Mudbound

by Hillary Jordan

  IN THE MORNING we said goodbye to the Stokeses and headed to the general store to buy food, kerosene, buckets, candles and the other provisions we would need on the farm. That’s when I learned there was no electricity or running water in the house.

  “There’s a pump in the front yard,” Henry said, “and some kind of stove in the kitchen.”

  “A pump? There’s no indoor plumbing?”

  “No.”

  “What about the bathroom?” I said.

  “There is no bathroom,” he said, with a hint of impatience. “Just an outhouse.”

  Honey, by the way.

  A stout-bodied woman in a man’s checked shirt and overalls spoke from behind the counter. “You the new owners of the Conley place?”

  “That’s right,” said Henry.

  “You’ll be wanting wood for that stove. I’m Rose Trickle-bank, and this is my store, mine and my husband Bill’s.”

  She stuck her hand out, and we all shook it in turn. She had a strong, callused grip; I saw Henry’s eyes widen when her hand grasped his. Yet for all her mannish ways, from the neck up Rose Tricklebank resembled nothing so much as the flower whose name she bore. She had a Cupid’s-bow mouth and a round face surrounded by a mop of curly auburn hair. A cigarette tucked behind one ear spoiled the picture, but only a little.

  “You’ll want to stock up good on supplies today,” she said. “Big storm’s coming in tonight, could rain all week.”

  “Why should that matter?” Pappy asked.

  “When it rains and that river rises, the Conley place can be cut off for days.”

  “It’s the McAllan place now,” Henry said.

  After we paid, Rose hefted one of our boxes herself and carried it out to the car, over Henry’s protests. She pulled two licorice ropes out of her pocket and handed them to Amanda Leigh and Isabelle. “I’ve got two girls of my own, and my Ruth Ann is about your age,” she said to Amanda, tousling her hair. “She and Caroline are in school right now, but I hope you’ll come back and visit us soon.”

  I promised we would, thinking it would be nice to have a friend in town, and some playmates for the girls. As soon as she was out of earshot, Henry muttered, “That woman acts like she thinks she’s a man.”

  “Maybe she is a man, and her husband hasn’t cottoned to it yet,” Pappy said.

  The two of them laughed. It irritated me. “Well, I like her,” I said, “and I plan on visiting her once we get settled in.”

  Henry’s brows went up. I wondered if he would forbid me to see her, and what I would say if he did. But all he said was, “You’ll have a whole lot to do on the farm.”

  THE FARM WAS about a twenty-minute drive from town, but it seemed longer because the road was so rutted and the view so monotonous. The land was flat and mostly featureless, as farmers will inevitably make it. Negroes dotted the fields, tilling the earth with mule-drawn plows. Without the green of crops to bring it alive, the land looked bleak, an ocean of unrelieved brown in which we’d been set adrift.

  We crossed over a creaky bridge spanning a small river lined with cypresses and willows. Henry stuck his head out the window of the truck and shouted back at me, “This is it, honey! We’re on our land now!”

  I mustered a smile and a wave. To me, it looked no different from the other land we’d passed. There were brown fields and unpainted sharecroppers’ shacks with dirt yards. Women who might have been any age from thirty to sixty hung laundry from sagging clotheslines while gaggles of dirty barefoot children watched listlessly from the porch. After a time we came to a shack that was larger than the others, though no less decrepit. It had a deserted air. The truck stopped in front of it, and Henry and his father got out.

  “Why are we stopping?” I called out.

  “We’re here,” Henry said.

  Here was a long, rickety house with a warped tin roof and shuttered windows that had neither glass nor screens. Here was a porch that ran the length of the house, connecting it to a small lean-to. Here was a dirt yard with a pump in the middle of it, shaded by a large oak tree that had somehow managed to escape razing by the original steaders. Here was a barn, a pasture, a cotton house, a corncrib, a pig wallow, a chicken coop and an outhouse.

  Here was our new home.

