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My vacation is over and with it a return to active reading. Last year I didn’t pick up a book for the entire month of February and I attributed it to the winter blahs. Truthfully, it is because last year my team lost the Super Bowl; this year it is a much different story. It is amazing how much winning has helped my mood. Two years ago my favorite teams won the World Series and Super Bowl three months apart and I went on to read over 200 books. I doubt I’ll approach that again until my kids are out of the house but it was such a positive feeling. Getting back on track, last year during my winter blahs the Southern literary trail group here on goodreads read Mudbound by Hilary Jordan. The book sounded intriguing but I was not in a mindset to join in. New year, new reading goals, one of which is reading many of the group and buddy reads that I missed out on last year. Mudbound is the first of those reads and appropriately enough, I finished this historical fiction set in 1940s Mississippi during black history month.

Hilary Jordan’s debut novel received national best seller status and became a Netflix movie. It is the post war 1940s and the McAllen family has moved to the Mississippi Delta to try their hand at farming. Henry McAllen has always wanted a farm, whereas his city bred wife Laura pines for her family in Memphis. Leaving behind civilization, the McAllens move to a farm, which Laura names Mudbound. Henry keeps on three tenant families to assist with the harvest, one of which is the African American Jacksons, who are determined to own their own land one day. They place all of their hopes and dreams on their son Ronsel, a sergeant in the 761st Black Panther Tanker regiment.

Laura’s resentment of farming did not make a full novel so Jordan has told her story in six voices: Henry, Laura; Hap, Florence, and Ronsel Jackson; and Henry’s younger brother Jamie, a decorated Air Force pilot returning from combat missions over Germany. Each of the six characters carried old southern prejudices. That the United States had just defeated fascism in Europe was lost on southern gentlemen who still viewed blacks as less than human. While Henry did not openly espouse these views, his father known as Pappy did, which created a tension between family members on the farm. The tension grew worse when Jamie returned from Europe after having seen the horrors of war and fighting off ghosts. He saw African Americans honorably fighting for their country, and, while he may not have been ready to call them his equal, Jamie did believe in respect for war veterans and did not see African Americans as less than human.

Jordan’s has prose is not spectacular but she moved the story between voices well enough to hold my interest throughout. What I found interesting is that she herself is not from the Delta region but that she created characters as archetypes for the south at a changing time. African Americans who fought to defeat the Germans abroad came home to a society that was not quite ready to view them as equal to whites, and struggled to settle in to old world views. The friendship between Jamie McAllen and Ronsel Jackson pinpoints that the younger generation saw the changing, modern world, yet their parents still saw things literally in black and white. With many respectable white southerners still holding membership in the Ku Klux Klan, African Americans realized that in order to achieve the American Dream that they would have to leave the south or be put in their place. Even forward thinking people as Jamie and Laura McAllen were not quite ready in the 1940s to live a life side by side with African Americans as their equals.

That I started reading Mudbound on what would have been Jackie Robinson’s 100th birthday was not lost on me. Almost concurrently to the story being played out in the Mississippi Delta, Jackie played his role to integrate American society. I wonder how Pappy McAllen, a man who enjoyed listening to ball games on the radio, would have reacted to hearing about Jackie’s exploits on the baseball diamond. I doubt the reaction would have been a positive one. February moves on. Baseball season starts in only seven weeks so perhaps the winter blahs will not be so bad this year after all. With stories like Mudbound chock full of intriguing group discussion points, I will be sure to stay in a positive mindset through the rest of the winter.

3.5 stars rounded up (prose could have been a little stronger)