Ava's Man by Rick Bragg

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The Barnes & Noble Review
Rick Bragg's Ava's Man is a no-blows-spared slice of life in hardscrabble Alabama and Georgia. Powerful and poignant, it will fire hearts and minds. Bragg's mother, Margaret's, self-sacrifice enabled him to become a prize-winning reporter-writer. Here, chronicling the desperately difficult life of her father (his grandfather), the one-of-a-kind Charlie Bundrum, Bragg also demonstrates what shaped his mother's life.

At 16, Charlie Bundrum faced life in the raw. His father, a moonshiner, was on the run; his mother was dead, her death hastened by a badly knit fractured hip. Beanpole Charlie possessed only the clothes he wore. He couldn't read, but through surviving he learned all he needed to know -- and then some. At 17, he married 16-year-old Ava, the steel-willed daughter of a Bible-bound small-time farmer. The prosperous post-WWI years were too few and their children too many to cushion the Bundrums through the Depression; 21 flits followed, milk cow in tow, landlords in pursuit. Life remained precarious until the 1950s, when rising national prosperity eased the family budget.

Into his searing account of Charlie and Ava's survival, Bragg weaves a history of regional folklore. Asides on cock- and dog-fighting, catfish and cornbread, midwives and birthing, and, not least, moonshine, "likkered" men and brutal sheriffs heighten his tale. Resourcefulness is a powerful subtext. Charlie knew what to do and how to do it. Ironically, drinking cost him his victory. He quit too late, dying at 50 in 1958.

Bragg illuminates the courage and dignity of a man who lived to the full, loved by and loving his own -- tough love though it often was. His full-blooded prose sings through hope, joy, and fear. He confirms that a family deemed dirt-poor can have an enviable wealth of spirit, and their hard-won successes match the gilded prizes of the privileged. (Peter Skinner)

Peter Skinner lives in New York City.

From the Publisher

With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a national bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression; a moonshiner who drank exactly one pint for every gallon he sold; an unregenerate brawler, who could sit for hours with a baby in the crook of his arm.

In telling Charlie’s story, Bragg conjures up the backwoods hamlets of Georgia and Alabama in the years when the roads were still dirt and real men never cussed in front of ladies. A masterly family chronicle and a human portrait so vivid you can smell the cornbread and whiskey, Ava’s Man is unforgettable.

Publishers Weekly

In less capable hands, this biography could have been mawkish and mundane. Instead, Bragg's telling of his maternal grandfather's life is eloquent and touching, and his spare prose is alive with fresh metaphors and memorable sentences. Bragg never knew Charlie Bundrum, who died prematurely at age 51 in 1958; the story of this proud, flawed, loving and much-loved hero of Depression-era Appalachia is derived from family and community oral history. Interestingly, this book emerged because readers of Bragg's bestselling book about his mother, Ava (All Over but the Shoutin'), wanted to understand the force that drove her to be such a strong figure. Few actors could have read this work as well as the author has. Bragg's Appalachian accent, slightly polished by Northern living, adds authenticity to the fine, funny and painful anecdotes that made up his grandfather's life and to the feelings each story encompasses. His smooth reading enhances the rhythms and sounds of his prose, rendering with genuine sincerity his deep admiration for his people and for the vanishing culture they represent. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Nancy Zachary - VOYA

When Bragg first turned his considerable journalistic talent to his family, he provided an unforgettable portrayal of the rural South in All Over but the Shoutin' (Pantheon, 1997). Here Bragg focuses on the life of his maternal grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, who died just one year before the author was born. Readers return to the Deep South during the years of the Great Depression and the legend of what it took to keep family together. Moving his family from place to place to find work, food, and shelter, Charlie was most proud of being a daddy. A roofer by trade, Charlie played and sang to a white-hot banjo, was no stranger to whiskey, and fought for what he felt was right. He is a backwoods tall-tale character at the very least. Bragg's wondrous style is filled with emotion and affection for his family members, the land they inhabited, and the stories they recalled. Although his memoir is recommended to all who enjoyed Bragg's first journey into his family's history, this volume reaches deeper into the heart of southern folk and might be used in cultural studies assignments. What made Charlie Bundrum act is a piece of Americana that Bragg highlights for all readers. Junior and senior high schoolers would benefit from reading this marvelous wit and social history. One might hope that Hollywood finds Bragg also. Photos. VOYA CODES: 4Q 3P J S A/YA (Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses; Will appeal with pushing; Junior High, defined as grades 7 to 9; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12; Adult and Young Adult). 2001, Knopf, 259p,

