Author Rick Bragg
Rick Bragg's grandfather Charlie Bundrum would probably be surprised to learn that his grandson grew up to be a renowned Pulitzer Prize winning writer. Charlie himself couldn't read, though he always asked his wife Ava to read him the newspaper so he wouldn't be ignorant.
Charlie died before Bragg was born, so the author never knew his grandfather and only heard snippets about him from other people. When Bragg - who'd already penned several books about his southern family - decided to write a book about Charlie, he asked his relatives to tell him stories about the man.
Rick Bragg talking to his mother
Most of them grew tearful remembering. "What kind of man was this," Bragg wondered, "who was so beloved, so missed, that the mere mention of his death would make them cry forty-two years after he was preached into the sky?"
Charlie Bundrum was born in 1908 somewhere near the Alabama-Georgia border. He was a roofer by trade, but was also a whiskey-maker, sawmill hand, well-digger, hunter, poacher, and river man. Charlie - who was what women call "a purty man" - was tall and thin and "worked with nails in his teeth and a roofing hatchet in a fist as hard as Augusta brick."
Charlie Bundrum
Charlie made a boat out of two car hoods welded together, caught washtubs full of catfish, cooked good white whiskey in the pines, and drank his own product. He played the banjo and guitar, and sang, laughed, and buck-danced under the stars.
Picture of man buck-dancing
Charlie was tender hearted, loved babies, and took a simple-minded man into his home to protect him from thugs. Charlie was normally a quiet man, but when the spirit or the liquor moved him, Charlie was a great storyteller.
Charlie loved to tell stories around the campfire
Charlie didn't go to church, and lived by his own moral code. And Charlie inspired backwoods legend and loyalty.
Bragg decided to tell Charlie's story for many reasons, one above all others - "to give one more glimpse into a vanishing culture." Charlie was the descendant of a French Huguenot man called Jean Pierre Bondurant. Religious persecution drove Jean Pierre to the New World, and he landed in Virginia in 1700.
French Huguenots were persecuted in their home country
Over time, Jean Pierre's children and grandchildren drifted south, their name morphing into Bundrum along the way.
The Bundrums settled on both sides of the Alabama-Georgia line, and were among the first white settlers in the Appalachian foothills.
White settlers in the Appalachian foothills
They were farmers; they raised their children on deer meat, salt pork, and hoecakes; and they pushed ever deeper into the forest.
Hoecakes
There were few slaves here, "so the whites did the heavy lifting." This is the world Charlie was born into near the turn of the century.
Charlie's mother told him stories and his father taught him how to brawl and how to live in the woods. Charlie's daddy showed him how to hunt deer; how to run a trotline to catch fish; how to tend a still; and how to watch out for government revenuers.
Trotline
Appalachian still
Charlie learned well. He was the nemesis of law enforcement; beat up men who done him or his family wrong; and hunted out of season to feed his babies.
Bragg notes that Charlie 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. He saw no reason to obey some laws, like the ones about licenses, fees, and other governmental annoyances, but he would not have picked an apple off another man's ground and eaten it." On the other hand, Charlie "saw absolutely nothing wrong with downing a full pint of likker before engaging in a fistfight that sometimes required hospitalization."
Picture of man drinking moonshine liquor
Charlie dressed in the same working clothes all his life: a denim cap, canvas shirt, worn out overalls, and hobnail boots.
Typical attire for a working man
Starting as a teenager, Charlie drifted around for work - staying with relatives and living mostly on beans and bread. When Charlie was 16, you could see the man he'd be in his hands. "The hands were magnificent, hung at the ends of his skinny arms like baseball mitts, the grease and dirt and tar permanent as tattoos." And Charlie was machine gun fast on the rooftops, nailing shingles in place.
Picture of roofer laying shingles
Charlie longed to have a family and married "that four-eyed gal with black hair and blue eyes, Ava Hamilton."
Picture of Ava Hamilton Bundrum in 1965, with some of her grandchildren
Over the years, Charlie and Ava had seven children, and Charlie excelled at being a daddy. He knew you never let anything happen to your babies. When a neighbor teased Charlie's son with a dog, and the hound bit the boy, Charlie went over and shot the dog.....though he'd have rather shot the man.
