Mudbound

Ronsel recalls the derogatory names the white men greet him with: “Coon, spade, darky, nigger. Went off to fight for my country and come back to find it hasn’t changed a bit” (142). He knows that he has already caused trouble for himself by his remarks to the white men. His father would have boxed his ears for his defiance because he had put himself in danger.

Ronsel walks home and surprises the family while they’re eating dinner. After they eat, they are sitting on the porch when Henry arrives in his car. He asks to speak with Hap alone, but Ronsel says he can say it in front of him. Henry tells Hap that Ronsel went out “[t]he front door,” recounting the previous incident: “[A]nd when my father and some other men objected to it, he made a fine speech. Put us all in our place, didn’t you?” (146). Ronsel apologizes and says he will come apologize to Pappy as well the following day. Henry says that even if he doesn’t agree with everything his father says: “He’s right about one thing. You’re back in Mississippi now, and you better start remembering it” (146).

As Henry is leaving Ronsel tells him they won’t need his mule much longer because he’s going to buy a new one. He says he’ll pay cash as soon as he has it. This bothers Henry, who drives away after yelling that Ronsel can’t forget about coming by the house to apologize. Hap says, “No point in fighting em. They just gone win every time” (148). Ronsel says he isn’t used to walking away from a fight anymore.

Ronsel says he never hated the enemy soldiers until 1945, when he reached the concentration camp Dachau: “We seen the people lined up in front of the gate, naked people with sticks for arms and legs. SS soldiers were walking up and down the lines, shooting them with machine guns” (148). Ronsel’s men killed the soldiers and knocked down the gate with a tank. When the starving men came out of the camp, they saw a horse, which a tank shell had killed. They fell to their knees and began eating it raw. The men moved through the camp, killing other SS soldiers as they tried to kill as many Jews as they could before being killed themselves. A starving woman approached Ronsel and fell onto him. He gave her a candy bar, and she convulsed and died after eating it. A medic told them not to feed the prisoners, who haven’t eaten in so long that too much food, too fast, will kill them.

Despite the horrors he witnessed, Ronsel misses his life in the war: “In Mississippi I was just another nigger pushing a plow. And the longer I stayed, the more that’s all I was” (151). One day in town he sees a woman named Josie. They had been friends and Ronsel had been interested in her romantically, but she married a man named Lem after Ronsel entered the war. Ronsel knows Lem is a troublemaker and doubts that he is treating Josie well. She says she has some things to say to him and asks if he will meet her at her house that night because Lem is gone.

He visits her that night and describes their lovemaking as “sad and lonesome during and stone quiet after” (154). The entire time he thinks about a white woman named Resl, “and the man I was when I was with her” (154). Her full name is Theresa Huber, and Resl is a nickname. Her husband had been killed at Strasbourg. When his unit had come into town, the women sent their children to beg for food. Resl’s daughter Maria was one of them and Ronsel had given her all his extra rations. On the fourth day she took Ronsel and one of his men to her house, where Resl was waiting with a bowl of soup and a loaf of bread for them: “Resl was that sorrowful kind of pretty that’s even prettier than the happy kind” (155). He began to see her often: “The two of us had something in common. Her people were conquered and despised, just like mine were. And just like me, Resl was hungry to be treated like a human being” (156).

Soon he spent all his spare time with her. When he had a chance to go home, he volunteered to stay in Teisendorf rather than to leave Resl. He stayed with her for months, but then the Army forced him to make a choice: re-enlist for four years or go home. He had to leave: “On the boat to New York I told myself it was just one of them things, just a wartime romance that was never meant to last, between two people who didn’t have nobody else. Till that night with Josie I even believed it” (157). 

Florence remembers praying for years that Ronsel would come home safely. Now she feels that God has answered her prayers. However, she knows Ronsel wants to leave, even though he doesn’t say so. He doesn’t talk at dinner and shows no interest in dating. She thinks that Mississippi is “squeezing the life out of him” (161). She says that she loves Ronsel the most out of her children: “If that was a sin I reckoned God would forgive me for it, seeing as how He the one stacked the cards in the first place” (162).

In May, Laura believes she is two months pregnant. She goes to her niece’s confirmation in Memphis and sees her old obstetrician, Dr. Brownlee, while she is there. When Henry drops her and the girls off at the train station, he says, “You just make sure you come back, hear? I couldn’t do without you” (165). She thinks he sounds worried. Dr. Brownlee confirms that she is pregnant. She finds that she misses Henry after a few days and wonders if it is because she is pregnant with his child.

One evening her mother tells her that she was her age when she had Laura’s brother, Teddy. She tells Laura that Teddy had a stillborn twin, and she never told him. She urges Laura to be careful and not to strain herself, to protect the pregnancy.

Back at home, Henry is happy about the pregnancy. Florence says she is positive that it will be a boy. Pappy is forced to help with chores because Henry won’t let Laura exert herself, and Pappy complains constantly. Henry and Laura become intimate again and are kind to one another. They agree that they cannot stay at the farmhouse once the baby is born and discuss other plans.

