Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

way to raise hisself up in the world. Just had to look at me and Hap to see that. Spent our lives moving from farm to farm, hoping to find a better situation and a boss that wouldn’t cheat us. Longest we ever stayed anywhere was the Conley place, we’d been there going on seven years. Mist Conley cheated us some too but he was better than most of em. He let us put in a little vegetable patch of our own, and from time to time his wife gave us some of their old clothes and shoes. So when Miz Conley told us she’d up and sold the farm we was real anxious. You never know what you getting into with a new landlord.
    “I wonder if this McAllan fellow ever farmed before,” Hap fretted. “He’s from up to Memphis. Bet he don’t know the eating end of a mule from the crapping end.”
    “It don’t matter,” I told him. “We’ll get by like we always do.”
    “He could put us off.”
    “He won’t, not this close to planting time.”
    But he could a done it if he’d had a mind to, that was the plain truth. Landlords can do just about anything they want. I seen em put families off after the cotton was laid by and that family worked all spring and summer to make that crop for em. And if they say you owe em for furnishings you don’t get nothing for your labor. Ain’t nobody to make em do right by you. You might as well not even go to the sheriff, he gone take the boss man’s side every time.
    “Even if he wants us to stay,” Hap said, “we still might have to move on, depending on what type a man he is.”
    “I don’t care if he’s the Dark Man hisself, I ain’t moving if we don’t have to. Took me this long to get the house fit to live in and the garden putting out decent tomatoes and greens. Besides, I can’t just go off and leave my mothers.” I had four mothers due in the next two months and one of em, little Renie Atwood, was just a baby herself. Couldn’t nary one of em afford a doctor and I was the only granny midwife for miles around.
    “You’ll move if I say so,” Hap said. “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.”
    “Only so long as he alive,” I said. “For if the husband be dead the wife is loosed from his law. Says so in Romans.”
    Hap gave me a sharp look and I gave him one right back. He’s never once laid a hand to me and I always speak my mind to him. Some men need to beat a woman to get her to do what they want, but not Hap. All he has to do is talk at you. You can start off clear on the other side of something, and then he’ll get to talking, and talking some more, and before longyou’ll find yourself nodding and agreeing with him. That was how I started loving him, was through his words. Before I ever knowed the feel of his hands on me or the smell of him in the dark, I used to lay my head on his shoulder and close my eyes and let his words lift me up like water.
    Henry McAllan turned out not to be the Dark Man after all, but wasn’t no use telling that to my husband. “Do you know what that man is doing?” Hap said. “He’s bringing in one of them infernal tractors! Using a machine to work his land instead of the hands God gave him, and putting three families off on account of it too.”
    “Who?”
    “The Fikeses, the Byrds and the Stinnets.”
    That surprised me about the Fikeses and the Stinnets, on account of them being white. Lot of times a landlord’ll put the colored families off first.
    “But he’s keeping us on,” I said.
    “Yes.”
    “Well, we can thank the Almighty for that.”
    Hap just shook his head. “It’s devilry, plain and simple.”
    That night after supper he read to us from the Revelations. When he got to the part about the beast with seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns and upon his heads the name of blasphemy, I knowed he was talking bout that tractor.
    T HE REAL DEVIL was that ole man. When Miz McAllan asked me to keep house for her like I done for Miz Conley,I almost said no