Love, Lies & Secrets in the South
by Christina Kaminski

"When I think of the farm, I think of mud." So began the graduate-school writing assignment that, seven years and eleven drafts later, would become local author Hillary Jordan's celebrated debut novel, Mudbound. Jordan's unpublished manuscript won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change in 2006 and has recently been released in paperback by Algonquin Books.

Inspired by her grandparents' tales of the year they spent in Lake Village, Arkansas, at a tumbledown farm without electricity, running water, telephone service, or a dependably passable bridge, Jordan started with a few pages, in her grandmother's voice, about life on that farm. The exercise gradually swelled into a story, and as her characters ceased to resemble family members, Jordan came to realize that she was no longer narrating the lives and stories she grew up hearing about. Through the lens of fiction, the character of her grandmother became Laura McAllan, a city-bred schoolteacher and mother of two whose husband, Henry, makes a unilateral decision to move his unsuspecting family from bustling Memphis, Tennessee to rural Marietta, Mississippi, to scratch out the farmer's life he'd idealized as a child. Henry's despicable, racist father, Pappy, goes along with them—not out of any attachment to the soil he'd happily walked away from decades before, but because there was no one else to care for him in Memphis. The book begins with the imperative of burying his body.

"As the story grew the characters became more themselves and got into a lot more trouble than my grandparents. Nobody was murdered in my family, or anything like that," says Jordan. "But the more it went on, the more free I felt to be inventive and to create things that hadn't really existed. I love being able to throw in a thunderstorm at a key moment." And throw in a thunderstorm she does. At the farm, the McAllens meet their black sharecroppers, Florence and Hap Jackson, with whom they establish a tenuous and turbulent relationship that takes a drastic turn for the worse when the Jacksons' eldest son, Ronsel, and Henry's younger brother, Jamie, return from Europe after World War II and develop a dubious friendship.

According to Jordan, the novel shifted dramatically when she introduced Ronsel as a character. Her attention to the African-American soldier's experience of fighting a war abroad to return to segregation at home engages serious moral issues, but Jordan's prose is never pedantic or overbearing. "What had started as a family drama ended up becoming a novel of social justice, but I still wanted it to be a page-turner," she says. "I think my number-one job is to tell a great story."

Finding a way for the narrative to speak through its characters was the most crucial and labor-intensive part of Jordan's writing process. The novel's story is told in six alternating, first-person perspectives. In order to make sure that those voices were consistent and convincing whether the character was black or white, male or female, Jordan read every chapter of the book aloud many, many times and followed different punctuation rules for each character to preserve the rhythm of each individual voice. "For example," she explains, "Laura is the only one in the book who is allowed to use semicolons. Hap's sentences tend to be really long, and Henry's are really short."

There are seven central characters in the story, but only six voices. Yet that non-narrating voice is the most insidious of them all; it represents a language of fear, ignorance, hatred, hostility, and selfishness that destroys everything it touches. "I unvoiced Pappy," says Jordan. As an author, bestowing first-person narration as a privilege is one way to deliver (or withhold) a measure of justice. But the unsaid does not go unrecognized, as Pappy "embodies not just the ugliness of the Jim Crow era but the absolute worst possibilities in ourselves."

Jordan points out that her grandparents, and many others of their generation, were overtly prejudiced. "They were products of a time and place, and yet they were really good people at the same time. I wanted to explore the coexistence of great beauty and great ugliness, of right and wrong. Life doesn't explain everything to us."

Experiencing the transition from writer to author has been, for Jordan, "the coolest thing that's ever happened to me—the most exciting time of my whole life." She spent fifteen years working as an advertising copywriter before starting to write fiction. Her novel has been translated into Croatian, and editions in Italian and French are forthcoming (in 2009 and 2010). Especially rewarding for the new author—whose mother is an English teacher—is the fact that Mudbound is appearing on scholastic reading lists all over the country and was recently certified to be taught in high schools in New York. Having completed an extensive, whirlwind book tour and a productive retreat at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Hillary Jordan will be returning to her home in Tivoli to continue working on her second novel, Red.

Hillary Jordan will be reading and signing at Merritt Bookstore in Red Hook on Saturday, June 6 at 4pm, and also at the annual meeting of the Friends of the Red Hook Library at the Elmendorph Inn, Wednesday, November 11, 7–9 pm.