  Amanda Leigh and Isabelle scrambled out of the car and ran around the yard, delighted with everything they saw. I followed, stepping up to my ankles in muck. It would be weeks before I learned that on a farm, you always look before you step, because you never know what you might be stepping in or on: a mud puddle, a pile of excrement, a rattlesnake.

  “Will we have chickens, Daddy? And pigs?” Amanda Leigh asked. “Will we have a cow?”

  “We sure will,” Henry said. “You know what else?” He pointed back to the line of trees that marked the river. “See that river we crossed over? I bet it’s full of catfish and craw-dads.”

  There was some kind of structure on the river, about a mile away. Even from a distance I could tell it was much larger than the house. “What’s that building?” I asked Henry.

  “An old sawmill, dates back to before the Civil War. You and the girls stay out of there, it’s liable to fall down any minute.”

  “It ain’t the only thing,” said Pappy, gesturing at the house. “That roof needs repairing, and them steps look rotten. And some of the shutters are missing, you better replace em quick or we’re liable to freeze to death.”

  “We’ll get the place fixed up,” Henry said. “It’ll be all right. You’ll see.”

  He wasn’t speaking to Pappy, but to me. Make the best of it, his eyes urged. Don’t shame me in front of my father and the girls. I felt a stirring of anger. Of course I would make the best of it, for the children’s sake if nothing else.

  With the help of one of the tenants, a talkative light-skinned Negro named Hap Jackson, Henry unloaded the truck and moved the furniture in. I saw right away that we wouldn’t be able to bring much more from Memphis. The house had just three rooms: a large main room that encompassed the kitchen and living area, and two bedrooms barely big enough to hold a bed and a chest of drawers each. There were no closets, just pegs hammered at intervals along the walls. Like the floors, the walls were rough plank, with gaps between the boards through which the wind and all manner of insects could enter freely. Every surface was filthy. I felt another surge of anger. How could Henry have brought us to such a place?

  I wasn’t the only one displeased with the accommodations. “Where am I gonna sleep?” demanded Pappy.

  Henry looked at me. I shrugged. He had laid this egg all by himself; he could figure out how to hatch it.

  “I guess we’ll have to put you out in the lean-to,” Henry said.

  “I ain’t sleeping out there. It don’t even have a floor.”

  “I don’t know where else to put you,” Henry said. “There’s no room in the house.”

  “There would be, if you got rid of that piano,” Pappy said.

  The piano just barely fit in one corner of the main room.

  “If you got rid of that piano,” Pappy said, “we could put a bed there.”

  “We could,” Henry agreed.

  “No,” I said. “We need the piano. I’m teaching the girls to play, you know that. Besides, I don’t want a bed in the middle of the living room.”

  “We could rig a curtain around it,” Pappy said.

  “True,” Henry said.

  They were both looking at me: Henry unhappily, his father wearing a smirk. Henry was going to agree. I could see it in his face, and so could Pappy.

  “I need to speak to you in private,” I said, looking at Henry. I went out onto the front porch. Henry followed, shutting the door behind him.

  In a low voice, I said, “When you told me you were bringing me here, away from my people and everything I’ve ever known, I didn’t say a word. When you informed me your father was coming to live with us, I went along. When Orris Stokes stood there and told you you’d been fleeced by that man you rented the
house from, I kept my mouth shut. But I’m telling you now, Henry, we’re not getting rid of that piano. It’s the one civilized thing in this place, and I want it for the girls and myself, and we’re keeping it. So you can just go back in there and tell your father he can sleep in the lean-to. Either that or he can sleep in the bed with you, because I am not staying here without my piano.”

  Henry was looking at me like I’d just sprouted antlers. I stared back, resisting the urge to drop my gaze.

  “You’re overtired,” he said.

  “No. I’m fine.”

  How my heart thumped as I waited him out! I’d never defied my husband so openly, or anyone else for that matter. It felt dangerous, heady. Inside the house I could hear the girls squabbling over something. Isabelle started crying, but I didn’t take my eyes off Henry’s.

  “You’d better go to them,” he said finally.

