Mudbound

Florence begins casting spells, trying to get Jamie to leave: “Jamie McAllan wasn’t evil, not like his pappy was, but he did the Dark Man’s business all the same. He was a weak vessel” (227). Now she is worried because Ronsel is often with Jamie and she knows they drink together. When she warns Ronsel he says that Jamie isn’t like the other white people. She is worried that Ronsel is going to leave and thinks that that might be the best way to keep him safe.

The day that Pappy and Laura see Ronsel and Jamie in the truck, Henry comes to visit. He warns Ronsel not to get into the truck with Jamie again and hints that Pappy will be violent with him if he ignores the warning. After Henry leaves, Ronsel tells his parents that he is leaving after the cotton harvest. 

Henry's frustrations with Jamie grows: “By planting time I was about ready to kill my brother, messed up in the head or not” (234). He is bothered by Jamie’s selfishness, and by how Laura changes around him: “Whenever Jamie was around she sang. And when it was just me, she hummed” (234). One day Henry and Jamie are working in the barn when Jamie spills a pail of milk. Henry tells him that he has to sober up and start acting like an adult. Jamie mocks him, saying that Laura is miserable and that if Henry is a responsible adult, Jamie doesn’t want to be one. Henry tells Jamie he has to leave for good, then tries to take it back when it sounds too harsh to him. He asks Jamie to stay until they plant the seeds. Jamie agrees.

A week later, Laura, Pappy, Henry, and Jamie are at dinner in a restaurant when Bill Tricklebank comes in looking for them. He says that there is a storm coming and that a large branch fell on Eboline’s house and caved the roof in. Someone needs to go get here and bring her back. Henry says that he will go and tells Jamie to get the farm prepped for the storm. At home, Laura tells Jamie that Henry trusts him, trying to make him feel better. Jamie tells her that Henry kicked him out and that he’s leaving soon. He’ll be gone in a week: “I could think of nothing to say in answer. Nothing that would comfort him. Nothing that would keep him here” (241).

After doing some chores, Jamie takes a nap in the lean-to. Laura hears him shouting from a nightmare and goes to see him. She wakes him and he looks at her. She realizes that he is waiting for her to kiss him: “That was the difference between men and women, I thought: men take for themselves the things they want, while women wait to be given them” (244). She kisses him, and they have sex. 

Ronsel comes home agitated, asking Hap if he has seen an envelope anywhere. He won’t tell Hap what is inside the envelope. Ronsel leaves, running down the road, and Hap reveals: “That was the last time I ever heard my son’s voice” (247). 

The envelope contains a letter from Resl and a photo of her holding a baby boy. The letter tells Ronsel that they have a son together, and that Resl has named the boy Franz Ronsel. She asks him to come back so that his son can have a father. The letter is two months old when Ronsel receives it. Ronsel does not know how to get to Germany, or how to get Resl to America. He is still running when a truck almost hits him. It is Jamie, who is very drunk.

Jamie falls out of the truck, then asks Ronsel, “What’s the worst thing you ever did?” (252). Ronsel tells him that his friend Hollis’s legs had been blown off by a grenade. He had begged Ronsel to shoot him and he had done it. Jamie says that he wants to know something that Ronsel can’t forgive himself for. Ronsel says there isn’t a thing, and they talk about how much they each want to leave. It is half an hour later that Ronsel realizes his letter is gone: “Only two places it could be: in somebody’s pocket who’d picked it up or in the McAllan’s truck” (254). He is almost home after a futile search in town when a truck pulls up with several white men inside. 

Laura cannot stop thinking about Jamie while he is away for two days. She feels no guilt, only surprise at her own passion. She is on the porch with Pappy when Jamie pulls up in the truck, swerving drunkenly. Pappy tells him that he is good for nothing and takes the truck into town to get cigarettes. It starts to rain, and Laura tries to help Jamie while he vomits. Florence returns two hours later saying that no one has seen Ronsel since he went to town. Laura goes to wake Jamie up and ask him if he knows where Ronsel is, but the lean-to is empty, and Jamie has left. 

