49 pages • 1 hour read
Rick BraggA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The chapter opens with a man being stabbed during a fight, and people scrambling to pack the wound with brown sugar, which was thought to stop the bleeding:
This was the life Charlie had delivered Ava unto, a place where people still lived shrouded by the trees, where the local sheriff was a deacon who meted out justice based on the season, because all the roads in and out of the backcountry were dirt and his old Model T was bad to sink up to its axles in the mud. Here, the people knew, a man sometimes just needed killing, and if it was more or less unanimous, the kilt man was buried quietly and no one ever saw any reason to call the law (67).
Charlie and Ava live in the woods on the river, with all kinds of creepy crawly bugs, wild animals, and water creatures just beyond their door. The people in this area are religious and superstitious, believing in God as much as they believe in fortune tellers. Charlie spends a lot of his free time on the river, fishing and drinking, and Ava picks cotton to help supplement the family income. Although Charlie never expresses an interest in learning how to read, they sit together at night, and Ava reads to him. Unlike other couples at this time, Ava and Charlie do things together: Ava isn’t a submissive wife, for she and Charlie act like partners.
When Ava has her first child, a son named James, Charlie sends for the local midwife named Granny Isom. Since most of the people in the region don’t have money, midwives like Granny barter for payment: “Like other professional people, she took whatever the man could afford in trade for the child—corn, a quilt, some onions, or just a pone of cornbread and some apple butter” (75). Granny helps Ava deliver a second son, William, a year later.
Charlie is a naturally good father. Even though he is only 18 when his first child is born, he knows not to let “nothin’ happen to it” (76). His sharp internal code guides him throughout fatherhood:
Kill if you have to, but don’t never, ever let nothin’ happen to it, because it is weak, and small, and it belongs to you. One day, twenty years later, he would seize James by the arms and say those very words to him after he had married and had a child of his own. That is how we know the code he lived by (76).
An old curmudgeon named Dempsey is a dog fighter, and he keeps a mean and abused dog chained up in a barn. Dempsey is Ava and Charlie’s distant neighbor, and she and the boys are visiting him. William goes to the barn, and when the dog reacts to his presence, the old man decides to “have some sport” (77). After Dempsey hands William a cornstalk, he takes hold of the dog’s chain and tells William to pretend like he’s going to hit the dog. When the boy abides, Dempsey lets the dog’s chain go, and the “dog leapt on William, snapping, and sand his teeth deep into the boy’s side. The blood spurted and Old Man Dempsey, seeing that his joke had gone too far, dragged his dog away” (78).
Charlie hears about what happened to William, and that night, he and his son go back to Dempsey’s house. He tells the old man that he wants the dog, and seeing the look on Charlie’s face, the Dempsey agrees:
Charlie walked to the barn with William at his side, and told him to wait outside. He walked in and, immediately, there was one shot. Then Charlie walked out, his face blank. All his life, Charlie knew he should have shot the man, truly, but in Floyd County, in the 1920s, they didn’t put a white man into prison, usually, for shooting a dog. But they would strap you down and make you ride the lightning for killing a man, and who would have fed his family, if he was so foolish (79).
After World War I ended, industry was booming, and jobs were plentiful. For the first time in their life, Charlie and Ava had money to spend on luxurious things like hats and pocketbooks. They even bough fancy clothes and had their pictures taken. It was the first time that they could afford a real doctor, not just Granny, to deliver their first girl, Edna. During this time, Charlie and his family ate well, could afford doctors, and lived in town. However, soon after, the Great Depression hit, and they lost it all. They moved back to the woods and lived like they always had: in poverty.
Once back in the woods, in the midst of the Depression, Ava has another little girl named Emma Mae, but Charlie nicknames her “Little Hoover” (83) in reference to Herbert Hoover:
[A] dark joke in honor of a failed president who watched, helplessly, as his own federal soldiers attacked and destroyed a raggedy squatters’ village of homeless, destitute World War I veterans who asked for early payments of their pensions (83).