One afternoon when Henry is gone, Vera arrives saying that Laura has to take her into town because she is going to kill Carl. She says that Carl has “started in” on Alma “just like he done with Renie” (171). Laura understands that she means Carl is molesting his daughters. She says that Renie had a baby, which Vera believed was Carl’s. She smothered it so that he could not have her. Laura says she can’t drive Vera to town because Henry won’t let her drive the truck. Vera leaves, saying it will be too late. Laura feels cramps, and a wetness between her legs.

Later, she learns that “[t]hey found Carl’s body lying in the road halfway between the farm and town. Vera had stabbed him seventeen times” (176) before turning herself in. Laura does not learn the news immediately because she is depressed after miscarrying the baby. She is furious with herself for losing the baby because she had told Henry not to put the Atwoods off the land. Then she blames Vera for causing the stress that led to it. Then she blames Henry for bringing her there in the first place. After three weeks she gets out of her sickbed and resumes her life.

Jamie comes to visit in late August, unannounced. Laura is shocked by how thin he is. Henry tells him that Pappy has missed him, and they take Jamie’s bags inside. That night Jamie tells them stories about his travels. He says that he needed the time to heal in his own way. Laura thinks that she will heal him: “The war had dimmed him, but I would bring him back to himself” (184). 

Henry says the war “broke my brother—in his head, where no one could see it” (185). He says that Pappy was always whittling away at his brother’s self-esteem because he loved him the most and wanted Jamie to be like him. He always thought Jamie needed someone to toughened him up. Now that Jamie is back, Pappy begins pestering him with questions like, “What’s it like being a big hero?” (186). He also asks him how many men he killed. Jamie dodges the questions and goes to bed, but before he does, he thanks Henry for letting him stay and says that he will leave before long.

Two weeks later the harvest starts. Henry hires eight colored families to pick for him. Jamie works hard, but every three or four nights he wakes shouting with nightmares, which Pappy criticizes: “Your brother needs to toughen up. You wouldn’t see me screaming and quaking like a girl” (192).

Sometimes Jamie goes into town. Henry assumes he goes to drink and chase girls. One day in October, Bill Tricklebanks drives out to tell Henry that Jamie is in jail. He was drunk and hit a cow with his car. A woman named Dottie Tipton was in the car with him, and she has a concussion and broken arm. When he tells the family, Laura is outraged that he is in jail after serving his country. Her outburst bothers Henry: “Her defending him like that nettled me. My wife was a sensible woman, but where Jamie was concerned she was blind as every other female who ever breathed” (194).

Henry goes to the Greenville jail to post bail, which Pappy offered to pay. Sheriff Charlie Partain is an old acquaintance of Henry’s and explains how Jamie went through a fence and that it appears he hit the cow on purpose, going as fast as he could. Charlie says the woman in the car is the widow of his deceased friend Joe: “I think Joe Tipton’s widow deserves better than to be treated like a whore” (198). He says that Henry will have to pay for the cow and for the fence, then tells him to tell Jamie to stay out of Greenville.

Jamie apologizes to Henry and says he doesn’t remember much of what happened. He has a black eye from where Charlie punched him. Henry drops Jamie off at the hotel where he is staying, then goes to pay Dottie’s bill at the hospital. After, Henry pays for the cow. When he is finished, he realizes there is not enough money for them to rent a house in town. That night, when he tells Laura, he expects her to be upset about the house. He says Jamie has offered to stay for another six months to help, to which Laura replies: “It’s all right Henry, I don’t mind so much” (201), and she kisses him. 

Jamie hates being indebted to Henry, and to Laura, whom he has deprived of her home in town for another year. He sneaks into Dottie and is surprised when she is not annoyed with him. She even offers to cook him dinner, and Jamie considers having sex with her before seeing a picture of her husband on the mantel. He tells her that he can’t ever see her again and leaves: “All that was left was for me to do the same, and that wasn’t hard” (204). He continues to be haunted by flashbacks of the war, knowing that sometimes his bombs killed innocent women and children.

He wants to tell Henry about the war, but he doesn’t believe that Henry knows what it means to crave one’s own oblivion and death: “I didn’t want to muddy his happiness” (205). To cope, he stashes bottles of whiskey all over the farm, and he can tell that no one notices except Florence: “She was immune to my charm—one of the only women I’d ever met who was” (206).

One day he is in Tricklebanks buying liquor when he hears an explosion. A voice tells him that it is just a car backfiring. The voice is Ronsel’s. As Jamie picks up groceries that he dropped, his hands are shaking. Ronsel shows him that his own hands are shaking as well and asks if he thinks the shaking will ever stop. Jamie offers to give him a ride back to the farm. They drink together on the way back and Jamie tells him about his missing finger: He had to leave the airplane’s windows open when it rained because there were no windshield wipers, and his finger had gotten frostbite. They trade war stories. When he drops Ronsel off Jamie tells him that if he goes to town the next Saturday Ronsel can have a ride again. Ronsel nods, and “in that moment, sealed his fate” (211).