Mudbound

by Hillary Jordan

  “Tell you what, Hap,” I said. “You stay on and I’ll let you look in this account book any time you want. You can even come with me to the gin for the grading.”

  He gave me a measuring look and I saw that his eyes, which I’d thought were brown, were actually a muddy green. Between that and his light skin, I figured he must have had two white grandfathers. It explained a lot.

  He was still looking at me. I raised my eyebrows, and he dropped his gaze. I was glad to see that. Smart is well and good, but I won’t have a disrespectful nigger working for me.

  “Thank you, Mist McAllan. That’d be just fine.”

  “Good, it’s settled then,” I said. “One more thing. I understand your wife and daughter don’t do field work. Is that true?”

  “Yessuh. Well, they help out at picking time but they don’t do no plowing or chopping. Ain’t no need for em to, me and my sons get along just fine without em. Florence is a granny midwife, she brings in a little extra thataway.”

  “But you could farm another five acres with them helping you in the fields,” I said.

  “I don’t want no wife of mine chopping cotton, or Lilly May neither,” he said. “Womenfolks ain’t meant for that kind of labor.”

  I feel that way myself, but I’d never heard a Negro say so before. Most of them use their women harder than their mules. I’ve seen colored women out in the fields so big with child they could barely bend over to hoe the cotton. Of course, a colored woman is sturdier than a white woman to begin with.

  Laura wouldn’t have lasted a week in the fields, but I thought she’d make a fine farmwife once she got used to the idea. Shows you how smart I was.

  SHE WAS AGAINST the move from the minute I told her about it. She didn’t say so directly, but she didn’t have to. I could tell from the way she started humming whenever I walked in the room. A woman will make her feelings known one way or another. Laura’s way is with music: singing when she’s content, humming when she isn’t, whistling tunelessly when she’s thinking a thing over and deciding whether to sing or hum about it.

  The music got a lot less pleasant once we got to the farm. Slamming doors and banging pans, raising her voice to Pappy and me. Defying me. It was as if somebody had come in the night and stolen my sweet, biddable wife, leaving behind a shrew in her place. Everything I did or said was wrong. I knew she blamed me for losing that house in town, but was it my fault the girls got so sick? And the storm—I suppose that was my doing too?

  It hit the middle of the night we arrived, making an ungodly racket on the tin roof. The girls’ room was leaking, so we brought them into the bed with us. By morning they were both coughing and hot to the touch. They’d been sniffling for a few days but I hadn’t thought much of it, kids are always catching something. The rain kept up all that day and the next, coming down in heavy sheets. Late that second afternoon I was out in the barn mending tack when Pappy came to fetch me.

  “Your wife wants you,” he said. “Your daughters are worse.”

  I hurried to the house. Amanda Leigh was coughing, high, cracking sounds like shots from a .22. Isabelle lay in the bed beside her, making a terrible wheezing noise with each indrawn breath. Their lips and fingernails were blue.

  “It’s whooping cough,” Laura said. “Go and fetch the doctor at once. And tell your father to put a pot of water on to boil.” I wanted to comfort her but her eyes stopped me. “Just go,” she said.

  I told Pappy to put the water on and ran out to the truck. The road was a muddy churn. Somehow I made it to the bridge without skidding off into a ditch. I heard the river before I saw it: a roar of pure power. The bridge was two feet underwater. I stood with the rain lashing my face and looked at the swollen brown water and cursed George Suddeth for a liar, and myself for a gullible fool. Never should have trusted him to begin with, that’s what Pappy said, and I reckoned he was right. Still, it’s a sorry world if you can’t count on a man to keep his given word after you’ve sat at his table and broken bread with him.

  It was on the way back to the house that I thought of Hap Jackson’s wife, Florence. Hap had said she was a midwife, she might know something of children’s ailments. Even if she didn’t, she’d be able to help with the cooking and housework while Laura nursed the girls.

  Florence herself answered my knock. I hadn’t met her before, and her appearance took me aback. She was a tall, strapping Negress with sooty black skin and muscles ropy as a man’s—an Amazon of her kind. I had to look up at her to talk to her. Woman must have been near to six feet tall.

  “May I help you?” she said.

  “I’m Henry McAllan.”

  She nodded. “How do. I’m Florence Jackson. If you looking for Hap, he’s out in the shed, tending to the mule.”

  “Actually, I came to see you. My little girls, they’re three and five, they’ve taken sick with whooping cough. I can’t get to town because the bridge is washed out, and my wife . . .”My wife is liable to kill me if I come home with no doctor and no help.

  “When they start the whooping?”

  “This afternoon.”

  She shook her head. “They still catching then. I can give you some remedies to take to em but I can’t go with you.”

  “I’ll pay you,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t be able to come home for three or four days at least. And then who gone look after my own family, and my mothers?”

  “I’m asking you,” I said.

  As I locked eyes with her, I was struck by the sheer force of her. That force was banked now but I could sense it underneath, ready to come alive at need. This wasn’t your commonplace Negro vitality—the animal spirits they spend so recklessly in music and fornication. This was a deep-running fierceness that was almost warriorlike, if you can imagine a colored farmwife in a flour-sack dress as a warrior.