A series of illnesses befall Emma, including diarrhea and pneumonia. Eventually, Emma has dysentery, and while modern medicine could have saved her, Charlie and Ava didn’t have money for a doctor. Emma dies, and since they don’t have money for a headstone, Charlie places rocks in a special arrangement on top of her grave.
Charlie and his family frequently relocated for his jobs, and “[i]n the decade of the Depression, they moved twenty-one times” (87). This constant moving strained the family, particularly Ava:
Ava hated moving day. When everything was loaded and tied down, she sat red-eyed and tight-lipped in the passenger seat of the Model A, her hands wrapped not around one of her babies but around something almost as dear, her kerosene lamp. […] Ava’s lamp, made of glass as thick as a Coke bottle, was her island, a circle of safe, amber light (86).
Although times were hard, the mask of the woods concealed the family’s struggle. Outsiders couldn’t see the shame of the poverty. Rather than begging on the streets, the people living in the woods, like Charlie and his family, suffered unbeknownst to the rest of the world.
During the Depression, “[b]abies, the most tenuous, died from poor diet and simple things, like fevers and dehydration. In Georgia, one in seven babies died before their first birthday, and in Alabama it was worse” (88). However, despite these grim statistics, Ava has another daughter named Gracie Juanita, and they once again call in Granny. Whenever Juanita gets sick, Ava always fears the worst, but Juanita grows up strong and healthy.
Despite their difficult circumstances, Charlie’s children grew up mostly unaware of their situation and later explained to Bragg that their parents took the brunt of their poverty:
[T]hey never really noticed the pain and the poverty that swirled around them, because [Charlie] loomed over it and would never let it reach them. They did not mind that they ate a whole lot of cornbread, did not notice—not until much later—that Charlie and Ava waited to eat until the children had, to make sure there was enough (89).
Charlie befriends a reclusive older man who lives along the banks of the river. The man’s name is Jessie Clines, although he goes by the nickname “Hootie.” He is described as looking like a “gremlin,” with a face “like a pickax. His nose was long and hooked, and pointy on the end, like he had bought it at the Dollar Store and tied it on his face with a string, and it curved all the way down past his lips” (97).
Although he looks strange, he is a quiet, nice man. While people thought he might be slow because he didn’t speak much, he was actually just really shy and socially awkward. Over time, Hootie and Charlie become best friends. Whenever Charlie goes to the river, Hootie is always there. Charlie loves to talk and tell stories, and Hootie loves to listen to him:
The two men, one so tall, one so small, built fires and passed a mason jar of hooch back and forth, and cooked fish over the fire on thin pieces of steel that Hootie had scavenged from a junkyard, or in an old iron skillet that Charlie carried in a tow sack with his hooks and line (99).
A rumor spreads that Hootie has a lot of money hidden on his property, which attracts the attention of lowlifes. Someone beats up Hootie in the middle of the night, and Charlie brings him to the Bundrum home to stay. Hootie becomes a part of the family, and Charlie’s children can hardly remember a time when Hootie wasn’t there.
The chapter opens with the story of when three of Charlie’s drunken friends come pounding on his door in the middle of the night. He tells them to go away because they’re going to wake up his babies, but they keep on pounding. They end up waking the babies, and Charlie flings the door open, swinging his hammer. The men try to drunkenly run away, but they keep tripping in the yard:
Charlie, his face still full of fury, walked into the house and loaded his Belgian 12-gauge, and walked back out on the porch. He stood, patient, until he saw one of the men run for their car, and tracked him across the dark yard like he was a pheasant (106).
He shoots one of the men. The next morning, a police officer comes to the door and “accept[s] a buttered biscuit, and a little daub of apple butter,” and tells Charlie next time he should kill the “son of a beeetch” (107). Charlie is a gentle, kind man when in the presence of his family, but he can be angry and violent when provoked:
Charlie’s temper did nor blind him. He hit, and he hit hard, because he believed he had to. It is impossible to explain that to someone who has never hit in anger, who has never been hit, and known that the hitting would not end, could not end, until you’d hurt your enemy real, real bad (108).
