Mudbound

by Hillary Jordan

  “Even if he wants us to stay,” Hap said, “we still might have to move on, depending on what type a man he is.”

  “I don’t care if he’s the Dark Man hisself, I ain’t moving if we don’t have to. Took me this long to get the house fit to live in and the garden putting out decent tomatoes and greens. Besides, I can’t just go off and leave my mothers.” I had four mothers due in the next two months and one of em, little Renie Atwood, was just a baby herself. Couldn’t nary one of em afford a doctor and I was the only granny midwife for miles around.

  “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. He’s never once laid a hand to me and I always speak my mind to him. Some men need to beat a woman to get her to do what they want, but not Hap. All he has to do is talk at you. You can start off clear on the other side of something, and then he’ll get to talking, and talking some more, and before long you’ll find yourself nodding and agreeing with him. That was how I started loving him, was through his words. Before I ever knowed the feel of his hands on me or the smell of him in the dark, I used to lay my head on his shoulder and close my eyes and let his words lift me up like water.

  Henry McAllan turned out not to be the Dark Man after all, but wasn’t no use telling that to my husband. “Do you know what that man is doing?” Hap said. “He’s bringing in one of them infernal tractors! Using a machine to work his land instead of the hands God gave him, and putting three families off on account of it too.”

  “Who?”

  “The Fikeses, the Byrds and the Stinnets.”

  That surprised me about the Fikeses and the Stinnets, on account of them being white. Lot of times a landlord’ll put the colored families off first.

  “But he’s keeping us on,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we can thank the Almighty for that.”

  Hap just shook his head. “It’s devilry, plain and simple.”

  That night after supper he read to us from the Revelations. When he got to the part about the beast with seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns and upon his heads the name of blasphemy, I knowed he was talking bout that tractor.

  THE REAL DEVIL was that ole man. When Miz McAllan asked me to keep house for her like I done for Miz Conley, I almost said no on account of Pappy. But Lilly May needed a special kind of boot for her clubfoot and Ruel and Marlon needed new clothes, they was growing so fast they was about to split the seams of their old ones, and Hap was wanting a second mule so he could work more acres so he could save enough to buy his own land, so I said I’d do it. I worked for Laura McAllan Monday to Friday unless I had a birthing or a mother who needed looking in on. My midwifing came first, I told her that when I took the job. She didn’t like it much but she said all right.

  That ole man never gave her a minute’s peace, or me neither. Just set there all day long finding fault with everything and everybody. When he was in the house I thought up chores to do outside and when he was out on the porch I worked in the house. Still, sometimes I had to be in the same room with him and no help for it. Like one time I had ironing to do, mostly his ironing, he wore Sunday clothes every day of the week. He was setting at the kitchen table like always, smoking and cleaning the dirt from under his fingernails with a buck knife. Cept he couldn’t a been getting em too clean cause he was too busy eyeballing me.

  “You better be careful, gal, or you’re gonna burn them sheets,” he said.

  “Ain’t never burnt nothing yet, Mist McAllan.”

  “See that you don’t.”

  “Yessuh.”

  He admired the dirt on the tip of the knife awhile, then he said, “How come that son of yours ain’t home from the war yet?”

  “He ain’t been discharged yet,” I said.

  “Guess they still need some more ditches dug over there, huh?”

  “Ronsel ain’t digging ditches,” I said. “He’s a tank commander. He fought in a whole lot of battles.”

  “That what he told you?”

  “That what he done.”

  The ole man laughed. “That boy’s pulling your leg, gal. Ain’t no way the Army would turn a tank worth thousands of dollars over to a nigger. No, ditch digger’s more like it. Course that don’t sound as good as ‘tank commander’ when you’re writing the folks back home.”

  “My son’s a sergeant in the 761st Tank Battalion,” I said. “That’s the truth, whether you want to believe it or not.”

  He gave a loud snort. I answered the only way I could, by starching his sheets till they was as stiff and scratchy as raw planks.

  LAURA

  FAIR FIELDS. That’s what Henry wanted to call the farm. He announced this to me and the children one day after church, clearing his throat first with the self-consciousness of a small-town politician about to unveil a new statue for the town square.

  “I think it has a nice ring to it, without being too fancy,” he said. “What do you girls think?”

  “Fair Fields?” I said. “Mudbound is more like it.”

  “Mudbound! Mudbound!” the girls cried.

  They couldn’t stop laughing and saying the name. Mud-bound stuck; I made sure of it. It was a petty form of revenge, but the only kind available to me at the time. I was never so angry as those first months on the farm, watching Henry be happy. Becoming a landowner had transformed him, bringing out a childlike eagerness I’d rarely seen in him. He would come in bursting with the exciting doings of his day: his decision to plant thirty acres in soybeans, his purchase of a fine sow from a neighbor, the new weed killer he’d read about in the Progressive Farmer. I listened, responding with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. I tried to shape my happiness out of the fabric of his, like a good wife ought to, but his contentment tore at me. I would see him standing at the edge of the fields with his hands in his pockets, looking out over the land with fierce pride of possession, and think, He’s never looked at me like that, not once.

