Mudbound

By Hillary Jordan

($13.95, Algonquin)



This engrossing novel opens with the digging of a grave. It needs to be a deep grave to ensure that the body won't surface during the next flooding. That thought keeps the brothers digging.

It is in 1946 that Henry McAllan decides he needs to have his own land so that he may "bury his hands in his own soil." He abruptly moves his city-bred wife and two young daughters to a farm he has purchased in the Mississippi Delta. They arrive at their new home just as the torrential rains start, and Henry's mean-spirited father, Pappy, moves in.

The story is told by several of the participants and surrounds two young men whose futures have been shaped by the war from which they've just returned. One arrives at his brother Henry's farm, where he struggles to accept the mud and the rural customs. The other, who was a hero in the setting of wartime Europe, is considered less than a man in the Jim Crow Delta, but his help is needed there by his sharecropping family, which includes his mother Florence.

Florence' strength and determination blaze through her passages. She may be a Colored, but she's not a slave, so when Pappy insists she bring him a cup of water, she just has to stick her finger in it before she turns around to give it to him. I could read a whole book about this gutsy woman!

"Mudbound," Hillary Jordan's first novel, is a recipient of the Bellwether Prize, which recognizes literature of social responsibility.