Mudbound

by Hillary Jordan

When the river takes me I don’t try to swim or stay afloat. I open my eyes and my mouth and let the water fill me up. I feel my lungs spasm but there’s no pain, and I stop being afraid. The current carries me along. I’m flotsam, and I understand that flotsam is all I’ve ever been.

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.

LAURA

He’d never walked down the street with his head held high, much less had folks lined up on either side cheering him and throwing flowers at him.

The battles he’d fought were the kind nobody cheers you for winning, against sore feet and aching bones, too little rain or too much, heat and cotton worms and buried rocks that could break the blade of a plow. Ain’t never a lull or a cease-fire. Win today, you got to get up tomorrow and fight the same battles all over again. Lose and you can lose everything. Only a fool fights a war with them kind of odds, or a man who ain’t got no other choice.

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.

Her people were conquered and despised, just like mine were. And just like me, Resl was hungry to be treated like a human being.

Henry never had much use for nature in its untouched state. Forests didn’t move him, nor mountains, nor even the sea, but show him a well-tended farm and he was breathless with excitement.

I felt a ripple of envy, which I saw echoed on Jamie’s face. How simple things were for Henry! How I wished sometimes that I could join him in his stark, right-angled world, where everything was either right or wrong and there was no doubt which was which. What unimaginable luxury, never to wrestle with whether or why, never to lie awake nights wondering what if.

All I had to do was stay silent, and I would have it—an end to pain and fear and emptiness. Here it was, if I just had the guts to reach out and grab hold of it.