Hillary Jordan: Mudbound (2008)

Mudbound is the first novel by Hillary Jordan, who grew up in Dallas, Texas and Muskogee, Oklahama. The book is almost entirely set on and around a cotton farm in the late 1940s in the Mississippi Delta not far from Greenville, and takes the form of a multiple narrative in six voices – three from the white McAllan family, and three from the black Jackson family:

Laura McAllan is a warm, tolerant city woman from Memphis, Tennessee and a 31-year-old virgin when she meets the man who will become her husband. She is shocked when several years later her family is forced to move to a primitive shack in Mississippi, on a farm prone to isolation by flooding. Things are made worse by the fact that her husband's father, a racist and a misogynist, also lives with them.

Henry McAllan is Laura's husband and is steady and reliable but a little too conventional, a little too accepting of old ways and of his father in particular. The land is in his blood.

Jamie is Henry's beloved brother. A handsome man who has women flocking to him, he first greatly impresses Laura when he dances with her at the famous Peabody in Memphis. He will later return from the war to live with the McAllan family, somewhat traumatised and with an addiction to whiskey.

Hap Jackson is a share tenant on Henry's property who is keen to get justice for his family but is aware of the dangers of stepping too far over the line in a Jim Crow society where the whites hold all the trump cards.

Florence Jackson is Hap's wife and the local midwife who also helps Laura out with household jobs. She is an intelligent woman who is also a good psychologist.

Ronsel Jackson is Hap and Florence's son and – transgressively – forms a close friendship with Jamie. He too comes with mental baggage from the war, part of it caused by a love affair with a white German woman. He finds it very difficult to adjust to a society which eagerly uses blacks as cannon fodder to protect itself but will not even acknowledge that they should have the same rights as anyone else.

Bit by bit, the six voices unravel into a powerful story of mindless racial violence, adulterous sex, and parricide.

Greenville, Mississippi: Highway 61 Revisited: Literary Landmarks of the Southern United States, #11

I take Highway 61 again (which I had previously taken to visit Port Gibson and Natchez), and am once more reminded not only of Bob Dylan's album Highway 61 Revisited, but – as I'm driving through the Mississippi Delta – also of David Cohn's famous words in his book God Shakes Creation (1935): 'The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.' We've just spent three nights in Vicksburg and are headed north, but Memphis and The Peabody Duck March are just not on the itinerary: this is supposed to be a literary trail, not a record of the tourist traps of the South. No, we're on the way to Washington. County, Mississippi, that is, and more specifically Greenville, which is about eight miles west of Highway 61, and where about 30% of the population live below the poverty line: this is a world away from the $200 a night Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. But Greenville, from a literary point of view, is remarkable. Greenville Library is on 341 Main Street, and the street marker by the sidewalk opposite the entrance to the building proudly proclaims the literary talent that has come from Greenville, Mississippi:

'Greenville's Writers. An extraordinary literary atmosphere in Greenville produced winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and O'Henry [sic] Award. Writers influenced by the creative ambience here include William A. Percy, Shelby Foote, Walker Percy, Hodding Parker, Jr., Charles Bell, Ellen Douglas, Bern Keating and David L. Cohn.' This is an extremely impressive list for a population of under 36,000.

Greenville takes an evident pride in its literary heritage. The William Alexander Percy Memorial Library is named after the writer who was Walker Percy's uncle. Walker's grandfather, and then his father, committed suicide, and following the death of his mother in a car crash, William Alexander brought up Walker and his two brothers in Greenville. Walker Percy (1916–90) wrote novels of alienation and existentialism, and his first novel, The Moviegoer (1962), was recently voted 6th best Southern novel of all time by Southern American, the literary journal of the University of Southern Arkansas. The writer Ada Liana Bidiuc said 'If a better book than The Moviegoer has been written, I'll cut off my little toe'. They talk like that in the South.