Mudbound

by Hillary Jordan

Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that.

The truth isn’t so simple. Death may be inevitable, but love is not. Love, you have to choose.

We didn’t stay in their country long, but I’ll always be grateful to those English folks for how they welcomed us. First time in my life I ever felt like a man first and a black man second.

Henry McAllan was as landsick as any man I ever seen and I seen plenty of em, white and colored both. It’s in their eyes, the way they look at the land like a woman they’s itching for. White men already got her, they thinking, You mine now, just you wait and see what I’m gone do to you. Colored men ain’t got her and ain’t never gone get her but they dreaming bout her just the same, with every push of that plow and every chop of that hoe. White or colored, none of em got sense enough to see that she the one owns them. She takes their sweat and blood and the sweat and blood of their women and children and when she done took it all she takes their bodies too, churning and churning em up till they one and the same, them and her.

I NEVER THOUGHT I’d miss it so much. I don’t mean Nazi Germany, you’d have to be crazy to miss a place like that. 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.