Library Journal

After the publication of Bragg's best-selling memoir All Over but the Shoutin', readers accused the author of "leaving out the good part." They wanted to know where he believed his mother's "heart and backbone came from, and where she inherited the strength and character to raise three boys alone." They also felt he had "short-shrifted" Charlie and Ava Bundrum, his mother's parents. Bragg's grandfather died before he was born, and his extended family, filled with fine storytellers, were conspicuously silent about his life. Upon questioning, he discovered that talking about his grandfather's life led to talking about his death and the grief all of his children still felt 42 years after he "was preached into the sky." On the day of Charlie's funeral, cars lined the blacktop for more than a mile. Deciding "a man like that deserved a book," Bragg interviewed family members and neighbors to tell his grandfather's story. As with his previous book, Bragg writes about poor people of the South with dignity and without condescension. The author reads with humor, affection, and pride; this is a splendid listening experience. Pam Kingsbury, Alabama Humanities Fdn., Florence Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The story of a man who could charm a bird off a wire, beat the tar out of a threat, dandle a baby, tend a still, and smile—no, live—right through the meanest poverty the South could throw at him, from New York Times reporter and Pulitzer-winner Bragg (All Over But the Shoutin'). Bragg's grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, died a year before Bragg was born, so the author "built him up from dirt level, using half-forgotten sayings, half-remembered stories, and a few yellowed, brittle, black-and-white photographs." Speaking in a lovely southern voice out of northern Georgia and Alabama, with a juke in its bones and metaphors to die for, Bragg brings not just Charlie but an entire time and place to life. Charlie was the son of another piece of work, a man who "largely disregarded any laws or influence outside his own will, and some people did not like to look him dead in the eye because it made them feel weak." No stranger to a dust-up himself, Charlie would take the law down a notch if it was too mettlesome, but he had a softer side—one that would play a white-hot banjo, buck-dance under the stars (and under the influence of his own good white whisky, which made him sing rather than cuss), and offer a helping hand whenever the need arose. Most important of Charlie's virtues, from the author's point of view, was the fact that "if he ever was good at one thing on this earth, it was being a daddy." Searching for work (sometimes, just for food), he'd move his family about the wild and dangerous South, a landscape of ridges and hollows and deep woods, ramshackle houses, muddy rivers, water moccasins, primeval catfish (which he caught from a boat made of two car hoods weldedtogether)—but he knew how to make his family feel secure and loved. A book that flashes with affection and respect for Charlie and the vanishing culture he represents, one we will be immensely the poorer for losing.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0375724443
  
• ISBN-13: 9780375724442
• Format: Paperback, 272pp
• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Pub. Date: August 2002
• Edition Description: Reprint
• Sales Rank: 18,695
• Series: Vintage Series

• Interviews & Essays
• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt

Interviews & Essays

It was hard. For 18 months I had stared at the keyboard and pounded out his personality, his wit and his temper, his love for fishing and whiskey and babies and an old hermit named Hootie Clines. I re-created his relationship with my grandmother, Ava, and wrote on and on about his children and their love for him. I described his fights with the law and bad men, and retold his own stories -- though never as good as he could have done, if he had lived.

I did all that while laughing out loud, while grinning like an idiot. How great, how grand, for a 41-year-old man to get to build himself a grandfather, to give flesh and blood and heart and soul to a legend, a ghost, a man of dust and bones. With every line I saw him take shape in my mind's eye, saw him ball up his fists and stand like stone between his family and trouble, saw him break their hearts with every furtive pull he took on a jar of moonshine whiskey.

But even in the saddest parts of his life, there was dignity and decency and character, so that I began to look forward to the time I spent with my notebooks and journals and scraps of paper, where I had written down his life and times in countless interviews with his children and others who remembered him.

I watched him grow up and I watched him take a wife and I watched him lift babies, one by one by one, into his arms. I watched him fade from his youth into middle age, watched him reach for grandbabies now, even watched him find the Lord.

Then, one day, it was time for him to die.

And I just couldn't do it.

I sat and stared at that keyboard, now suddenly hateful, and no matter how hard I tried to write about his death and his funeral, I could not. His children, who loved him so much that they had blocked from their minds the circumstances of his death, did not like talking about his end, and I had to pry more than I would have liked just to get the information I needed to complete the book.

