoted no-count crackers who couldn’t have led their way out of a one-room shack in broad daylight. Putting them over black troops was the Army’s way of punishing them.

Funny how many of us farm boys ended up in the driver’s seat. Reckon if you can get a mule to go where you want it to, you can steer a Sherman tank.

I mean who I was when I was over there. There I was a liberator, a hero. In Mississippi I was just another nigger pushing a plow. And the longer I stayed, the more that’s all I was.

I believe they married each other almost entirely for their looks.