  “And the piano?”

  “I’ll put a floor in the lean-to. Fix it up for him.”

  “Thank you, honey.”

  That night in our bed he took me hard, from behind, without any of the usual preliminaries. It hurt, but I didn’t make a sound.

  HENRY

  WHEN I was six years old, my grandfather called me into the bedroom where he was dying. I didn’t like to go in there—the room stank of sickness and old man, and the skeleton look of him scared me—but I was reared to be obedient so I went.

  “Run outside and get a handful of dirt, then bring it back here,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “Just do it.” He waved one gnarled hand. “Go on now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I went and got the dirt. When I returned with it, he asked me what I was holding.

  “Dirt,” I said.

  “That’s right. Now give it to me.”

  He cupped his hands. They shook with palsy. I poured the dirt into them, trying not to spill any on the sheets.

  “What am I holding?” he asked.

  “Dirt.”

  “No.”

  “Earth?”

  “No, boy. This is land I’ve got. Do you know why?” His eyebrows shot up. They were gray and bushy, tangled like wire.

  I shook my head, not understanding.

  “Because it’s mine,” he said. “One day this’ll be your land, your farm. But in the meantime, to you and every other person who don’t own it, it’s just dirt. Here, take it on back outside before your mama catches you with it.”

  He poured it back into my hands. As I turned to leave, he grabbed ahold of my sleeve and fixed me with his rheumy eyes. “Remember this, boy. You can put your faith in a whole lot of things—in God, in money, in other people—but land’s the only thing you can count on to be there tomorrow. It’s the only thing that’s really yours.”

  A week later he was dead, and his land passed to my mother. That land was where I grew to manhood, and though I left it at nineteen to see what lay outside its borders, I always knew I’d return to it someday. I knew it during the weeks I spent overseas with my face pressed in alien mud soaked in the blood of people not my own, and during the long months after, lying on my back in Army hospitals while my leg stank and throbbed and itched and finally healed. I knew it while I was a student up in Oxford, where the land doesn’t lie flat, but heaves itself up and down like seawater. I knew it when I went to work for the Corps of Engineers, a job that took me many places that were strange to me, and some others that looked like home but weren’t. Even when the flood came in ’27, overrunning Greenville and destroying our house and that year’s cotton crop, it never occurred to me that my father would do other than rebuild and replant. That land had been in my mother’s family for nearly a hundred years. My great-great-grandfather and his slaves had cleared it, wresting it acre by acre from the seething mass of cane and brush that covered it. Rebuild and replant: that’s what farmers do in the Delta.

  My father did neither. He sold the farm in January of ’28, nine months after the flood. I was living down to Vicksburg at the time and traveling a great deal for work. I didn’t find out what he’d done till after it was too late.

  “That damned river wiped me out,” Pappy liked to tell people after he’d moved to town and started working for the railroad. “Never would’ve sold otherwise.”

  That was a lie, one of many that made up his story of himself. The truth was he walked away from that land gladly, because he feared and hated farming. Feared the weather and the floods, hated the work and the sweat and the long hours alone with his own thoughts. Even as a boy I saw how small he got when he looked at the sky, how he brushed the soil from his hands at the end of the day like it was dung. The flood was just an excuse to sell.

  Took me nearly twenty years to save enough to buy my own land. There was the Depression to get through, and then the war. I had a wife and two children to provide for. I put by what I could and waited.

  By V-J Day, I had the money. I figured I’d work one more year to give us a cushion and start looking for property the following summer. That would give me plenty of time to learn the land, purchase seed and equipment, find tenants and so on before the new planting season started in January. It would also give me time to work on my wife, who I knew would be reluctant to leave Memphis.

  That’s how it was supposed to be, nice and orderly, and it would have been if that good-for-nothing husband of Eboline’s hadn’t gone and hanged himself that Christmas. I never trusted my brother-in-law, or any man comfortable in a suit. Virgil was a great drinker and a great talker besides, and those are stains enough on anybody’s character, but what sort of man ends his life with no thought for the shame and misfortune his actions will bring upon his family? He left my sister flat broke and my nephew and nieces fatherless. If he hadn’t already been dead, I would have killed him myself.

