Mudbound

by Hillary Jordan

If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. . . . A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point. —JAMES AGEE, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

“You’ll move if I say so,” Hap said. “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.” “Only so long as he alive,” I said. “For if the husband be dead the wife is loosed from his law. Says so in Romans.”

Hap gave me a sharp look and I gave him one right back.

Violence is part and parcel of country life. You’re forever being assailed by dead things: dead mice, dead rabbits, dead possums, dead birds. You find them in the yard, crawling with maggots, and smell them rotting under the house. Then there are the creatures you kill for food: chickens, hogs, deer, quail, wild turkeys, catfish, rabbits, frogs and squirrels, which you pluck, skin, disembowel, debone and fry up in a pan. I learned how to load and fire a shotgun, how to stitch up a bleeding wound, how to reach into the womb of a heaving sow to deliver a breached piglet. My hands did these things, but I was never easy in my mind. Life felt perilous, like anything at all might happen.

BAD NEWS IS about the only thing that travels fast in the country.

PRIDE GOETH BEFORE destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

Ain’t no doubt in my mind God had a hand in it. He was trying to instruct me whatall I’d been doing wrong and thinking wrong. He was saying, Hap, you better humble down now, you been taking the blessings I’ve given you for granted. You been walking around thinking you better than some folks cause you ain’t working on halves like they is. You been forgetting Who’s in charge and who ain’t. So here’s what I’m gone do: I’m gone send a storm so big it rips the roof off the shed where you keep that mule you so proud of.

A dead mule, a busted shed and a broke leg. That’s what pride’ll get you.

I remembered ole Waldo Murch and his arm that had to be took off back in ’29. Waldo swore that arm still ached even though it wasn’t there no more. I’d seen him myself plenty of times, rubbing at the air, and I wondered if it was that kind of imagine pain I was feeling. But I guess God must a decided He’d humbled me enough cause when I pulled the blanket off there was my leg, all bandaged and splinted up. I’m here to tell you, seeing you got two legs when you thought you was down to just one is a mighty glad feeling.

HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN, jiggety-jig. Coon, spade, darky, nigger. Went off to fight for my country and came back to find it hadn’t changed a bit. Black folks still riding in the back of the bus and coming in the back door, still picking the white folks’ cotton and begging the white folks’ pardon. Nevermind we’d answered their call and fought their war, to them we were still just niggers. And the black soldiers who’d died were just dead niggers.

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.

AT SUPPER THAT NIGHT, Jamie regaled us with stories about his travels overseas. He’d been as far north as Norway and as far south as Portugal, mostly by train but sometimes by bicycle or on foot.

“Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble,” Hap went on. “He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not. And dost thou open thine eyes upon such a one, and bringest me into judgment with thee? Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one.”