On this page: Biography; Interview; The Mississippi Delta; The 761st Tank Battalion; The Battle of the Bulge;Oral History Interview with Lyman Johnson, July 12, 1990

Biography

Hillary Jordan grew up in Dallas, Texas and Muskogee, Oklahoma. She received her BA in English and Political Science from Wellesley College and spent fifteen years working as an advertising copywriter before starting to write fiction. She got her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University.

Mudbound, published by Algonquin Books in March 2008, is her first novel. It is the 2008 NAIBA (New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Assoc.) Fiction Book of the Year. It won a 2009 Alex Award from the American Library Association and the 2006 Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded biennially to an unpublished debut novel that addresses issues of social justice. It was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick for summer 2008, a Borders Original Voices selection, a Book Sense pick, and one of twelve New Voices of 2008 chosen by Waterstone's UK. Hillary’s short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, including StoryQuarterly and The Carolina Quarterly.

She lives in Tivoli, New York

http://hillaryjordan.com/bio.php

A Conversation with Hillary Jordan, author of the debut novel, Mudbound

What inspired you to write Mudbound?

I grew up hearing stories about my grandparents' farm in Lake Village, Arkansas. It was a primitive place, an unpainted shotgun shack with no electricity, no running water and no telephone. They named it "Mudbound" because whenever it rained, the roads would flood and they'd be stranded for days.

Though they'd only lived there for a year, my mother, aunt and grandmother spoke of Mudbound often, laughing and shaking their heads by turns, depending on whether the story in question was funny or horrifying. Often they were both, as Southern stories tend to be. I loved listening to them, even the ones I'd heard dozens of times before. They were a peephole into a strange and marvelous world; a world full of contradictions, of terrible beauty. The stories revealed things about my family, especially about my grandmother, who was the heroine of most of them for the simple reason that when calamity struck, my grandfather was invariably elsewhere.

To my mother and aunt, their year on the farm was a grand adventure; and indeed, that was how all their stories, even my grandmother's, portrayed it. It was not until much later that I realized what an ordeal that year must have been for her — a city-bred woman with two young children — and that, in fact, these were stories of survival.

I began the novel (without knowing I was doing any such thing) in graduate school at Columbia. One of my teachers asked us to write a few pages in the voice of a family member, and I decided to write about the farm from my grandmother's point of view. But what came out was not a merry adventure story, but something darker and more complex. What came out was, "When I think of the farm, I think of mud."


If Mudbound was indeed a true place, how much of the story is based on fact?

The basic premise is true: My grandfather decided to move the family from the city (Dallas, in reality) to the farm in 1946. Like Henry in the novel, he wanted to be near his recently widowed sister, whose husband had committed suicide. And too, my grandfather yearned to be a farmer. He was a native Mississippian; reverence for the land was bred into his bones.

My grandmother had never seen the property, and I can only imagine how she felt when she arrived to discover she would be living and rearing her two small children (my mother and aunt were three and six, respectively) in such a primitive place. But Nana was a woman of her time, obedient to her husband's wishes, and so she made the best of it. My grandfather's brother, Bobby, came to live with them, followed by her cantankerous father-in-law, and she cooked and cleaned uncomplainingly for all of them. Like Laura in the novel, my grandmother was a singer, and the songs she sang were indicative of her mood. "Rock of Ages" was a frequent refrain on the farm, and — when things got really bad — "Were You There When They Crucified Our Lord."

My grandparents also had black and white (as well as Mexican) sharecroppers on the farm, and a black maid who helped with the housework.

And there reality ends, and fiction begins. I started with actual people and events, but the more I wrote, the more the characters insisted on being themselves, and the more trouble they got themselves into. Murder, lust, betrayal, forbidden love — with fiction, all these things were possible, and oh so beguiling to me as a writer.


Why did you choose to tell this story through six first-person voices?

Well, I wanted to make the process of writing my first novel as difficult for myself as I possibly could.

That aside, I began by writing a short story in Laura's (my grandmother's) voice and ended up with the Cliff Notes of a novel, squeezed into 35 pages. As I thought about how I would unpack the story, I started experimenting with other voices. Jamie's came first. I woke up in the wee hours, typed five pages about the flood and went back to bed. It wasn't until I turned on the computer the next morning and saw the pages on the screen that I remembered having written them. Florence's voice was next. She poured out of me, though it took me a while to get the dialect right. Then Henry, who was stubborn and difficult, and Hap, who was a talker from the beginning. Ronsel didn't even exist until I saw a PBS documentary called The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. There was a segment about the 761st Tank Battalion — their heroism and the discrimination they endured. I knew right then that Florence and Hap had a son and that he was in that battalion, though I had no idea how central he would become to the story.


