Mudbound

Henry and Jamie dug a hole seven feet deep. Any shallower, Jamie thought, and the corpse would come rising up during the next big flood. Storm clouds gathered overhead. Jamie's body ached from kicks and blows he'd taken, but he didn't want Henry to know that. They traded places. Henry kept digging. Four feet down, his shovel hit something hard. A human skull. Then a leg bone with a manacle clamped around the ankle.

"We can't bury our father in a nigger's grave," Henry said.

Jamie knew he was right. Nothing their father would have hated more than being buried in a slave's grave.

A woman named Laura brought them food and water. She saw the bones and told them to move them so the children couldn't see. When the grave was a foot over Jamie's head, it started to rain. He was afraid the mud would spill in and bury him. It wasn't the confinement that scared him. He'd spent hundreds of hours in airplane cockpits with no problem at all. It was the water.

Henry lowered a ladder. Jamie climbed out. They carried their father's body to the coffin. Jamie began pounding the nails in. He heard Laura tell a little girl named Bella that the pounding wouldn't make her grandpa mad.

"He can't get mad at anyone ever again," Laura said. And Jamie heard unmistakable satisfaction in her voice.

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This is how *Mudbound* begins. Not with a funeral. With a burial. Two brothers digging in mud and rain, uncovering a slave's remains, and wondering if they can bury their father in ground that's already claimed.

The novel is set in the Mississippi Delta in the years immediately following World War II. It follows two families: the white McAllans and the black Jacksons. They share the same land but live in entirely different worlds. A tragedy provoked by virulent racism changes their fates irreversibly. The story explores themes of love, family, loyalty, duty, and the uneasy relationship African Americans have had with the South in the years following emancipation.

Laura, the woman who brought food to the grave, tries to make sense of what happened. She says her father-in-law was murdered because she was born "plain rather than pretty." But then she admits the truth isn't that simple. It's tempting to believe that everything that happened on the farm was inevitable, she says. But by the end of the story, she no longer believes that.

The novel unfolds through six different voices: Laura, Henry, Jamie, Ronsel, Florence, and Hap. Each character sees the same events from a different angle. Each carries their own guilt, their own longings, their own version of the truth.

Jamie and Henry's father—the man they're burying—was called Pappy. He was a virulent racist who bullied Laura, his grandchildren, and the black tenants on the land. He mocked Ronsel Jackson's military service, claimed no one would let a black man touch a tank, and delighted in making everyone around him miserable. His death is not mourned. But the circumstances surrounding it are not simple either.

The bones in the grave are a kind of prophecy. The past is never buried. Slavery's legacy runs through this land like an underground river. The manacle on that leg bone is a reminder that the soil of Mississippi is soaked in blood and suffering. Pappy, who spent his life enforcing white supremacy, ends up in a grave that was already occupied by a slave. The irony would have infuriated him.

Laura says the farm only reminds her of mud. The days blend together. She feels stuck in an endless routine of work, childcare, and cooking. Her children were always scared of their grandfather. And now he's gone. But the question that hangs over the opening scene is this: how did Pappy die? And what role did each of them play in his death?

Jamie and Henry dug that grave in the mud, but who put their father in the ground? What happened in the sawmill that night? And why does Laura's voice carry satisfaction when she tells her daughter that Pappy can never get mad at anyone again?

The answers to those questions will take us deep into a story about love and racism, about two families bound together by land and torn apart by hate, about a war hero who comes home to find his country hasn't changed, and about a woman who discovers she's capable of passions she never knew she had.

But before we get to the violence, before the Klan and the mutilation and the murder, Laura says we have to begin with love. That's where her story starts. And that's where the next section begins.

What kind of love could lead to such destruction? What choices set these families on a collision course with tragedy?