Mudbound: Friendship, Motherhood, and Redemptive Softness

Both the novel and the film tell the story in rotating points of view. Flowing from multiple perspectives, the action feels epic, kaleidoscopic. A morality tale in the vein of film adaptations like To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968), Mudbound is suffused with eccentric, lived-in characters even on the periphery. There’s grotesque, racist Pappy (Jonathan Banks), Henry and Jamie’s father, who lives with Henry, Laura, and Jamie and sets off a menacing chain of events. And the town doctor, a brutal man more inclined to torture Black patients than to treat them. These films communicate a clear sense of place and a palpable outrage at the rot at the heart of Jim Crow. All three originated as novels rooted in the southern-gothic tradition, delving into outsiderness, moral and physical decay, and the presentness of the past. Mudbound author Hillary Jordan has said the influences for her novel were William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter novelist Carson McCullers.

For her work on Mudbound, Dee Rees became the first Black woman nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. She kept gorgeous passages from the novel about the land, transforming them into moving voice-over delivered by Mulligan. “Violence is part and parcel of country life,” Mulligan intones, foreshadowing a bloody confrontation to come. “You are forever assailed by dead things.” In new text written by Rees, Morgan, in voice-over as Hap, waxes poetic about Black disinheritance: “What good is a deed?” Rees’s introduction to Mudbound came by way of her cowriter Virgil Williams’s original draft of the screenplay. “I wanted to make the relationship between the families less sweet,” she told me. She wanted their symbiosis to feel more transactional—to allow more space for the Jacksons’ human desires. On-screen, Florence makes it clear when she takes a job with the McAllans that her purpose is to advance her own family’s dreams of no longer being tenants. And before she agrees to nurse the McAllan girls through whooping cough, she resists: “Who gon’ look after my own family?” When she helps, she’s firm with Laura and Henry, insisting that she can’t go back home immediately, lest she infect her own children with the disease.

As guidance while fleshing out the characters of the Jacksons, Rees used stories and primary documents from her grandmother Earnestine Smith, who kept a journal she named “Memories of My People.” Smith’s parents had worked as sharecroppers in Louisiana. “I wanted to make sure that the Jackson family had just as much stake,” Rees said. “I wanted to get into Black land ownership.” In the novel, it isn’t always easy to feel for the Jacksons, or to believe in the romance between Hap and Florence. In the film, we’re forced to contend with their past, and their future. We see Hap and Florence slow-dance to the inaudible sound of a shared memory. We watch Florence unable to cast her eyes on Ronsel when he leaves for training camp. Because it is too painful, but also because of a belief that watching a loved one walk away causes bad luck. “A novel is very interior, and with a film you have to externalize all that,” Rees said.

Film adaptations have the ability to add new dimension to a novel’s characters and to introduce its stories to audiences unfamiliar with the original work. Kathleen Collins, one of the earliest Black women to direct a feature film, became interested in cinema when she took a course on literary adaptation while in graduate school. “I had written a lot of short stories myself, but I thought, Well, if I’m going to do a first movie, I should do somebody else’s work,” she once said. She called the work of adaptation “a process of translation.” Her first film, The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980), was based on a series of short stories by her friend Henry H. Roth. To translate the characters of Mudbound to cinema, Rees imagined “the different colors” she wanted on the screen, and the “different textures, like the voice qualities,” she wanted the film’s actors to possess. She had to let go of some of the original text so the world on the screen would feel real.

Mudbound, Rees’s fourth feature, was nominated for a total of four awards at the 2018 Oscars. Her first, Eventual Salvation, documented the life of her grandmother Earnestine, the woman whose journal inspired the screenplay for Mudbound. Her second film—and narrative debut—Pariah, told the story of a seventeen-year-old budding writer navigating her burgeoning lesbian identity and a volatile family life. Pariah won the cinematography award at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as commendations from the NAACP and GLAAD. Bessie (2015), an HBO biopic on Bessie Smith starring Queen Latifah, depicted the glamorous but gritty milieu in which blueswomen created modern music. In their songs and performances, they enacted a kind of freedom that they often didn’t possess in real life. Rees said the film was “a chance to talk about the queerness of [women like] Bessie, Ma Rainey, and Lucille Bogan.” She used texts by scholars Angela Davis and Michelle R. Scott, alongside the songs Smith wrote, as references. The film’s warm colors and textures—the fur stoles, silk slips, and peacock feathers of the chorus girls; the rubbly roads where the blues queens busked or sang in tent shows—helped me to imagine the atmosphere of the juke joint my grandmother ran, which eventually made its way into my own journals and notebooks.

The literal structures endure too. Production designer David J. Bomba used existing old sharecropper cabins, moving them onto the set and arranging them so that they were “always within eyesight,” Rees said, “so you have this feeling of always being observed.” The tragic, culminating violence ignites when Pappy first spies Ronsel and Jamie together in the McAllan family’s truck.

Later, Ronsel accidentally leaves a letter from his German sweetheart in the McAllans’ vehicle. He is brutally confronted by members of the Klan, including Pappy and other prominent white men in the town. The Jackson family flees. Florence is resolute that it is time to move on. She is the family’s quiet yet competent leader. The audience is made to wonder if the young man will survive. In the novel, we never learn. In the film, a coda brings hope and new life.

My own grandmother Exora was born in the Delta’s Sunflower County, the birthplace of C. L. Franklin and the site of Fannie Lou Hamer’s earliest work as an organizer. Exora left the region so that her children could go to school year-round, not only when awaiting the harvest. According to our family’s lore, it was the murder of an older brother, shot dead after a dispute with a landowner, that encouraged her to move. Notions of maternal lineage suffuse the work of Dee Rees, from the documentary on Ms. Earnestine; to the fraught mother-daughter relationship at the heart of Pariah; to the bond, in Mudbound, between Florence and Ronsel. Hillary Jordan said that Mudbound was “loosely based” on her own maternal line, and that she infused the book with details from the life of her grandmother, “a city girl, much like Laura,” who lived on a farm in the Arkansas Delta early in her marriage to Jordan’s grandfather.

My mother’s love sent me to the Midtown elementary school and then to the magnet school out east. And though I had to leave Jenny behind, and the new school’s multiculturalism wasn’t always easy, or genial, I gained a new group of friends, mostly other Black girls. We found comfort with one another. Together we rehearsed the clumsy words we’d say to our crushes, danced until we sweat out our blowouts, read every new issue of Vibe. Sometimes, we wrote poems and short stories in a notebook we’d pass around between classes. I am writing to you from the future our grandmothers and mothers made manifest.