  Florence shifted, and I saw a girl of maybe nine or ten in the room behind her, white to the elbows with flour from kneading dough. Had to be the daughter, Lilly May. She was watching us, waiting like I was for her mother’s answer.

  “I got to ask Hap,” Florence said finally.

  The girl ducked her head and went back to her kneading, and I knew that Florence was lying. The decision was hers to make, not Hap’s, and she’d just made it.

  “Please,” I said. “My wife is afraid.” I felt my face get hot as she considered me. If she said no, I wouldn’t ask her again. I wouldn’t stoop to beg a nigger for help. If she said no —

  “All right then,” she said. “Wait here while I get my things.”

  “I’ll wait in the truck.”

  A few minutes later she came out carrying a battered leather case, a rolled-up bundle of clothes and an empty burlap bag. She opened the passenger door and set the case and the clothes inside.

  “You got you any chickens yet?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She closed the truck door and walked around to the chicken coop on the side of the house, moving unhurriedly in spite of the pouring rain. She stepped over the wire fence and tucked the bag under one arm. Then she reached into the henhouse, pulled out a flapping bird and, with one sure twist of her big hands, wrung its neck. She put the chicken in the bag and walked back to the truck, still moving at that same steady, deliberate pace.

  She opened the door. “Them girls gone need broth,” she said, as she climbed inside. She didn’t ask my permission, just got in like she had every right to sit in the cab with me. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have stood for it, but I didn’t dare ask her to ride in back.

  FLORENCE

  FIRST TIME I LAID eyes on Laura McAllan she was out of her head with mama worry. When that mama worry takes ahold of a woman you can’t expect no sense from her. She’ll do or say anything at all and you just better hope you ain’t in her way. That’s the Lord’s doing right there. He made mothers to be like that on account of children need protecting and the men ain’t around to do it most of the time. Something bad happen to a child, you can be sure his dad
dy gone be off somewhere else. Helping that child be up to the mama. But God never gives us a task without giving us the means to see it through. That mama worry come straight from Him, it make it so she can’t help but look after that child. Every once in awhile you see a mother who ain’t got it, who just don’t care for her own baby that came out of her own body. And you try and get her to hold that baby and feed that baby but she won’t have none of it. She just staring off, letting that baby lay there and cry, letting other people do for it. And you know that poor child gone grow up wrong-headed, if it grows up at all.

  Laura McAllan was tending to them two sick little girls when I come in with her husband. One of em was bent over a pot of steaming water with a sheet over her head. The other one was just laying there in the bed making that awful whooping sound. When Miz McAllan looked up and seen us her eyes just about scorched us both to a crisp.

  “Who’s this, Henry? Where’s the doctor?”

  “The bridge is washed out,” he said. “I couldn’t get to town. This is Florence Jackson, she’s a midwife. I thought she might be able to help.”

  “Do you see anybody giving birth here?” she said. “These children need a medical doctor, not some granny with a bag full of potions.”

  Just then the little one started gagging like they do when the whooping takes em real bad. I went right over to her. I turned that child onto her side and held her head over the bowl, but all that come out was some yellow bile. “I seen this with my own children,” I told her. “We need to get some liquid down em. But first we got to clear some of that phlegm out.”

  She glared at me a minute, then said, “How?”

  “We’ll make em up some horehound tea, and we’ll keep after em with the steam like you been doing. That was real good, making that steam for em.”

  Mist McAllan was just standing there dripping water all over the floor, looking like somebody stabbed him whenever one of them little girls coughed. Times like that, you got to give the men something to do. I asked him to go boil some more water.

  “That tea’ll draw the phlegm right on out of there,” I told Miz McAllan. “Then once they get to breathing better we’ll make em some chicken broth and put a little ground-up willow bark in it for the fever.”

  “I’ve got aspirin somewhere, if I can find it in all this mess.”

  “Don’t fret yourself over it. Aspirin’s made out of willow bark, they do the same work.”

  “I should have taken them to the doctor yesterday, as soon as they started coughing. If anything happens to them . . .”

  “Listen to me,” I said, “your girls gone be just fine. Jesus is watching over em and I’m here too, and ain’t neither one of us going nowhere till they feeling better. Give em a week or so, they’ll be right as rain, you’ll see.” I talked to her just like I talk to a laboring woman. Mothers need to hear them soothing words. They just as important as the medicines, sometimes even more.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said after awhile.

  “You welcome.”

  After they had some tea and was quieted down some I went and started plucking the chicken I’d brought. I hadn’t been in the house since the Conleys left and it was filthy from standing empty. Well, not altogether empty—plenty of creatures had been in and out of there. There was mouse droppings and snail tracks on the floor, cicada husks stuck to the walls and dirt all over everything. When Miz McAllan come in and seen me looking, I could tell she was ashamed.

  “I haven’t had time to clean,” she said. “The children took sick as soon as we got here.”

  “We’ll set it to rights, don’t you worry.”