  For the children’s sakes, and for the sake of my marriage, I hid my feelings, maintaining a desperate cheerfulness. Some days I didn’t even have to pretend. Days when the weather was clear and mild, and the wind blew the smell of the outhouse away from us rather than toward us. Days when the old man went off with Henry, leaving the house to me, the girls and Florence. I depended on her a great deal, and for far more than housework, though I wouldn’t have admitted it then. Each time I heard her brisk knock on the back door, I felt a loosening in myself, an unclenching. Some mornings I would hear Lilly May’s more hesitant rapping instead, and I would know that Florence had been called away to another woman’s house. Or I’d open the door to find an agitated husband standing on my porch, twisting his soiled straw hat in his hands, saying the pains had started, could she come right now? Florence would take her leather case and go, bustling with purpose and importance, leaving me alone with the girls and the old man. I accepted these absences because I had no choice.

  “I got to look after the mothers and the babies,” she told me. “I reckon that’s why the Lawd put me on this earth.”

  She had four children of her own: Ronsel, her eldest, who was still overseas with the Army; the twins, Marlon and Ruel, shy, sturdy boys of twelve who worked in the fields with their father; and Lilly May, who was nine. There had been another boy, Landry, who’d died when he was only a few weeks old. Florence wore a leather pouch on a thong around her neck containing the dried remains of the caul in which he’d been born.

  “A caul round a child mean he marked for Jesus,” she told me. “Jesus seen the sign and taken Landry for His own self. But my son’ll be watching over me from heaven, long as I wear his caul.”

  Like many Negroes, Florence was highly superstitious and full of well-meaning advice about supernatu
ral matters. She urged me to burn my nail clippings and every strand of hair left in my brush to prevent my enemies from using them to hex me. When I assured her that wouldn’t be necessary, as I had no enemies, she looked pointedly at Pappy across the room and replied that the Dark Man had many minions, and you had to be vigilant against them all the time. One day I smelled something rotten in the bedroom and found a broken egg in a saucer under the bed. It looked to have been there for at least a week. When I confronted Florence with it, she told me it was for warding off the evil eye.

  “There are no evil eyes here,” I said.

  “Just cause you can’t see em don’t mean they ain’t there.”

  “Florence, you’re a Christian woman,” I said. “How can you believe in all these curses and spirits?”

  “They right there in the Bible. Cain was cursed for killing his brother. Womenfolks cursed on account of Eve listened to that ole snake. And we got the Holy Spirit in every one of us.”

  “That’s not the same thing at all,” I said.

  She replied with a loud sniff. Later I saw her give the dish to Lilly May, who went and buried the egg at the base of the oak tree. Lord knows what that was supposed to accomplish.

  There was no colored school during planting season, so Florence often brought Lilly May to work with her. She was a fey child, tall for her age, with purple-black skin like her mother’s. The girls adored Lilly May, though she didn’t talk much. She had a clubfoot, so she lacked Florence’s slow heavy grace, but her voice more than made up for it. I’ve never heard anyone sing like that child. Her voice soared, and it took you along with it, and when it stopped and the last high, yearning note had shivered out, you ached for its passing and for your return to your own lonely, mortal sack of flesh. The first time I heard her, I was playing the piano and teaching the girls the words to “Amazing Grace” when Lilly May joined in from the front porch, where she was shelling peas. I’ve always prided myself on my singing voice, but when I heard hers, I was so humbled I was struck dumb. Her voice had no earthly clay in it, just a sure, sweet grace that was both a yielding and a promise. Anyone who believes that Negroes are not God’s children never heard Lilly May Jackson sing to Him.

  This is not to say that I thought of Florence and her family as equal to me and mine. I called her Florence and she called me Miz McAllan. She and Lilly May didn’t use our outhouse, but did their business in the bushes out back. And when we sat down to the noon meal, the two of them ate outside on the porch.

  • • •

  EVEN WITH FLORENCE’S help, I often felt overwhelmed: by the work and the heat, the mosquitoes and the mud, and most of all, the brutality of rural life. Like most city people, I’d had a ridiculous, goldenlit idea of the country. I’d pictured rain falling softly upon verdant fields, barefoot boys fishing with thistles dangling from their mouths, women quilting in cozy little log cabins while their men smoked corncob pipes on the porch. You have to get closer to the picture to see the wretched shacks scattered throughout those fields, where families clad in ragged flour-sack clothes sleep ten to a room on dirt floors; the hookworm rashes on the boys’ feet and the hideous red pellagra scales on their hands and arms; the bruises on the faces of the women, and the rage and hopelessness in the eyes of the men.

  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. At the end of March, several things did.

  One night near to dawn, I woke to the sound of gunshots. I was alone with the children; Henry and Pappy had gone to 99 to help Eboline move into her new and considerably more humble abode—the big house on Washington Street had been sold to pay off Virgil’s debts. I checked on the girls, but the shots hadn’t wakened them. I went out to the porch and peered into the graydark. A half mile away, in the direction of the Atwood place, I saw a light moving. Then it stopped. Then, from that same direction, came two more gunshots. Thirty seconds later there was another. Then another. Then silence.

