by Linhah

Created on: January 28, 2012

Racism is a fact of life for many people and Mudbound by Hillary Jordan, published in 2008, is a horrific journey through that racism.  It is so sharply felt that it demands to be read a second time.  The reader is left gasping from the shock and the arrogance captured.  It’s an ugly story, with layers of racism, sexism, and cruelty of all manner including murder and incest.  Hatred reigns in the south in the 1940s and the Devil walks and the tension rises.  It is a plain girl getting a husband that is the first glimpse in this chorus driven book.  It is Laura, the plain girl, that pulls the pieces of the story together.

The chorus members are six total.  Three are black family members, three are white family members.   The two families are neighbors, one the property owners and one the sharecroppers.   Two charismatic soldiers and their families, one white, one black, bound together by need, weather, circumstance. They came home from World War II to  the Delta country of Mississippi, a rich farmland, coveted by black and white farmers alike.  The soldiers became friends; their time in the military had equalized them.  They came back from the war different men.  The problem was that society had not become different.

As Laura says, her family destroys their family.  The friendship of the soldiers is not tolerable to the Delta people and every incidence of their friendship stirs race hatred.  The black soldier has left in Europe a son with a white woman.  He misplaces the letter informing him of his son and leaves it in the truck of the white family.  When the racist old man finds the letter and the picture, he sets in motion some god-awful activity that pits the Ku Klux Klan against one black man.

It ends hard, of course, it has to.  The racist old man is Pappy, the only main character that is not part of the chorus.  His part is told by his two sons and his daughter in law.  The book opens and closes on his funeral, a muddy and rainy event.    The mud is an integral part of the book.  It implies hard times and dirty living on a day to day basis.  Laura has been brought to this lifestyle without her vote being cast in the matter.  It was her husband who made the farming decision.

Laura’s form of racism is milder than her husband's and father-in-law's.  The differences in racial feeling, some subtle and some brash and loud spoken, were not only differences among people, but differences between the North and South.  Sharecropping was barely removed in definition from slavery.    Europe did not share the racist views of the United States toward blacks; however Germany had its own racist mentality, as evidenced by Auschwitz and other concentration camps. The black soldier, Ronsel, tells of the liberation of the concentration camp survivors.  This is one of the most intense moments of the book, when the black soldiers liberate the camp.  The terrible cruelty of being locked away and starved leaves the reader with a feeling of sickening dread and no feeling of hope.  We are all human after all and it is high time we became a civilized society.  We are a culmination of our own history, no matter how shocking.

Learn more about this author, Linhah.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.