Ava's Man

“He was a man whose tender heart was stitched together with steel wire, who stood beaten and numb over a baby’s grave in Georgia, then took a simple-minded man into his home to protect him from scoundrels who liked to beat him for fun. He was a man who inspired backwoods legend and the kind of loyalty that still makes old men dip their heads respectfully when they say his name, but who was bad to drink too much, miss his turn into the driveway and run over his own mailbox.”

This is one of Bragg’s first descriptions of Charlie that reveals his character and the effect his life had on the people and landscape around him. This description reveals how Charlie was a paradoxical man, capable of great good and sensitivity but also able to be tough when he needed to be. 

“In a time when a nation drowning in its poor never so resented them, in the lingering pain of Reconstruction, in the Great Depression and in the recovery that never quite reached all the way to my people, Charlie Bundrum took giant steps in run-down boots. He grew up in a hateful poverty, fought it all his life and died with nothing except a family that worshiped him and a name that gleams like new money. When he died, mourners packed Tredegar Congregational Holiness Church.”

This describes the socio-economic landscape that Charlie was born into, and how he had to work with the cards he had been dealt. While he never gained monetary wealth, by the end of his life, he was rich with a large family that loved him beyond words.

“People still say what a shame it was that he died so young, at fifty-one, but I cannot say he died too soon. He lived long enough to see most of his children grown. He lasted, with his liver and heart ravaged by whiskey and hard living, till my brother Sam came into this world, and then he hung on, to save my mother and big brother from the sadness beyond the door, for as long as he could.”

Bragg contemplates his grandfather’s untimely departure from their family. While Charlie’s children and wife found it too painful to talk about him once he died, Bragg considers it a blessing that Charlie lived as long as he did, considering his hard work and lifestyle. Charlie died of liver failure, a result of drinking too much whiskey, so it can be said that he was a heavy drinker throughout the course of his life. However, Bragg is quick to point out that Charlie was never a mean drunk. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Charlie drank simply because he enjoyed it, and it made him even jollier.

“They never spoke about it. They never had another moment like it again. They fought—my Lord, did they fight—for thirty years, until the children were mostly grown and gone. But they stuck. You go through as much as they did, you stick. I have seen old people do it out of spite, as if growing old together was some sweet revenge. Charlie and Ava did not get to grow old together. What they got was life condensed, something richer and sweeter and—yes—more bitter and violent, life with the dull moments just boiled or scorched away.”

This moment comes right after Ava attacks Blackie Lee, the woman that Charlie let use their house to rest. Bragg points out that this was Charlie and Ava’s only real fight, and that their relationship, despite its ups and downs, was knit together with genuine love for each other. 

“But it was just buck dancing, about the only kind of dancing my people did. There were no reels, no shags, just this. Folklorists trace it to Ireland and Wales and other places, and it became, over time, the odd ballet that I saw on a riverbank not far from the falls, the stench of burning tires in the wind. I cannot recall the tune, but I can still see the old man banging his bootheels together, spinning, stomping. It was to gentler dancing what a hurtling freight train is to a buggy ride, and it belongs to us, just us. We don’t even know how to do is anymore, but it’s ours.”

Before this moment, Bragg describes his first memory of seeing two men in the woods buck dancing around a fire. He describes the act of buck dancing, its origins, and how it’s unique to his people. Charlie was a talented buck dancer, and Bragg attributes Charlie’s dancing skills as part of his attractiveness to women.

“It happened when Charlie was still a boy, around 1915, at a spot in Calhoun County called the Mill Branch, a beautiful Clearwater spring where the hard drinkers gathered in the cool of the evening to swap lies and trade dogs and cut each other up a little bit, to settle differences. Rich men would have dueled and said the killing was over honor. Poor men just cut in anger, and sometimes there was honor in it and sometimes the man holding the bloody knife, his mind befuddled from whiskey, just sent home and told his wife he reckoned the sheriff would be by, directly.” 

This moment describes the atmosphere of drunken, senseless violence that often occurred during Charlie’s childhood. Jimmy Jim, Bragg’s great-grandfather, was a heavy drinker and a ruthless brawler. After this moment, he goes on to bite a man’s finger off during a fight. 

“She was a small and humble woman who, weak from childbirth and crippled after her hip was shattered by a cow, worked herself to death. But behind her husband’s back she told her children long stories, sang songs that Charlie remembered a lifetime, and, even as she grew weaker, paler, thinner, she made her children laugh. She made up stories about the forest and possums, wildcats, deer, bears that held Charlie and the other children rapt, stories better than any book, better than stories about beanstalks and such. Years later, when Charlie told them late in the evenings to his own children, it was Mattie they heard.” 