Charlie and Ava had a brief period of prosperity after World War I, when Charlie got work in the Alabama steel mills. Charlie got a new car, rented a house in town, and got himself and Ava new clothes. Then 'The Great Depression' hit and Charlie was let go. He resumed renting cabins in the woods, at the end of dirt roads surrounded by poison ivy and blackberry bushes.
Picture of an old cabin in the woods
Charlie often had to relocate for work, and the family moved 21 times over the next ten years.
Bragg observes, "the prosperity they would chase criss-crossing the Alabama-Georgia state line in that overloaded rattletrap cut down Ford was usually only marginally better than the life they'd left behind....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."
During The Great Depression, a sack of flour was a valuable commodity
The depression was hard on the deep south. Babies died from poor diet and simple things like fevers and dehydration. You could feed your family catfish and jack salmon, poke salad and possum, but medicine took cash money.
Poke salad plant
And the poorest of the poor, blacks and whites, didn't have money. 'Women, black and white, really did smother their babies to save them from slow death, to give a stronger sounder child a little more."
It was during the depression that Charlie started to make a few gallons of liquor to swap for meal and bacon and coffee. Sometimes the Bundrums moved not because of work, but because a lawman had found Charlie's still.....and the family had to flee before the lawman found Charlie himself.
Lawmen searched for stills
Though things were difficult during the Depression, Charlie's children recall, today "that they never really noticed the pain and the poverty that swirled around them, because he loomed over it and would never let it reach them,” Bragg observes, “They did not notice 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.”
And there was always room for one or two more in Charlie's house.
Hootie, who became an 'adopted' member of the Bundrum family, was an ugly scrawny man, about five feet tall, who lived in a tiny shack along a north Georgia river. Hootie always wore an old army uniform, though he was never a soldier, and lived on fish and whiskey - trading one for the other. Charlie would see Hootie about every month or so, always on the river.
There were stories swirling around about Hootie, one of which was that he'd robbed a bank up north and hidden the money in Mason jars.
There were just enough rumors to attract goons who wanted Hootie's money, and every now and then a group of drunks would stop by Hootie's shack and beat him, demanding to know where the money was.
When Charlie found Hootie beaten to a pulp, he got his roofing hatchet and sat on the stoop of the Hootie's shack....waiting. But no one came. The next day Charlie took Hootie back to the Bundrum's shack north of Rome, Georgia. Ava said she "reckoned it would be fine.....for a while", but Hootie stayed with the family for years, sleeping in a corner of whatever shack they inhabited.
Bragg writes, "Hootie, because he needed a hero, brought out the light in Charlie's character. Charlie's children pulled [the light] out of him like taffy when they crawled in his lap and felt his nose or tugged his ears. And the liquor made him gleam too, hiding his worries in a golden fog, loosening his tongue, numbing his mind, and reminding him it had been a long long time since he sang Darling Nelly Gray."
Conversely, Bragg says, "Anger, temper, opened up the door on the hot dark basement in Charlie's soul. His actions were so quick and so violent that people wondered how the two sides of his character lived in only one body, as if one leg would wanna go one way and one leg go another, like a poor zombie conjured from goofer dirt. But the anger was not meanness; it was willingness to hurt a man when that man hurt or threatened you or your loved ones. Charlie hit and hit hard, because he believed he had to."
The revenuers were always after Charlie, laying for him on both sides of the state line - but Charlie was elusive. When lawmen came, Charlie tried to melt into the dark. If this didn't work, things got rough. Once, Charlie stomped over one revenuer "like a bull over a rodeo clown" and ran the rest of them into the ground. The fact is, the law never caught Charlie for making whiskey.
Charlie was squeezed between his love for his family and his love for liquor, but he never drank at home. Charlie returned home when his drinking was done.....and staggered into the house. Charlie wasn't a mean drunk. He drank and he laughed, and he sang, and he told good stories.....or sometimes he just went to bed smiling. Charlie liked living and he liked drinking.
One of Charlie's most violent episodes involved some Georgia neighbors, the Reardons. Charlie's family lived near the Reardons for a time in the 1940s, and constantly heard them yelling and fighting. The Reardons loved conflict, made moonshine in the house, and always had the law after them.
