Mudbound

For this month's  Reading Club we read Mudbound by Hillary Jordan.  It is set during the 1940's in Mississippi.  Laura married Henry late in life and they had two little girls.  One day Henry came home with a surprise!  He had bought a farm and they were all moving from their nice city home to a 3 room shack without running water or electric.  Oh, and by the way, his crotchety, mean dad was moving with them and would live in the lean-to attached to the shack.

Laura did the best she could living in that shack that was surrounded by mud whenever it rained.  A few months after they moved to the farm, Jamie, Henry's brother moved in with them when he came back from the war.  Laura fell in love with Jamie, and I think he fell in love with her.

Jamie became friends with one of the sharecroppers sons, Ronsel, who had also served in the Big War.  That friendship led to the local Klu Klux Klan (which Jamie's dad was a part of) making a visit to Ronsel one night, which was the same night Jamie silently smothered his dad in his sleep.

There were about 30 people at this months book club meeting.  Most people in the group had grown up in the south.  Some grew up during the 40's and agreed that black people were not treated with respect.  One lady spoke about how the black help always sat in the back seat of the car and ate in the kitchen while they ate in the dining room, but that didn't mean her family was prejudice.  Oh no????  That's the way things were done back then and everyone accepted it.  The black help had their place in society and the white folk had theirs.  It is always interesting to see how Southerners have very different view points from us Yankees.

Our next book is Same Kind of Difference as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore.  It is a non-fiction book and the librarian said she thought it was about mental illness and the other members said good, they didn't want to talk about race anymore since we dealt with it in the last two books.  I just looked it up on Amazon and it's about a black, uneducated, sharecropper from Louisiana who meets a wealthy art dealer at a homeless shelter and they become friends.  Looks like we'll be dealing with the race issue one more time....