  Whole time I was plucking that chicken and cutting up the onions and carrots for the broth, that ole man was setting at the table watching me. Mist McAllan’s father, that they called Pappy. He was a bald-headed fellow with hardly any meat on him, but he still had all his teeth—a whole mouthful of em, long and yellow as corn. His eyes was so pale they was hardly any color at all. There was something bout them eyes of his, gave me the willies whenever they was on me.

  Mist McAllan had gone outside and Miz McAllan was back in the bedroom with the children, so it was just me and Pappy for a spell.

  “Say, gal, I’m thirsty,” he said. “Why don’t you run on out to the pump and fetch me some water?”

  “I got to finish this broth for the children,” I said.

  “That broth can do without you for a few minutes.”

  I had my back to him, didn’t say nothing. Just lingered along, stirring that pot.

  “Did you hear me, gal?” he said.

  Now, my mama and daddy raised me up to be respectful to elderly folks and help em along, but I sure didn’t want to fetch that water for that ole man. It was like my body got real heavy all of a sudden and didn’t want to budge. Probably I would a made myself do it but then Miz McAllan come in and said, “Pappy, there’s drinking water right there, in the pail by the sink. You ought to know, you pumped it yourself this morning.”

  He held his cup out to me without a word. Without a word I took it and filled it from the pail. But before I turned around and gave it back to him I stuck my finger in it.

  For supper I fried up some ham and taters they had and made biscuits and milk gravy. After I served em I started to make up a plate for myself to take out to the porch.

  “Florence, you can go on home now,” Miz McAllan said. “I’m sure you’ve got your own family to see to.”

  “Yes’m, I do,” I said, “but I can’t go home to em. It’s like I told your husband when he come to fetch me. That whooping cough is catching, specially at the start like your girls is. They gone be contagious till the end of the week at least. If I went home now I could pass it to my own children, or to one of my mothers’ babies.”

  “I ain’t sleeping under the same roof as a nigger,” Pappy said.

  “Florence, why don’t you go check on the girls?” Miz McAllan said.

  I left the room but it was a small house and there wasn’t nothing wrong with my ears.

  “She ain’t sleeping here,” Pappy said.

  “Well, we can’t send her home to infect her own family,” Miz McAllan said. “It wouldn’t be right.”

  There was a good long pause, then Mist McAllan said, “No, it wouldn’t be.”

  “Well then,” Pappy said, “she can damn well sleep out in the barn with the rest of the animals.”

  “How could you suggest such a thing, in this cold?” Miz McAllan said.

  “Niggers need to know their place,” Pappy said.

  “For the last few hours,” she said, “her place has been by your granddaughters’ bedside, doing everything she could to help them get better. Which is more than I can say for you.”

  “Now Laura,” Mist McAllan said.

  “We’ll make up a pallet for her here, in the main room,” Miz McAllan said. “Or you can sleep in here and we can put Florence out in the lean-to.”

  “And have her stinking up my room?”

  “Fine then. We’ll put her in here.”

  I heard a chair scrape.

  “Where are you going?” Mist McAllan asked.

  “To the privy,” she said. “If that’s all right with you.”

  The front door opened and then banged shut.

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into your wife,” Pappy said, “but you better get a handle on her right quick.”

  I listened hard, but if Mist McAllan said anything back I didn’t hear it.

  SLEPT FOUR NIGHTS in that house and by the end of em I’d a bet money there was gone be trouble in it. Soft citybred woman like Laura McAllan weren’t meant for living in the Delta. Delta’ll take a woman like that and suck all the sap out of her till there ain’t nothing left but bone and grudge, against him that brung her here and the land that holds him and her with him. 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 knew she’d take me and Hap someday, and Ruel and Marlon and Lilly May. Only one she wasn’t gone get was my eldest boy, Ronsel. He wasn’t like his daddy and his brothers, he knowed farming was no way to raise hisself up in the world. Just had to look at me and Hap to see that. Spent our lives moving from farm to farm, hoping to find a better situation and a boss that wouldn’t cheat us. Longest we ever stayed anywhere was the Conley place, we’d been there going on seven years. Mist Conley cheated us some too but he was better than most of em. He let us put in a little vegetable patch of our own, and from time to time his wife gave us some of their old clothes and shoes. So when Miz Conley told us she’d up and sold the farm we was real anxious. You never know what you getting into with a new landlord.

  “I wonder if this McAllan fellow ever farmed before,” Hap fretted. “He’s from up to Memphis. Bet he don’t know the eating end of a mule from the crapping end.”

  “It don’t matter,” I told him. “We’ll get by like we always do.”

  “He could put us off.”

  “He won’t, not this close to planting time.”

  But he could a done it if he’d had a mind to, that was the plain truth. Landlords can do just about anything they want. I seen em put families off after the cotton was laid by and that family worked all spring and summer to make that crop for em. And if they say you owe em for furnishings you don’t get nothing for your labor. Ain’t nobody to make em do right by you. You might as well not even go to the sheriff, he gone take the boss man’s side every time.