One of the Reardon sons, Jerry, had a large girlfriend named Norris. Everyone feared Jerry except for Charlie.....and poor Hootie was scared to death of him. When the Bundrums moved away, Jerry came to their house one night and - with a shotgun pressed into his shoulder - demanded to see Hootie.....claiming Hootie stole some of his liquor.
Charlie didn't have his gun or hammer on him, but did one of the bravest things possible. He walked out and approached Jerry, striding straight toward the shot gun. "You got to leave here," he said. "I got babies in that house." Jerry pulled the trigger, but the shot missed, and Charlie ran at Jerry, "who saw a fist the size of a lard bucket come flying at his nose."
Jerry's head snapped back and Charlie grabbed the gun and hit Jerry's teeth. Then Norris came out of the shadows with a hog-killing knife, and Charlie shot her.....and the shot passed through both breasts.
Neither Jerry nor Norris was mortally wounded, the Reardons didn't come back, and the law didn't investigate. Charlie observed, "Some people need shooting and need knocking upside the head"......but Charlie still moved his family back to Alabama, to get some distance from the troublemakers.
After World War II the Bundrums finally lived in one house - in Jacksonville, Alabama - for seven years. The government was giving out surplus 'commodities' every month, which consisted of cans of peanut butter, five pound blocks of American cheese, and the occasional sack of yellow grits, corn meal, flour, oats, or rice.
After World War II, the government gave away surplus commodities
Charlie hadn't changed much on the outside as he passed forty. He still worked hard and drank liquor like water. The fact is, though, that things in the south were changing.
Bragg notes that, "It was not Charlie's world anymore. The revenuers had airplanes now and took a man's picture from the sky." Sheriff Socko Pate busted a still almost every week and Charlie gave up moon-shining. It wasn't the same in other ways either. "The State troopers seldom had to chase a man anymore down the dirt roads. They just took down his tag number and sent a car out to fetch him when they felt like it. That to Charlie was just mean. And a man couldn't drive drunk now with all the cars that went so fast on the creeping blacktop."
Also, "If a man fought the police or the deputies in an honest bare knuckle fight it almost seems as if they didn't appreciate the contest in it, like they lost their sense of humor as soon as he balled up his fists. Taking a whupping from Charlie had been almost a rite of passage for a lot of young troopers, deputies, and police, but now the men behind the badges pulled their batons and put a hand on their pistol....and what fun is that? A man didn't do a night in jail anymore to sober up. They took him to the county lockup in Anniston and it cost good money to bail him out, money his family didn't have. The law penned [Charlie] in."
By the Spring of 1958, Ava and Charlie had been together for more than three decades. Sadly, Charlie was sick and nearing the end, without strength and without purpose.....and his body gave out. The cars lined the blacktop for more than a mile the day of Charlie's funeral, and the church couldn't hold all the people. Funeral singers sang about the mystery of death and the beauty of living, and Charlie's friends talked about how much they loved him.
Bragg writes, "Charlie was no myth and not even a legend really, or at least just a small one. It's only when you compare him to today, with this new south, that he seems larger than life. The difference between then and now is his complete lack of shame. He was not ashamed of his clothes, his speech, his life. He not only thrived, he gloried in it. In the new true south it's harder to be poor and proud, harder to work your way into an unapologetic hard-eyed independence. I think Charlie would have done it still, but he was more a man than most, imperfect sure, but a man.....a kind mostly lost to this world forever."
Bragg tells many additional stories in the book, about Charlie and other members of the family. For example, Ava beat up a scarlet-lipped hussie named Blackie Lee for getting too cozy with Charlie; Ava collected pocketbooks (purses); Ava's most precious possession was her kerosene lamp; Charlie and two relatives saw a man murdered and thrown in the river; Charlie and Ava's four-year-old daughter accidentally set herself on fire; Charlie's two oldest sons were drafted into the army; Rick Bragg's mother and father had a rocky marriage; and lots more.
Bragg is a wonderful storyteller, and I enjoyed reading about Charlie Bundrum, his extended family, and the culture of the old south.
Rating: 4.5 stars
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