  Eboline and the children needed looking after, and there was no one to do it but me. As soon as we buried Virgil, I started searching for property nearby. There was nothing suitable for sale around Greenville, but I heard about a two-hundred-acre farm in Marietta, forty miles to the southeast. It belonged to a widow named Conley whose husband had died at Normandy. She had no sons to inherit the place and was eager to sell.

  From the minute I set foot on the property, I had a good feeling about it. The land was completely cleared, with a small river running along the southern border. The soil was rich and black—Conley had had the sense to rotate his crops. The barn and cotton house looked sound, and there was a ramshackle house on the property that would serve me well as a camp, though it wouldn’t do as a home for Laura and the girls.

  The farm was everything I wanted. Mrs. Conley was asking ninety-five hundred for it—mostly, I reckoned, because I’d driven up in Eboline’s Cadillac. I bargained her down to eighty-seven hundred, plus a hundred and fifty each for her cow and two mules.

  I was a landowner at last. I could hardly wait to tell my wife.

  But first, I had some things to take care of. Had to find us a rent house in town. Had to buy a tractor—I wasn’t about to be a mule farmer like my father had been—and a truck. And I had to decide which tenants to keep on and which to put off. With the tractor I could farm more than half the acreage myself, so I’d only need three of the six tenants who were living there. I interviewed them all, checking their accounts of themselves against Conley’s books, then asked the ones with the smallest yields per acre and the greatest talent for exaggeration to leave.

  I kept on the Atwoods, the Cottrills, and the Jacksons. The Jacksons looked to be the best of the bunch, even though they were colored. They were share tenants, not sharecroppers, so they only paid me a quarter of their crop as opposed to half. You don’t see many colored share tenants. Aren’t many of them have the discipline to save for their own mule and equipment. But Hap Jackson wasn’t your typical Negro. For one thing, he could read. The first time I met him, before he signed his contract, he asked to see his page in Conley’s account book.

  “Sure,” I said, “I’ll
show it to you, but how will you know what it says?”

  “I been reading going on seven years now,” he said. “My boy Ronsel learned me. I wasn’t much good at it at first but he kept after me till I could get through Genesis and Exodus on my own. Teached me my numbers too. Yessuh, Ronsel’s plenty smart. He’s a sergeant in the Army. Fought under General Patton hisself, won him a whole bunch of medals over there. Reckon he’ll be coming home any day now, yessuh.”

  I handed him the account book, as much to shut him up as anything. Underneath Hap’s name, Conley had written, A hardworking nigger who picks a clean bale.

  “Mr. Conley seemed to have a good opinion of you,” I said.

  Hap didn’t answer. He was concentrating on the figures, running his finger down the columns. His lips moved as he read. He scowled and shook his head. “My wife was right,” he said. “She was right all along.”

  “Right about what?”

  “See here, where it says twenty bales next to my name? Mist Conley only paid me for eighteen. Told me that was all my cotton graded out to. Florence said he was cheating us, but I didn’t want to believe her.”

  “You never saw this book before?”

  “No suh. One time I asked Mist Conley to look in it, that was the first year we was here, and he got to hollering at me till it was a pity. Told me he’d put me off if I questioned his word again.”

  “Well I don’t know, Hap. It says here he paid you for twenty.”

  “I ain’t telling no part of a lie,” he declared.

  I believed him. A Negro is like a little child, when he tries to lie it’s stamped on his face plain as day. Hap’s face held nothing but honest frustration. Besides, I know it’s common practice for planters to cheat their colored tenants. I don’t hold with it myself. Whatever else the colored man may be, he’s our brother. A younger brother, to be sure, undisciplined and driven by his appetites, but also kindly and tragic and humble before God. For good or ill, he’s been given into our care. If we care for him badly or not at all, if we use our natural superiority to harm him, we’re damned as surely as Cain.