Editor's Note: The PEN/Bellevid Award-winning debut novel of contemporary American female novelist Hillary Jockten, The Dirt Frontier, is a novel set in the American South, which carries multiple themes such as Racial Discrimination, World War II, brotherhood, family and love in the United States, presenting a tragedy that occurred on the plantations of the American South before and after World War II to the contemporary readers of the 21st century.
In the novel, Laura Schaper, a middle-class girl who grew up in the city, marries Henry McCarran, who longs for a plantation and creates wealth on the land with the labor of her hands, in order to escape the fate of loneliness. Henry moved his family from Memphis, Tennessee, to the Mississippi Delta in order to realize his dream of farming. Faced with an endless cotton field, Laura felt imprisoned in this dirt realm. Also feeling out of place and unable to blend in with the land were Jamie, who had just returned from the battlefields of World War II, and Junsel, the son of a black farmer tenant. The post-war trauma of shared experiences brought the two a friendship that transcended racial boundaries, but also led to tragedy.
The film of the same name starred Kerry Mulligan, the heroine of The Marvelous Gatsby, and received multiple nominations at the 90th Academy Awards. In February this year, "The Boundary of Dirt" was published by Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House. The following is an interview with Hilary Joaton by Daily News Editor Ben Beagle (translator: Fang Xiaoran) attached to the original edition of Dirt Frontiers.
The Boundary of Dirt, by Hillary Jordon, translated by Fang Xiaoran, Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House
Ben Beagle: Why did you write the novel "Dirt Frontiers"?
Hilary Joughton: Shortly after World War II, my grandparents ran a farm in Lake Village, Arkansas, and I grew up listening to stories about farms. At that time, the living conditions on the farm were extremely rudimentary, with only an unpainted log cabin, no electricity, no running water and telephones. Grandparents called the farm "mud field" because as soon as it rained, the water flooded the road and people were trapped on the farm for several days without going out.
Although they had only lived on the farm for a year, I often listened to my mother, aunt and grandmother talk about the farm, and when they talked, sometimes they laughed, sometimes shook their heads and sighed, depending on whether what they said was funny or appalling. Things on farms in Southern States usually do both. I love listening to them tell those stories, and I don't get tired of hearing them. In their narration, I seemed to be peeking into a strange and magical world, which was full of contradictions but colorful. These stories have deepened my understanding of the family, especially when I found that most of the protagonists in these stories were my grandmother, for the simple reason that every time a disaster occurred, my grandfather happened to be elsewhere.
To my mother and aunt, the year they spent in the "mud" was more like a life adventure, which was not difficult to hear from their words. It was a long time before I realized that life was actually an ordeal for my grandmother, a woman who grew up in the city and had to raise two children, and the so-called story was actually a survival experience.
I started writing this story when I was in graduate school (I didn't realize it would become a novel at the time). The assignment assigned to me at that time only required writing a story from the perspective of a family member, and I decided to go to the farm from the perspective of my grandmother. But in the end what I wrote was not only like an adventure, but something darker and more complex. The story begins: "When I think of the farm, I see the appearance of mud in front of my eyes. ”
Ben Beagle: So when you started writing this story, the first thing that came to mind was your grandmother?
Hilary Joughton: Yes, she was the first character to appear in my mind, and the only one in a while. My teacher loved my story and encouraged me to keep writing, so I tried to expand a few pages into a short story. As a result, my grandmother became Laura, a fictional character who was more passionate and rebellious than my grandmother, and the story began to get longer and longer. When I was writing until I was 50 pages old, I realized I was actually writing a novel, so I decided to add more characters to the story. That's where Jamie, then Henry, then Florence and Harper. It wasn't until I had written 150 pages that I joined the role of Juncell! Of course, with the addition of Juncell, the entire storyline took a dramatic turn.
Ben Beagle: But from the beginning to the end of the book, Paby doesn't make his voice heard?
Hilary Joughton: Actually, in the first nine drafts, I've recounted his own funeral in Paby's tone (both the beginning and the end of the book). My editor and Barbara Kinsovo had given me valuable criticism, and after reading the draft, they didn't like to hear Paby in the first place, or even simply didn't want to listen to Paby. Eventually I was persuaded by them to remove Paby's narrative. After much deliberation, I felt that these two paragraphs were more appropriately narrated from Jamie's point of view.
Although Paby does not have a chapter of his own, the reader is clearly very impressed with the character. What do you think about that?
That's right, people seem to hate Paby! And that's exactly what it should be – he's really annoying. He is not only a typical example of the ugly phenomena of the Jim Crowe period, but also a concentrated embodiment of the evil deeds of human beings.
Ben Beagle: What did you find the biggest difficulty you encountered during the writing of this book?
Hillary Jon: The right language —especially the African-American dialect. Many friends kindly advised me: "Even Faulkner would not write about black people in the first person." "But I think I have to let my black character take it from my own perspective and expose the ugliness of that era with my own voice."
Ben Beagle: This book takes a multi-angle approach to racism — some of which are well known, but some of which are barely well understood, such as the division into sharecroppers.
Hillary Jon: I was taken aback when I gathered material for this book and discovered the dangers of the system of division. Whether the sharecropper owns a mule is crucial. Farmers owning their own mules means they can retain half of their income, otherwise they would have to hand over three-quarters of their income to the farmer. The remaining quarter of the income is difficult to sustain the family, and they have no choice but to borrow money from the farmer, in which case the sharecroppers are almost unable to withstand the blows of bad luck, disease and bad weather, and life becomes more and more miserable. The so-called sharecroppers were actually similar to slaves.
Poster for the movie Dirt Frontier
Ben Beagle: At the climax of the book, juncell's experience is really unbearable to read, and I guess you must have felt a lot of pain when you wrote this, right?
Hilary Jonton: Yes, that's right. I thought about it for months to write that part, and I didn't think about how to write it. When I finally got the idea, and the plot really made me sweat, I called my best friend James Cannon (who was also a writer and the first reader to encourage me to start writing the book in seven years), and I said, "I thought about how to write that part of Juncell." Then told him what I thought. He was silent on the other end of the phone for a long time, and then he said, "Wow. ”
I was afraid to write this part and dragged it out for a long time. When I made up my mind to start writing, I cried many times. I write and read aloud — I have to read it when I write character dialogue — it's to make the dialogue more real and scary.
Ben Beagle: If readers want to know more about that period of history, how many books can you recommend to them?
Hilary Joughton: The Highest Crisis: The Life of Nate Shaw by Theodore Rosengartten. The book tells the story of a black farmer in Alabama who grows cotton from a first-person perspective and how he went through all kinds of hardships, started as a sharecropper, and finally owned his own land. Nate Shaw is a memorable character, intelligent (though illiterate), funny, and insightful of human nature. Nate Shaw was over eighty years old when he told his story to New York journalist Theodore Rosengartten. It was a really interesting life.
Also, James Cobb's The Southernmost Place on Earth. Pete Daniel has written two great books: The Collapse: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and Standing at the Crossroads: Life in the South in the 20th Century. A documentary about black history in History of America produced by PBS. Clifton M. L. Taubert's Once Upon a Time, When We Became Black. And, of course, there are the works of James Baldwin, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Verti, and Richard Wright.
Ben Beagle: Have you already started working on your next novel?
Hilary Joughton: Yes, a very different story from DirtWorld! I spent seven years writing Dirt Frontiers, and now I don't want to write about the south and the south anymore, and I don't use first-person narrative techniques anymore. My second novel, Red, is set in a dystopian America about thirty years later. The story begins in Crawford, Texas, and as for where it ends — who knows?