  I must have stood on the porch for twenty minutes, hands clenched in a death grip around our shotgun. The sun rose. Finally I saw someone coming up the road. I tensed, but then I recognized Hap’s slightly stooped gait. He was out of breath when he reached me. His clothes were covered with dirt, and he too was carrying a shotgun.

  “Miz McAllan,” he said. “Is your husband here?”

  “No, he and Pappy went to Greenville. What’s going on? Was that you firing your gun?”

  “No, ma’am, it was Carl Atwood. He done shot his plow horse in the head.”

  “Good heavens! Why would he do that?”

  “He been messing with that whiskey. Ain’t no devilment a man won’t get hisself into when he’s full of drink.”

  “Please, Hap. Just tell me what happened.”

  “Well, Florence and I was asleep when we heard them first two gunshots. Both of us like to jump right out of our skins. I got up and looked out the window but I couldn’t see nothing. Then we heard another two shots, sound like they coming from the Atwood place. I got my gun and went over there but I know them Atwoods is crazy so I snuck up on em. First thing I seen was that plow horse of Carl’s, haring through the fields like the devil hisself was after it. I could hear Carl a-cussing that horse, hollering, ‘You oughten not to done it, damn your hide!’ Then here he come chasing after it with his shotgun. I could tell he’d been at the whiskey and I was afraid he was gone see me and shoot me too so I dropped down on the ground and laid there real still. He pointed the gun at that horse and bam! He missed again and fell over backwards. That horse let into whinnying, I could a swore it was laughing at him. Carl kept trying to get up and falling back down again, all the while just a-cussing that horse up and down. Finally he got up and aimed again and bam! This time that horse went down, wasn’t twenty feet from where I was laying. Carl went over to it and said, ‘Damn you to hell, horse, you oughten not to done it.’ And then he pissed—begging your pardon Miz McAllan, I mean to say he done his business on that horse, right on its shot-up head, cussing and crying like a baby the whole time.”

  I hugged myself. “Is he still out there?” I asked.

  “No, ma’am. He went on back home. Reckon he’ll be sleeping it off most of the day.”

  Carl Atwood was my least favorite of all our tenants. He was a banty rooster of a man, spindly legged and sway backed, with little muddy eyes that crowded his nose on either side. His lips were dark red, like the gills of a bass, and his tongue was constantly darting out to moisten them. He was always polite to me, but there was a sly, avid quality about him that made me uneasy.

  I looked in the direction of the Atwood place. Hap said, “You want me to stay here till Mist McAllan come back?”

  As tempted as I was to say yes, I couldn’t ask him to lose an entire day in the fields during planting season. “No, Hap,” I said. “We’ll be fine.”

  “Florence will be over in a little while. And I’ll keep a sharp eye out for Carl.”

  “Thank you.”

  I spent the day pacing and looking anxiously out the windows. The Atwoods would have to go. As soon as Henry got home, I’d tell him so. I wouldn’t have my children living near such a man.

  Later that afternoon, I was at the pump getting water when I saw two figures coming up the road. They walked slowly and unsteadily, one leaning on the other. As they got closer I recognized Vera Atwood and one of her daughters. Vera was huge with child. Except for the jutting mound of her belly, she
was little more than skin stretched over bone. One eye was swollen shut, and she had a split lip. The girl had the look of a frightened fawn. Her eyes were large, brown and wide-set, and her dark blonde hair wanted washing. I guessed her to be ten or eleven at most. This, then, wasn’t the Atwood girl who’d had an out-of-wedlock baby in February. That child was fourteen, Florence had told me, and her baby had lived only a few days.

  “Howdy, Miz McAllan,” Vera called out. Her voice was soft and eerily childlike.

  “Hello, Vera.”

  “This here’s my youngest girl, Alma.”

  “How do you do, Alma,” I said.

  “How do,” she replied, with a dip of her head. She had a long, elegant neck that looked incongruous sprouting from her ragged dress. Her face under the grime that covered it was fine-boned and sorrowful. I wondered if she ever smiled. If she ever had reason to.

  “I come to speak with you woman to woman,” Vera said. She swayed on her feet, and Alma staggered under the extra weight. The two of them looked ready to collapse right there in the yard.

  I gestured to the chairs on the porch. “Please, come and sit.”

  As we made our way up the steps, Florence appeared in the doorway. “What you doing walking all this way, Miz Atwood?” she said. “I done told you, you got to stay off a your feet.” Then Florence saw the state of Vera’s face. She scowled and shook her head, but she held her tongue.

  “Had to come,” said Vera. “Got business with Miz McAllan.”

  I handed Florence the bucket. “Bring us a pitcher of water, will you?” I said. “And some of that shortbread I made yesterday. And keep an eye on Amanda Leigh for me.”

  “Yes’m.”

  Vera half sat, half lay in the chair with one hand curled over her upthrust belly. The faded fabric of her dress was stretched so taut I could see the nipple-like lump her navel made. I felt a wave of longing to have a child growing inside of me again. To be full to bursting with life.