But mostly I was stymied by my own mind, which refused to work with me, to help me kill off this amazing man. It may have been, as my friend said, that I had invested so much in building him up, how could I just tear him down? But now, finally, I know it was more than that.

I could not kill him, with mere words, because he had become so much more than that to me.

He was not a character in a nonfiction book.

He was not a name on a page.

He was my grandfather.

He was a man who, if he had lived, would have toted me on his shoulders and helped me dig worms and bait my hook, who would have towered over me in kindness.

He was real. He was alive.

Or, at least, that was how it felt, for a little while, before I went ahead and finally did it, finally allowed his legs to buckle and allowed his tall, thin frame to fall into the new grass of a spring evening, allowed him to die -- again.

I hated that. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't do it, not on a bet, not for a gold monkey.

I would let him live on and on and on, forever.

I hope people see value in him, between his flaws. But even if Charlie Bundrum never touches anyone else the way his story did me, it was worth the time, worth the work, worth all of it.

For two years, I got to sit with my kin and talk about a man I never knew, a man with my same blood, my same temper, my same eyes and hair and hard-headedness and more.

And then I made me a grandfather.

How damn cool is that? (Rick Bragg)

Rick Bragg's Southern Grit
From the September/October 2001 issue of Book magazine.

He's got things to take care of, this man. Besides bailing a brother out of trouble and allaying the concerns of the mother he celebrated in All Over but the Shoutin', the preeminent chronicler of yesterday's South confronts his readers with the issue that nobody wants to discuss today: class.

Rick Bragg has just gotten off the phone in his small home office, walked through the large, open kitchen and entered the living room of his shotgun-style New Orleans home. He's holding a stamped, addressed envelope in his right hand and slowly waving it back and forth. "Bail money," he repeats.

He's a big man, nearly six foot three and heavyset, and when he gets agitated, you feel it. He's steadily pacing the room, walking off warring feelings of rage, concern and helplessness, stoicism and exasperation. He runs his hands through his thick brown hair, and it falls back into his face. The young, beautiful woman who has just flown in to spend the weekend with him is silent. Helplessness is on her face as well.

Bragg speaks again. "Some people, when they talk to the folks at home, they get, ‘Oh, hi, honey, it's so good to hear from you. How are you doing?' When my momma calls, it's, ‘Rick, Mark is in trouble again. Can you help him out?' "

It's as close as Bragg will ever come to saying anything remotely critical of his mother, the shimmering heroine of his first book, All Over but the Shoutin'. The saga of his mother's struggle to raise three boys amid the abject poverty of rural Alabama -- and to overcome the burden of a violent, alcoholic husband from whom she eventually is compelled to flee -- Shoutin', as Bragg invariably refers to it, is a powerful redemption song. By the book's end, his mother, Margaret, is safely ensconced in the first home she has ever owned. Bragg purchased the place for her after skyrocketing to success as a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. Also, Bragg's older brother, Sam, settles into a dignified life as a workingman, a reliable rock of support to his family and community.

But like one of those disturbing characters who refuses to join the restored circle of humanity at the end of a Shakespeare comedy, Bragg's younger brother, Mark, has thus far rejected his place at the hearth. He's assumed, instead, his father's role as the seductive hell-raiser determined to unsettle any order he manages to stumble into. And, as her youngest son, he has proved to have as strong a hold on his mother as his father ever did.

"I tried that tough-love shit," Bragg explains as we drive in the pulverizing New Orleans heat to find a mailbox. "But then I'll get a call from my momma and she'll say, ‘Ricky, would you mind if I sold some of this furniture to get some money for Mark?' And that's not acceptable to me." He pauses, his hands tightly gripping the wheel. "I spent $24,000 getting him out of one jam or another last year." He pauses again, then repeats, "$24,000."

