An Affectionate Portrait of the South’s Poor, Hard-Living Whites

“Ava’s Man” is a big book, at once tough and sentimental. Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, broke into best-sellerdom with his “All Over But the Shoutin,” his moving account of how his mother raised him and his two brothers in extreme poverty in the Deep South.

Bragg takes that story back a generation in “Ava’s Man,” which tells the story of his mother’s father, Charlie Bundrum, husband of Bragg’s grandmother, Ava. Long after Charlie died young (at 51) of drinking too much whisky, the grandchildren would ask her, as she sat rocking in her chair on the porch, “Grandma, you goin’ to get you a man?”

“No, hon,” she would say, “I ain’t goin’ to get me no man.... I had me one.”

Charlie Bundrum was a fighter, a drinker, a man at home in the woods and on the rivers of foothill Appalachia, along the northern Alabama-Georgia border, where for most of his life he had stills and made what Bragg calls “likker, clear whisky.” For every gallon he made, he drank a pint. The deputies chased him and sometimes, but not often, caught him.

Bundrum beat one man half to death for throwing a snake at his son and shot a large woman with a shotgun for trying to cut him with a butcher knife. He, Bragg writes, “beat the hell out of two worrisome Georgia highway patrolmen and then threw them headfirst out of the front door of a beer joint called Maple on the Hill.” He had eight children; one, a baby girl, died. He moved his family 21 times during the Great Depression, back and forth across the Georgia-Alabama border, mostly into remote places deep in the woods where he felt at home.

Ava read the newspaper to her husband, for Charlie couldn’t read. He belonged to that vast group of Southern white men who struggled through the Great Depression, Bragg writes, “in a part of the nation still wasted from Reconstruction.” Black people are not part of this narrative. Bragg does remark that each county had its own two bootleggers, one white, one black, but the two worlds were so separate that Bragg rarely comments on that fact. At one point, however, he does most pointedly. Bundrum is on a job in Alabama and a rising river suddenly engulfs his car. He leaves it and heads for home through Birmingham.

“Commissioner Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor,” Bragg writes, “didn’t want any white trash on his streets, and officers routinely swept the street and the bus station for vagrants.”

While Charlie waited for the bus, with no baggage, in tattered overalls, two carloads of city police moved fast down the sidewalk, picked up Charlie and several other poor white men and sent them, Bragg writes, “what would be the most famous jail in the country.” Charlie, a despised white man, spent time--two weeks--in the Birmingham jail where a despised black man, Martin Luther King, would spend time to its everlasting infamy and his everlasting fame.

The poor whites of the South--the men rough and often hellions, the women hard-pressed yet enduring--have not, until Rick Bragg, been much written about honestly and affectionately, There was, of course, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” by James Agee with photographs by Walker Evans, of the Depression South. But, for all its sympathy and even grandeur of conception, that book came from the outside.

Bragg’s work is from the inside. He never knew his grandfather, who died a year before Bragg’s birth. So if at times an air of sentimental wistfulness touches the pages of this fine book, that is all right. Charlie Bundrum’s South, which lasted several hundred years, is disappearing fast: men going possum-hunting and drinking on the river bank, singing and doing buck dancing (just stomping the ground), getting drunker and fighting and sometimes killing. (Bundrum and his sons were camping by a river one night and heard a fight at a nearby still and then heard a shot and then, silent and terrified, saw a group of men pass close by and dump a body in the river.)

All in all, Charlie Bundrum was a good man. He took in and kept with the family a weird but harmless little man other men were bullying.

And Charlie loved his family--defended its members, tenderly played with them and provided for them the best he could. “Ava’s Man” is a monument to a grandfather Bragg had not known and to a condemned group of disappearing Americans who, until now, have had no bard.