Was it difficult for you to write in the voices of African American characters?

Yes, but no more difficult than it was to write in the voices of men, of soldiers, of farmers, of mothers, of devout Christians, of desperately poor people with little education, of bigots or of an alcoholic — none of which I am, and all of which I had to embody convincingly.


How would you answer those who might say that's not something a white writer has any business doing?

In the stories I grew up hearing, black people were always in the background — where African-Americans in the Jim Crow South were thought to belong. I decided to put my black characters front and center, and to let them answer the ugliness of Jim Crow in their own voices. Still, I was a little afraid. I knew I would be excoriated (and rightly so) if I got it wrong. A number of well-meaning colleagues said things to me like, "You know, even Faulkner didn't write about black people in the first person." But ultimately, I decided that letting my African-American characters speak was the only way to give them a small measure of justice.

Also, from an artistic point of view, I think it's nonsense to tell a writer, "You can't write about X because you're Y." If writers didn't make leaps into existences other than our own, we wouldn't have Madame Bovary or Moll Flanders or Jane Eyre or half of literature. Instead, we'd have a whole lot of tedious books about lonely, neurotic types with writer's block and knotted shoulder muscles. At the time I began Mudbound, I was a single woman dating and struggling to survive in New York City — and how many more novels do we need on that subject?


Your manuscript won the prestigious Bellwether Prize, judged by Barbara Kingsolver. Tell us what it was like to get this news.

I sent off the second draft of the book in September 2005 with the $30 entry fee, thinking, There goes thirty bucks. Then I heard in January that I was one of a dozen semi-finalists, and I thought, Well, I was in the top twelve anyway. A couple of months later I found out I was one of three finalists, and I thought, Hey, at least I got close. Then, the night Barbara called, she didn't identify herself right away, and I thought she was a telemarketer. I was pretty un-cordial. I was about to hang up on her when she said, "This is Barbara Kingsolver, and I'm calling to tell you that you've won the Bellwether Prize."

I responded with the immortal words of a beauty pageant contestant: "Oh my God!"


Writers often say it took them many years and permutations to arrive at the final version of their first novel. How long have you been working on Mudbound?

About seven years, or was it seventy? I was putting myself through graduate school, supporting myself in the city and frankly, doing a lot of dithering. My best friend, James Cañón, was also struggling to finish his first novel (he and I met at Columbia and were each other's primary readers while writing our books). So we made a bet: whoever didn't finish his/her first draft by April 1, 2005, would have to pay the other the unthinkable sum of $1,000, plus endure a lifetime of daily taunting and shame. I cut back my freelance ad work and focused on my writing. I finished on time, and so did James.

Et voilà — two published novels!


Is there a particular character in Mudbound that you side with the most or feel most sympathetic toward?

I started by identifying the most with Laura, for obvious reasons. But as the others' voices developed, I became enamored with each of them in turn. Henry was the hardest to love (and to write), but he won me over in the end. Ronsel has the last word, so I suppose you could draw some conclusions from that.


Without giving too much away, the conclusion of your novel is unforgettably powerful. Did you know how the book would end when you first began writing it?

I never had an outline for the novel; I wrote it very much as it came to me, or it came to me as I wrote it — I'm not sure which. I struggled for months to come up with a conclusion I could write towards. And then one night, it was just there in my head. I called up James, and I said, "I know what happens in the last big scene." When I told him, all the hairs rose up on my arms, and I knew I really had something.

Writing the scene was wrenching. I had terrible nightmares for weeks. Enough said.

http://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm/author_number/1538/Hillary-Jordan

The Mississippi Delta

In the mind of America, no area of the country probably better represents the South than the Mississippi Delta, and it is from just this area that many of the FSA's most prominent photographers chose to mold an understanding of a Southern culture that for better and for worse seemed to be vanishing. With the thirties came not only the depression that would rock many Mississippi farms and displace countless workers but the advent of a national culture in which the Magnolia State would struggle to negotiate an identity. The photography of Lange, Evans, and Wolcott helped with this transition.
Lange's famous picture of the plantation owner was discussed in some detail earlier, but its importance in the context of Mississippi regionalism is again worth stressing. The imposing stance of the plantation owner seems a projection of his powerful; he dwarfs his nearby black workers in the photo and in real life (Puckett 50). Lange's dramatization of this phenomenon marks not just an artistic triumph but a resonating indictment against the failure of the deep South to squelch the lingering ghost of slavery. Lange, Stryker, and others in the FSA refuse to crop out the unpleasant part of the photograph like MacLeish did and challenge Mississippi and the nation to address a problem that would have to be reconciled for the state to gain a place in the budding national culture.