Jamie wakes up in the lean-to and remembers that he has a bottle of whiskey in the sawmill. When he goes outside, he sees a truck next to his. He looks through a crack in the sawmill and sees eight men in white hoods in a circle around Ronsel. Then he hears Pappy's voice: “How many times did you fuck her?” (267). He has a noose around Ronsel’s neck, slung over the beam, and he jerks it when Ronsel doesn’t answer.

Ronsel is in the sawmill with a hood on his head. He thinks he recognizes the voices of Pappy, Orris Stokes, and Doc Turpin. They take the hood off of his head and show him a picture of Resl, from the letter. Someone asks him again if he had been with her sexually. They force him to say: “I defiled a white woman” (271). Pappy says they are going to hang him. Jamie opens the door, points a pistol at them, and tells them to drop the rope. 

Pappy says that Jamie does not have the courage to shoot any of them. They rush him and begin to wrestle. Jamie loses the gun. Before he goes unconscious from a kick he thinks: “Goodnight, Pappy. Goodnight, Ronsel. Goodnight” (275). 

There is a knock on the door. When Hap answers it he sees Sheriff Tacker. He tells them that Ronsel is injured, beaten up, and has been taken to a doctor in Belzoni. He shows them a letter he found. On the side of it, written in blood, is “Ezekiel 7:4” (277). Hap knows the verse: “And mine eye shall not spare thee, neither will I have pity; but I will recompense thy ways upon thee, and thine abominations shall be in the midst of thee: and ye shall know that I am the Lord” (278). The sheriff tells them that Ronsel has been white a woman and his tongue has been cut out. 

The sheriff says they found Ronsel at the sawmill after receiving a tip that there was going to be trouble. Florence tells Hap to go with the sheriff to the hospital. After he leaves, she thinks: “I would use Hap’s skinning knife. It wasn’t the biggest knife we owned, but it had the thinnest blade. I reckoned it would go in the easiest” (281). 

Laura wakes to the sound of Pappy pounding on the front door. He asks if Jamie is back yet. Laura asks what is wrong, and if it has anything to do with Ronsel missing. Pappy demands that she serve him dinner, then tells Laura, “If Henry or anybody else asks you where I was tonight, you tell em I was right here at home with you, hear?” (284). When she can’t sleep later, she goes outside and sees a light in the barn. Jamie is there, badly beaten. He begins to sob when she touches him. She looks up and sees Florence in the doorway holding a knife, and believes she is going to try to kill them. Florence leaves, and Jamie falls asleep.

When she wakes up, her daughters are shaking her. They say that Pappy “won’t wake up” and that he “isn’t in his eyes” (288). Laura finds him dead on his cot and is elated. The girls ask to say a prayer for Pappy. As they kneel, rain from the leaking roof hits their heads. Jamie comes in and watches them with the body. He says that he would like to die in his sleep, as it appears to him that Pappy has. Laura watches him and realizes “that Jamie had never really existed” (291). She sees him as an imitation of a person, one that doesn’t know who it wants to be. Laura kneels with him and the girls and sings a hymn for Pappy. Jamie sings as well. 

Jamie reflects on his actions, justifying the choice he has made: “Sometimes it’s necessary to do things wrong. Sometimes it’s the only way to make things right. Any God who doesn’t understand that can go fuck Himself” (294). He cannot stop thinking of Ronsel, his screaming, and the blood in the sawmill. Jamie tells Laura what happened and blames himself for not being able to help. Jamie shows her the picture of Resl and the baby and tells Laura about Ronsel’s lover and son. He says he doesn’t know how the other men found it but says to himself that he is lying. Jamie tells Laura that she and her family are not in danger as long as he leaves. Laura says they should not tell Henry that his father was involved.

When Henry comes home, Laura tells him that Pappy is dead. When Henry asks Jamie if he is all right, Jamie feels a flare of resentment: “I saw in that moment that I’d always resented him, even as I’d looked up to him, and that I’d bedded his wife in part to punish him for being all the things I wasn’t” (300).