This describes Bragg’s great-grandmother and Charlie’s mom, Mattie. She was married to Jimmy Jim and had a difficult life because he was constantly on the lam for his illegal whiskey stills, leaving her alone to care for their family with no money or outside support. Despite these trials, she was a good mother. Bragg reveals that the compassionate, warm, story-telling side of Charlie came from his mother.

“They rented, because they were one class below the owners, and owning land was a dream that most of them certainly had. But it might as well have been a dream about steamships and zeppelin rides, for all is would amount to, for generations. But there was a dignity in them that no amount of servitude could collapse. The women wore their hair long—dictated by the doctrine of Protestant faith—and the men, even the young ones like Charlie, draped their overalls in severe black coats for court and funerals and voting. A man has to have a lot of dignity to walk around proud with most of the rear end worn out of his overalls. But a pair of ventilated breeches, Charlie figured, was no reason to bow your head.”

This moment explains the poverty that Charlie and his family lived in most of their life. It also demonstrates the dignity he and his family maintained despite their poverty. That is, Charlie never let his poverty make him feel less than other men. 

“The hands were magnificent. They hung at the ends of his skinny arms like baseball mitts, so big that a normal man’s hand disappeared in them. The calluses made an unbroken ridge across his palm, and they were rough, rough all over, as shark’s skin. The grease and dirt, permanent as tattoos, inked his skin, and the tar and dirt colored the quick under his fingernails, then and forever. He could have burned his overalls, changed his name and bought himself a suit and tie, but those hands would have told on him.” 

This describes Charlie’s hands—the hands of man who worked difficult physical labor. Bragg often talks about Charlie’s hands, how they were large and strong enough to drive a nail into wood with one swing of the hammer and knock a man down with one swing. However, they were also gentle enough to cradle babies.

“Few doors were closed to him, because of his nature. Sober, he was a fine listener. Drunk, he hogged the very air. He spoke in the language—the very specific language—of the Appalachian foothills. It was an unusual mix of formal English and mountain dialect. The simple word ‘him’ was two distinct sounds—‘he-yum.’ And a phrase like ‘Well, I better go,’ was, in the language of our people, more likely to sound like ‘Weeeellll, Ah bet’ go.’ Some words are chopped off and some are stretched out till they moan, creating a language like the terrain itself. Think of that language as a series of mountains, cliffs, valleys, and sinkholes, where only these people, born and raised here, know the trails.”

This describes Charlie’s dualistic yet complimentary nature and how the language of Charlie’s people reflects the landscape of the foothills. The foothills represent home for Charlie.

“If someone, maybe around a fire on one of those riverbanks, had asked him then, ‘What do you want, Charlie,’ he would have told them. He wanted enough work to live decent, and on a Saturday he wanted a drink of likker, because it sent the silver shivers down him and that was good. He wanted a ham and biscuit. He wanted to hear some music, and watch a pretty girl walk down the street in town, if he could do it and not be obvious about it.”

Bragg describes the things that his grandfather wanted for his life, thus illustrating that Charlie was a man who had simple pleasures and desires in life. However, despite that Charlie was content with his life, he was always driven to provide for his family, which is what led them to constantly move for his work. 

“God made just one. In size, she wasn’t much, just a little thing, a tad bowlegged, with hair down past her waist and those startling, silver-blue eyes. But the Maker must have had some personality left over from somebody else—Lutherans maybe—because He gave Ava about twice as much as anybody else. Even when she was growing up on her daddy’s nice farm in the Alabama foothills, her anger burned hotter and her happiness flashed brighter, it seemed, than was altogether natural.”

This describes the center of Ava’s personality, traits that only grew stronger as she grew older. Bragg admires his grandmother, and he aptly names the book in direct reference to who Charlie was at heart: Ava’s man. Ava helped make Charlie the man whom Bragg now memorializes.

“She was more prone to voice her opinion, probably, than most women of that time, and with Ava there was never any such thing as a compromise. But while she complained a lifetime about being cast into the damned wilderness, she always knew she had found something in this man that she had never seen in another, certainly not in any of the Congregational Holiness she had known since birth. He talked to her. He did not grunt about crops and scripture. He talked. If he dug a well, he did not say, ‘Well, today I dug a well.’ It might just be a hole in the ground, but he made it seem like a tunnel into adventure.”