Charlie taught this to his son James when a bigger boy hurt him. Charlie picked out a large stick and told James, “I want to see this stick when you get one with him. […] I want to see that bark tore off” (108). James does as Charlie says, and “laid the boy’s head open to the skull” (108).
While Charlie and Ava had managed to muddle through most of the Depression, in “the winter of 1936, they had some bad luck” (112). Charlie suffers an accident on an unstable scaffold. He falls hard onto the ground and coughs up blood, but he keeps working because he needs the money. He ends up getting pneumonia and becomes severely frail. Unable to work, he’s unable to pay the rent. Landlords threaten them until he’s finally better and able to work again.
Chapters 6 through 12 focus on Charlie and Ava’s young married life, their children, and the Great Depression. Before the Depression, Charlie and Ava lived in poverty, moving from shack to shack following work. However, right before the Depression happened, Charlie and Ava experienced a fleeting glimpse of prosperity due to the industrial boom following World War I. Charlie got a job in the steel mills, and for the first time, he could afford plentiful food, nice clothing, and even pictures for his family. Once the Depression hit, each newfound luxury disappeared, once again leaving Charlie and Ava in poverty. However, the Bundrums survived the worst years of the Depression. Bragg points out that the Depression wasn’t as dramatic for the people of the foothills, who had always lived in poverty:
It was a creeping thing, down here, not the drama that send the Yankee stockbrokers leaping from window ledges. In a part of the nation still wasted from Reconstruction, this ‘Great Depression’ was, at first, almost redundant, like putting the bootheels to a man already down (87).
Since Charlie and Ava and the others in the foothills had always been a hunting and farming people, they didn’t need to beg on the streets like the city folk. They managed to find food, but “[h]ere, deep in the woods, was a different agony. Babies, the most tenuous, died from poor diet and simple things, like fevers and pneumonia” (88). This was true for Charlie and Ava. Their biggest loss during the Depression was their daughter, Emma Mae. While they always had something to eat, they couldn’t afford the medicine that could have saved their fragile daughter’s life.
Charlie managed to find odd jobs here and there to provide food and shelter for his family, but many other men in the region weren’t so fortunate:
Ragged tent cities took shape beside lonely Southern blacktop, on riverbanks, beside railroad tracks. By the early 1930s, one in three men in the foothills was out of work. Cotton farms failed because the textile mills were padlocked, and cotton rotted in the dirt (90).
In Chapter 9, Bragg points out that the rich Southerners who held onto their money “did not, as history shows, do a lot for their brethren. And some even took sadistic pleasure in driving poorer Southerners, a class they had long disdained, to even greater pain” (90). Not only was this a hopeless time for many, it was also a time of great division. Amid the Depression’s devastation were the great losses of opportunity and education:
[E]ight out of ten schoolchildren stopped coming because the books and teachers cost money, and even now old women will tell you one of the most hateful things about the Depression was that is stole books, teachers, and knowledge, and held another generation prisoner to the old life of backbreaking work, a life in which every book may as well have had a chain wrapped around it, for all the good it did a person who did not read (91).
While these chapters focus mainly on the effects of the Depression for Charlie, his family, and the South more generally, Chapter 10 introduces Hootie. He’s an important character because he represents Charlie’s compassion and generosity, even in desperate times. Hootie is a man who could have easily blended into his surroundings and never been known, yet Charlie befriends him and makes him a part of the Bundrum family. Even though Charlie and his family were struggling to survive during the Depression, Charlie lets Hootie move in; this meant that he had another body to provide shelter for and another mouth to feed. However, those material things didn’t matter to Charlie because he saw that helping Hootie, a defenseless and forgotten man, was the right thing to do. Through the character of Hootie, Bragg illustrates how Charlie’s strong code of morality always drove him to do the right thing accordingly.
By Rick Bragg