Jamie remembers being kicked and beaten in the sawmill. Pappy woke him up after he was knocked unconscious. His hands were tied behind his back. Pappy tells the other men that Jamie won’t talk about what he has seen, so they can let him go. They show Jamie the letter from Resl. Jamie looks at Ronsel, who nods. Jamie thinks about white women with black men: “I’d never been easy with it. I still wasn’t. And if I wasn’t, I could only imagine what that photograph stirred up in these white-sheeted men” (302). Jamie says that he doesn’t see the problem with Ronsel punishing an “enemy whore” (303) by infecting her with a black child.

The men argue about whether they should castrate Ronsel, or cut off his hands, tongue, or gouge out his eyes. Pappy says that Jamie has to choose. That will make Jamie part of the violence, so he won’t be able to tell anyone about it. He whispers to Jamie that they found the letter in the front seat of his truck: “This is your doing,” he says. “You think about that” (305). Jamie chooses.

Laura goes to talk to Florence three days after Pappy’s death. Jamie gives her the letter and asks her to give it to Florence. Florence answers the door but doesn’t invite Laura in: “I stared back at her, adulteress to murderess” (307). Florence says they are leaving as soon as the river goes down. In the house, Ronsel moans. Laura gives the letter to Florence and says she is sorry. Florence does not say she forgives her. She just says goodbye. 

The family lowers Pappy’s coffin into the grave. The Jacksons come by on their wagon and Henry waves at them to stop. When Laura protests Henry says what happened to Ronsel is not his fault and that he had warned them. Henry shouts to Hap that he could use his help. Florence and Hap begin to argue about something that they McAllans can’t hear. Hap walks over to help, but says the others are staying on the wagon. Hap takes out a Bible and says he is willing to perform a small service. Henry argues, but Jamie and Laura say that they should let him. Hap reads a verse from Job, about death, iniquity, and a world filled with trouble. During the service, Florence watches from the wagon with undisguised rage.

Jamie reveals that Florence never got a chance to kill Pappy. Jamie had gone into the room the night he died and had smothered him with a pillow. Then he had gone to the barn, where Laura had found him: “I wished there was some way to tell her it was already done, that he didn’t die a peaceful death. I put my guilt in my eyes, hoping she would see it. What we can’t speak, we say in silence” (315). 

Jamie plans to leave for California a few days later. Henry asks Laura if she needs to leave as well one night when they are in bed. Before she can answer he tells her that he will get her a house. He apologizes for how hard the life on the farm has been for her. She lays her head on his shoulder and says, “What I need, I have right here” (317). 

Jamie leaves three days after the burial. Laura is worried about him but knows that he will not be alone for long. When he leaves, he tells Laura he left her a present, and that she will know it when she sees it. She and the girls look for it after he is gone, but it is weeks before Laura finds it. At the edge of the vegetable patch Jamie had planted several dozen lavender plants.

Laura jumps ahead to early December and says she is going to Memphis for the final six weeks of her pregnancy. They had moved to a house in Tchula after the harvest, into a nice house. Her life is filled with routine: “Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe in that other life and that other self—the one capable of range and lust, of recklessness and selfishness and betrayal” (320). She feels the baby kick and reveals that it is Jamie’s baby. Jamie writes and says that he was married in September but provides few details.

She knows that one day she will love her son “as fiercely as Florence loves Ronsel” but does not wish to change her past choices: “And while I’ll always regret that I got my son at such a terrible cost to hers, I won’t regret that I got him. My love for him won’t let me. I’ll end with that. With love” (321). 

Ronsel says that in order for his story to end differently, he would have to overcome a great deal: “First he’d have to wean himself off of laudanum and self-pity” (322). He describes what it would take for a man like himself to go to college, and to write to his Army unit and tell them what had been done to them. He imagines that a man who could overcome what he has would have a chance at marching with Dr. Martin Luther King. The final lines of the book are: “That’s the ending we want, you and me both. I’ll grant you it’s unlikely, but it is possible. If he worked and prayed hard enough. If he was stubborn as well as lucky. If he really had a shine” (326).