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A review by silverliningsandpages
Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
5.0
🌿Mudbound won Hillary Jordan the Bellwether Prize in 2006 for highlighting issues of social injustice. This beautifully written and haunting story is told through the perspective of several characters, who are well drawn, each with their own distinct voice. Jordan conveys a harsh, bleak landscape in a remote part of the Mississippi Delta. In 1946, Henry has moved his refined wife to the remote farm, which becomes isolated by relentless mud when it rains. Their lives become entangled with those of black sharecroppers, whose brave son returns from service in the war. Having been subjected to segregation, contempt and poor conditions in the army, Ronsel faces deep-rooted hypocrisy from the local townspeople:
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“They gave us the dregs of everything, including officers. Our lieutenants were mostly Southerners wigs washed out in some other post. Drunkards, yellow bellies, bigoted no-count crackers who couldn’t have led their way out of a one-room shack in broad daylight. Putting them over black troops was the Army’s way of punishing them. They had nothing but contempt for us and made sure we knew it.....Our uniforms didn’t mean a damn to the local white citizens. Not that I expected them to, but my buddies from up and out west were thunderstruck by the way we were treated. Reading about Jim Crow in the paper is a mighty different thing from having a civilian bus driver wave a pistol in your face and tell you to get your coon hide off the bus to make room for a fat white farmer...The Army didn’t do nothing to protect us from the locals.”
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This is an uncomfortable and harrowing tale, but very powerful to the end in its message.🌿
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“They gave us the dregs of everything, including officers. Our lieutenants were mostly Southerners wigs washed out in some other post. Drunkards, yellow bellies, bigoted no-count crackers who couldn’t have led their way out of a one-room shack in broad daylight. Putting them over black troops was the Army’s way of punishing them. They had nothing but contempt for us and made sure we knew it.....Our uniforms didn’t mean a damn to the local white citizens. Not that I expected them to, but my buddies from up and out west were thunderstruck by the way we were treated. Reading about Jim Crow in the paper is a mighty different thing from having a civilian bus driver wave a pistol in your face and tell you to get your coon hide off the bus to make room for a fat white farmer...The Army didn’t do nothing to protect us from the locals.”
.
This is an uncomfortable and harrowing tale, but very powerful to the end in its message.🌿