This moment describes why Ava chose to marry Charlie. Ava grew up in the Congregational Holiness church, which was of the Pentecostal persuasion; they spoke in tongues and had very animated church services. Her family was devoutly religious and more proper in nature than Charlie’s family. However, she was immediately drawn to Charlie because he was a charmer—a man unlike other men in her circle growing up. Charlie could have a conversation, and he was exciting. Even though he was poor, and they continually lived a life in the deep woods, which she didn’t prefer, she loved him.

“The plant laid him off not long after Edna’s second birthday, but it wasn’t personal. U.S. Steel had 250,000 full-time employees in 1929—and zero four years later. It had changed the lives of a whole generation of Southerners who found that rolling steel was child’s play next to what they done, next to cutting pulpwood or fighting a brain-dead beast along endless rows of red dirt. And now, it was changing them back. People would come to call it the Great Depression. For Ava and Charlie, it was as if the biggest broom in the world just dropped out of the sky and swept everything away.”

Before this moment, World War I ended, and industry was booming. Charlie got a job at a steel mill making good money for the first time in his life. They had enough money to leave Charlie’s beloved backwoods and relocate to town, which Ava loved. Charlie and Ava could afford things they never could before, like a hat for Charlie and pocketbooks for Ava. However, this small glimpse of luxury quickly vanished when the Great Depression struck, and Charlie was laid off. 

“In the decade of the Depression, they moved twenty-one times. The prosperity they would chase, crisscrossing the state line in that overloaded, rattletrap, cut-down Ford, was usually only marginally better than the life they had left behind. The ladders he climbed in the summer heat that turned the shingles to black mush, in the cold that made them crack like panes of glass, never got him more than a few feet higher than rock bottom, and the wells he dug were just dead-end tunnels leading to a wadded-up ten-dollar bill. Maybe prosperity is too strong a word for it. They pursued the here and now, a sack of flour, a gallon of kerosene, a yard of copper tubing, a new needle and thread.”

Charlie, Ava, and their children were constantly moving for Charlie’s work. However, as this quote details, they were never getting ahead financially but were instead simply surviving. 

“Some historians say the time that defines us, as a people, was the Civil War, and I guess that is true for those Southerners who hold tight to yellowed daguerreotypes of defiant colonels, distant ancestors who glare at the camera like it was a cannon, leaning on their swords. But you seldom hear people of the foothills talk much about the Civil War, contrary to the popular belief that all of us down here are sitting around waiting for the South to Rise Again, gazing at our etching of Robert E. Lee and sipping whiskey from the silver cups our great-aunt hid in the corncrib when she saw the Yankees comin’. But you hear them talk a lot about the Depression, at reunions, at dinner on the ground, on that bench outside E.L. Green’s store, down the road from my momma’s house.”

Bragg explains just how devastating the Depression was for the people living in the south, even more so than the Civil War. This is especially true for Charlie, who lost a baby during the Depression because he couldn’t pay for a doctor to care for her.

“It was not religion that forced them to hide it. Charlie was not, as we have said, a religious man, though he lived surrounded by people of deep faith. There were men of that time, and this time, too, I guess, who would preach drunk, who would be so full of the spirit—and spirits—that they would stagger to their feet in the woods and start quoting loud and hot from the Bible, until they passed out. Charlie did not cloak his drinking to hide it from church people. Men like Charlie, the ones squeezed between their love for their families and their love for the likker, came home only when their drinking was done.”

Charlie loved his family as well as his drinking, but he never let either of his loves interfere with the other. He always kept his family and his drinking separate. However, even though he wouldn’t drink in the presence of his family, he often came home drunk, and his family inevitably saw the effects of his drinking. Although he was never mean when he drank, and was, in fact, a happy drunk, his drinking always worried Ava, a woman who thought it a sin to drink. 

“Ava, as she had grown older in the hard life she chose, had become more mercurial, more prone to fits, rants, and weeping jags. But Ava was not one of those Southern women who could afford life as an eccentric victim of circumstance. She did not sit on the veranda waiting for the vapors. Cotton had come back big after the Depression, and Ava and the older children, dragging the younger ones on their pick sacks, walked the rows and stood in line at the wagon to weigh in for a wad of one-dollar bills.”

This explains Ava’s emotional yet pragmatic nature. Although she chose a path in life that caused great emotional and financial hardship, she never let herself fall into a pity party. Instead, she worked just as hard as Charlie to keep the family afloat. 