He continues to drive and eventually stops at Dunbar's, a ramshackle but spectacularly satisfying Creole restaurant in a devastated neighborhood. His dark eyes light up as he enters and contemplates the savory delights awaiting him. He energetically annotates the menu for his guests, gleefully concluding, "And I'm ordering the fried chicken 'cause I'm Ricky!" The meal more than lifts his spirits. He's smiling, laughing, and telling stories with the unfailing eye for detail that makes both Shoutin' and his writing for the Times so distinctive. His brother's travails seem a distant memory -- somebody else's life somewhere else. When he arrives home, Bragg realizes that he has forgotten to mail the check. (Anthony DeCurtis)

Reading Group Guide

1. In the prologue, Rick Bragg wonders about his grandfather, “What kind of man was this . . . who is so beloved, so missed, that the mere mention of his death would make [his family] cry forty-two years after he was preached into the sky?” [p. 9] How does the book answer this question? What kind of man is Charlie Bundrum? Why does his memory evoke such powerful emotions in those who knew him?

2. Bragg says that he wrote this story “for a lot of reasons, ” one of which was “to give one more glimpse into a vanishing culture” [p. 13]. How does he create a vivid picture of that culture? What does he admire about it? How is it different from “the new South”? What other reasons compelled Bragg to write about a grandfather he never knew?

3. Bragg says that Charlie Bundrum was “blessed with that beautiful, selective morality that we Southerners are famous for. Even as a boy, he thought people who steal were trash, real trash. . . . Yet he saw absolutely nothing wrong with downing a full pint of likker . . . before engaging in a fistfight that sometimes required hospitalization” [p. 53]. What kind of moral code does Charlie live by? Are his frequent acts of violence justifiable? In what sense can Charlie be called a hero?

4. Charlie is a man of great physical strength and courage, but what instances of kindness, generosity, and caring balance the violence and recklessness in his life? How does the inclusion of this kind of behavior in Bragg’s description create a richer and fuller portrait of the man?

5. In speaking of his grandfather’s legacy, Bragg says, “A man like Charlie Bundrumdoesn’t leave much else, not title or property, not even letters in the attic. There’s just stories, all told second and thirdhand, as long as somebody remembers” [p. 18]. What is the value of preserving the kind of stories that Bragg gathers in Ava’s Man?

6. Ava’s Man is filled with dramatic confrontations and vivid scenes. What episodes stand out the most? What do these episodes reveal about the character of the Bundrum family?

7. In considering his grandfather’s drinking, Bragg writes, “I am not trying to excuse it. He did things that he shouldn’t have. I guess it takes someone who has outlived a mean drunk to appreciate a kind one” [p. 133]. What does this passage suggest about Bragg’s personal stake in reconnecting with his grandfather? What kind of portrait does he paint of his own father in Ava’s Man?

8. Charlie Bundrum “was a man who did the things more civilized men dream they could, who beat one man half to death for throwing a live snake at his son, who shot a large woman with a .410 shotgun when she tried to cut him with a butcher knife, who beat the hell out of two worrisome Georgia highway patrolmen and threw them headfirst out the front door of a beer joint called the Maple on the Hill” [p. 8]. In what ways is Charlie free from the constraints of society? What is the cost of this freedom? Is Bragg right in thinking that Charlie’s way of living is something that more civilized men envy?

9. Bragg writes that Ava could have had her sister Grace’s life, a life of relative wealth and comfort, of fine clothes, good food, and travel, instead of a life of rented houses, poverty, and hard labor in the cotton fields. “She could have hated her life, ” Bragg admits [p. 153]. Why doesn’t she? What does Charlie give her that other men cannot? What kind of woman is she?

10. Why does Charlie take in Hootie? What does this reveal about his character? What does Hootie bring out in Charlie?

11. Bragg writes that Charlie “could charm a bird off a wire” [p. 45]. What are the charms of Bragg’s own storytelling style? Where else does he use colorful similes? In what ways is his narrative voice perfectly suited to his subject matter?

12. What does Ava’s Man reveal about how the Great Depression affected people in the Deep South, especially those who lived in the foothills? How did it affect the Bundrums specifically? How are they treated by landlords, sheriffs, and others in positions of power?

13. For centuries, recorded history has largely been the account of those who have had the greatest impact on world events. Why is the history of a man like Charlie Bundrum important? In what ways does it offer a door into American history and culture that more conventional histories cannot provide?

14. In the epilogue, Bragg argues that when compared with the new South, Charlie Bundrum seems larger than life, because of “his complete lack of shame. He was not ashamed of his clothes, his speech, his life. He not only thrived, he gloried in it” [p. 248]. What accounts for Charlie’s pride? Why is Bragg so proud of him? What does Ava’s Man suggest about the way in which inner character is more important than external circumstances?

Read an Excerpt