Ava's Man

Ava first met Charlie in the 1930s, and from that moment on, they were passionately committed to one another:

Ava met him at a box-lunch auction outside Gadsden, Alabama, when she was barely fifteen, when a skinny boy in freshly washed overalls stepped from the crowd of bidders, pointed to her and said, ‘I got one dollar, by God.’ […] But to remind him that he was still hers, after the cotton rows aged her and the babies came, she had to whip a painted woman named Blackie Lee (19).

While Blackie is at Ava and Charlie’s home resting and washing her clothes, Ava is working in the cotton fields miles away. However, she hears a rumor that a pair of silk stockings are hanging on her clothesline back home. Ava drops her bag of cotton and walks in a mad rush to her house. Around dark, she arrives to see Blackie on the porch. Blackie sees how angry Ava looks and runs inside: “[Ava] beat her all through the house. She beat her out onto the porch, beat her out into the yard and beat her down to the road, beat her so hard that her hands swelled up so big she couldn’t fit ‘em in her apron pocket” (22). When Charlie gets home that night, Ava starts to beat him, too.

Despite that moment, Ava and Charlie stay together and seem to love each other wildly, even though they often pick on each other. In their younger years, Charlie often plays the banjo in the evenings and Ava dances and sings to his music.

Bragg remembers when he saw his “real buck dance” (28). It was almost dark, and he was in a bait shop parking lot waiting for his mom. He looked over at some fishermen who were drinking by a fire and listening to music from their truck radio. One of the men started hitting his fist on his leg to the music, and “commenced to dance” (29). The bizarre sight was unfamiliar to Bragg, and the dance itself “was not rhythmic, not fluid. The old man stomped hard at the gravel, then shuffled a bit before stomping down hard again, as if he was trying to stamp out fired or snakes” (29). Bragg explains that buck dancing was native to his people: “Folklorists trace it to Ireland and Wales and other places, and it became, over time, the odd ballet that [he] saw on a riverbank not far from the falls, the stench of burning tires in the wind” (29).

Bragg’s grandfather “was a buck dancer” (29), and the way he danced always reflected his mood. Charlie couldn’t read, and many of the men in the family couldn’t either. Bragg notes that although there wasn’t a written record of the family history, he believes the Bundrum men faced similar plights: “The first Bundrum, if the connection is correct, was just one more poor fool was got run off from someplace else. And being run off, I learned, is a rich family tradition” (31).

The first Bundrum was “Jean Pierre Bondurant […] He was a Huguenot. Wandering people, set adrift by the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were the disenfranchised French Protestants” (31). Bragg’s family only knows about Jean Pierre because of ship records: He moved from Geneva to England to America, and his descendants made their way south. As they moved, the name “Bondurant” slowly turned into “Bundrum” (32).

Jimmy Jim was Charlie’s father and Bragg’s great-grandfather. Despite his playful nickname, Jimmy Jim was a severe man:

His temper was hot as bird’s blood, and his eyes seemed to burn, even in photographs. He had a hooked nose and thick brown mustaches and wore overalls with a black suit coat over them, and was known to carry a little .22 pistol in his coat pocket. He 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 (36).

In Jimmy Jim’s time, “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” (39). Jimmy Jim was also a heavy drinker and a fighter. Bragg recalls how one night, when a man attacked Jimmy Jim, his great-grandfather bit off his own finger to save himself. Jimmy Jim had seven children with his wife, Mattie Mixon, and he was hard on them.

Jimmy Jim was “as well known for his likker as his lumber” (42). Law enforcement continually chased Jimmy Jim, trying to bust his whiskey stills, so he would have to go into hiding for long periods of time, leaving his wife and children alone. When Charlie was 12 years old, a milk cow kicked his mom’s hip and shattered it. Although the injury left her crippled, she managed to take care of her children without her husband. While Charlie’s dad was hard on him, he and his mom were close. She died when Charlie was 15, and the loss of his mom crushed him.

During his young life, Charlie is a roamer: “He could run, man, he could run. Up and over the ridges and down, down into the hollows, he trailed the dogs that trailed the possums, his ears tuned to their music” (47). He catches possums and sells them to people for a little bit of money, or at least the hope that someone will invite him to dinner. Everything he owns can fit in a little sack, and he is skinny. People call him “whistle britches” (50) because his clothes are too big, and the wind always seems to blow right through them.

Despite being so skinny, he has strong, dirty hands—working man’s hands. He likes to drink homemade whiskey, but he is never mean. In fact, he is incredibly talkative and jolly when he drinks. He has his own sense of morality, believing it’s wrong to steal or lie, but it’s okay to drink. Although he can’t read or write, he is business smart and knows how to do “carpenter’s calculations” (54). Charlie wants a big family and is a man of simple pleasures:

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 (54).

Bragg describes his grandmother, whom he maintains “God made just one” (56). As a little girl, Ava had a huge personality, something that stayed with her throughout her whole life. Despite her visual impairment, she read avidly: “She loved learning, people said, and if it had been another time or place Ava might have been anything, done anything. But love, and luck, set her walking down a different road” (57).

Ava’s family was better off than Charlie’s, and her family encouraged her to read and write. As a young girl, Ava’s family belonged to a Congregational Holiness church, “where people get happy and just start to yell, where people begin to speak in tongues, fall out on the floor and weep and laugh and go into trances, as if dead” (58).

Ava loved music, which came naturally to her, and her family was distantly related to Elvis Presley. She first met Charlie during a box lunch event, where young, eligible women made lunches, which men bid on to spend an afternoon with the woman of his choice. Charlie bid on Ava’s lunch, which her sisters actually made because Ava didn’t cook. At the lunch, Charlie and Ava fell in love quickly:

They lied about their age and got a preacher named Jones to marry them in his house in Gadsden, when she was sixteen and he was seventeen. And Ava just walked away from the upstanding, church-going life she had been raised in and followed a boy, a boy who could not even read or write, into uncertainty (63).