“But if was funny thing, that Depression. History said it was dead and gone, but then history never paid much attention where people like her were concerned. It was as if that death grip on her daddy, and momma, was only loosened. The landlord would still walk in the yard and shout for her daddy, they knew, if he didn’t work. But he worked until he could barely stand, and when his car was broke down he slung his old tool belt and carpenter’s apron over one shoulder and lifted a big five-gallon bucket of tar in his hand, and walked miles to the job.”

When the Great Depression ended, many people bounced back from the financial devastation. However, this wasn’t true for Charlie, Ava, and their children; they lived in poverty before the Depression, and they still lived in poverty afterwards. In the moment above, Bragg is describing the way his mom, Margaret, felt after the Depression ended: Not much had changed for them. Margaret was one of Charlie and Ava’s many daughters, and for her, she felt that life was nearly the same after the Depression as it was before it began.

“They had never had a free anything, really, except maybe the fish that Charlie pulled from the Coosa. Now they had a free horse, and free cheese. If the children thought Bob was magic, they thought that every month, when Ava went into town to get her commodities, was Christmas. The federal government had discovered that poor people, as tough and resourceful as they were, as proud as they were, would not say no to a little free food. The government called them ‘commodities,’ just plainly packaged surplus food that the government handed out at National Guard armories and courthouse auditoriums, and the word would work its way into the vernacular of the region.” 

After the Great Depression ended, Charlie and Ava began receiving free food from the government: mostly cheese, peanut butter, and other staple items. After this moment, Bragg emphasizes that these commodities weren’t like food stamps, which could be used to buy unhealthy items. Bragg also says that everyone in the region who was alive during this time fondly remembers the taste of the government cheese and peanut butter—luxuries for people who were used to living on fish, cornbread, and beans.

“The town of Jacksonville was growing. The jail, made from rock, was still the most imposing structure on the square, and the Confederate soldier still watched over its citizens with granite eyes. But you could buy everything from a suit of clothes to a vanilla float there. The Creamery sold a big ol’ scoop for a nickel, and Juanita—who always got vanilla—would drag Margaret in there by the hand, a dime scorching her fingertips. She was about seventeen then, and Margaret a little younger. But with ice cream in their hands, they were little girls all over again, and they would sit and watch the cars. You never saw a mule anymore, not in town. […] It was not Charlie’s world anymore.”

For most of Charlie’s life, he and his family lived deep in the woods. For Charlie, his world had always been simple: He went to work, drank whiskey on Saturdays, and spent time with his family. He loved being on the river and away from town. However, as his children grew older and industry expanded after the Depression, the world became a different place. Bragg constantly views Charlie as a river man because that’s where he felt most at home. However, once industry begins to boom, the family moves closer to the jobs, and Charlie finds himself removed from the simplicity of his former life.

“There was never a quiet time for him, between his children and grandchildren, never an empty nest. Some people might have ached for a little peace, a little solitude, but that was what God made the rivers for. As he neared fifty, his life had not changed. Charlie still climbed the ladder every day with a hammer dangling from his hip, still fished when it suited him, and still seemed at his best, at his happiest, with children on the floor at his feet, or doing chin-ups on his skinny forearms. Ava loved them, too, but Charlie … well, Charlie just owned them, owned their hearts, as he owned the hearts of his own children. Some men are just blessed that way. Some men walk in the room, and babies laugh out loud.”

This moment illustrates how Charlie stayed both true to himself and active his whole life. Even though he had a failing liver and poor health during in his 50s, he still did the things he had done as a younger, healthier man. This moment also points out how beloved he was to his family, especially his children and grandchildren. 

“Now she looked at him and wept, for him, for her, for all the people who believed that he hung the moon. And for once, it was not just Ava bawling again, but something that drove everybody else from that room, leaving them truly alone for the first time in … hell, could they even remember? She had a right to cry. For everyone else, he had been a wall that protected them. For her, he was the wall she threw herself against, over and over and over again. He decided he would not die here, in this house, under her watch. He would not die here with his three youngest daughters, Margaret, Jo and Sue, watching.”

This describes the moment right before Charlie dies from liver failure. He knows that he’s about to die, and he decides to die at his oldest daughter Edna’s house because she was the strongest of his children. When Charlie goes to Edna’s, he takes a walk and collapses by a random pasture. During the funeral, the church is packed with people who knew and loved Charlie.