Evans and the FSA sound a more somber note in the photograph of the railroad station at the right. While Stryker's FSA called America to move out of the cultural hold of slavery, not all of the past was worth forgetting, or even changing. Small town life, it seemed, was disappearing forever, and as the once quiet Mississippi streets filled up with noisy cars and tall buildings, Stryker became mournful. He remarked upon Evans' photo above:
I remember Walker Evans' picture of the train tracks in a small town, like Montrose [his hometown in Colorado]. The empty station platform, the station thermometer, the idle baggage cars, the quiet stores, the people talking together, and beyond them, the weather-beaten houses where they lived, all this reminded me of the town where I had grown up. I would look at pictures like that and long for a time when the world was safer and more peaceful. I'd think back to the days before radio and television when all there was to do was go down to the tracks and watch the flyer go through. That was the nostalgic way in which those town pictures hit me (qtd. in Brannan & Fleischhauer 59).

Railroad station, Walker Evans, Edwards, Mississippi.

Picking cotton, Marion Post Wolcott, Mileston Plantation, Mississippi
Delta, Mississippi.
The photographs of the FSA defy easy classification, as we are again reminded by Wolcott's photograph to the left. One of the most repeated--and moving--images in the FSA file is a close-up view of beaten workers' hands. In providing a photograph of a Mississippi cotton-picker, Wolcott adds a particularly haunting image. Like many in the collection, the photograph features a certain timelessness. It could have come from any age, and much of its resonance comes from how closely associated it is with Mississippi's slavery past. The image of the cotton picker is not accidental but carries with it an almost unrivaled amount of cultural capital. Not much, the weather-beaten hands remind the viewer, has changed in the past 70 years for Mississippi blacks. What, they demand, are you going to do?
The particular sub-regional identity of the three pictures on this page complements the three areas previously discussed, as the unique local environment outlined by each create some sort of composite image of the region known as the South. But how, if at all, does the diverse array of images combine to form a coherent whole? Furthermore, how do these images team with those of the Midwest migrant worker and the Northern laborer to produce any kind of true American? The answer is simpler than

Picking cotton, Marion Post Wolcott, Mileston Plantation, Mississippi
Delta, Mississippi.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug99/brady/miss.html

The 761st Tank Battalion

Later referred to as the Black Panther Tank Battalion, the 761st was attached to the XII Corps' 26th Infantry Division, assigned to Gen. George S. Patton Jr.'s Third Army, an army already racing eastward across France, and committed to combat on Nov. 7, 1944. As a result of their great fighting abilities they spearheaded a number of Patton's moves into enemy territory. They forced a hole in the Siegfried Line, allowing Patton's 4th Armored Division to pour through into Germany. They fought in France, Belgium, and Germany, and were among the first American forces to link up with the Soviet Army (Ukranians) at the River Steyr in Austria.

The history of the 761st Tank Battalion has been told a number of times, including books, starting with one titled Come Out Fighting that was written and self-published by the unit's enlisted members immediately after the end of World War II in Europe. The strength of the 761st Tank Battalion was proven during 183 days of continual fighting (including action in the Battle of the Bulge) after the Black Panthers became the first African-American armored unit to enter combat. Staff Sergeant Ruben Rivers posthumously received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his extraordinary heroism in action. Warren G. H. Crecy received a battlefield commission and a recommendation for the Medal of Honor while earning his reputation as the Baddest Man in the 761st. Baseball legend Jackie Robinson was an officer with the 761st Tank Battalion during training at Camp Hood, Texas, but he was prevented from going to Europe with his unit by a racial incident on a bus. An article in the January 1992 edition of Army magazine by Lt. Col. Philip W. Latimer describes his recollections of When the Black Panthers Prowled. Eventually, after delays caused by the deep racial prejudices of the time, the unit was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation by President Jimmy Carter. An oral history project interview with the late Staff Sergeant Floyd Dade, by The Urban School of San Francisco provides an interesting first hand account of a 761st Tanker's personal experiences. Buddie V. Branch describes his recollections of being a 761st tanker in an interview with 761st Tank Battalion Historian Wayne D. Robinson. An article written by Gina DiNicolo originally published in Military Officer magazine in February, 2006, is republished here by permission of the author (and with thanks to the auhtor and magazine.) Also, a feature article entitled Color Barrier Broken written by John Neville originally published in the Turret in February, 2007, is republished here by permission (with thanks to the author and the newspaper serving Fort Knox.) On October 1, 2008, Matthew Rector, a Historic Preservation Specialist in the Cultural Resources Office at Fort Knox, Kentucky, provided a copy of an artilce titled And Now God’s Chillun Got Tanks that was published in Yank magazine on August 5, 1942.

Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Lyman Johnson, July 12, 1990. Interview A-0351. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt