Ava's Man

Rick Bragg is the man. Why is it that when I read his books, I feel like I must have roots in the South, too? Simply put, he captures Southern, hard scrabble, depression-era life from the perspective of his lovable and flawed grandfather so poignantly that readers from anywhere will identify. Truly a gifted writer who captures family history in all of its beauties and pains. A model memoir.

Ava's man was Bragg's maternal grandfather who passed away before Rick was born into poverty.

Like William Faulkner, Bragg writes of the poor American South with such vivid descriptions that you feel as though you are walking along a hot, dusty path in a depression era back woods, spiting tobacco and drinking moon shine as your caloused hands and achy back trudge along yet one more soul depleting day.

Like Pat Conroy, Bragg captures the essence of an abusive father who simply won't let go of the booze and the demons.

Life was hard, mean and nasty and wore Bragg's family down to a pulp. Bragg's admiration for his grandfather shone through.

This is the second book of his that I've read and I'll continue to learn of Bragg's saga. It is wonderful to read such clear, crisp images. This guy can write!

With his improbable personal background and deft story-telling, Rick Bragg has earned an avid readership. In All Over But the Shoutin' (1997) he introduced his family of origin, and especially his heroic mother, who epitomized the poorest of poor white trash. His newly released The Prince of Frogtown (2008) makes peace with his violently alcoholic father who repeatedly abandoned his family. Bragg spent one semester in college, then started writing, first high school sports, local stories, anything. In 1993 he won a prestigious Nieman fellowship to spend a year at Harvard, and in 1996 he won a Pulitzer for feature writing at the New York Times. Today he teaches writing at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

In Ava's Man Bragg re-creates the story of his maternal grandfather, Charlie Bundrum (1901-1958), a man of mythic proportions and colorful character who died the year before Bragg was born. Like his other two memoirs, Bragg's narrative works well at several levels. He illustrates the power of place, honors the traditions of a time and place that have been lost to cultural snobbery, exemplifies the ambiguous shadow that one's extended family casts over successive generations, and is just a remarkable wordsmith with the dialect of rural Alabama and Georgia.

Charlie Bundrum was a roofer who could neither read nor write. His people picked the banjo. At the slightest insult to their "honor" they brawled with pocket knives, ax handles, and shot guns. They worked in the mills and picked other people's cotton. "Chollie" fished his beloved Coosa River on a "boat" made from two car hoods that he welded together, he could make a harmonica scream, and he ruined his liver from too many mason jars of moonshine. He eloped with his beloved Ava when she was sixteen and he was seventeen. Ava dipped snuff, her dresses were made from feed and flour sacks, she knew the meaning of welfare cheese handouts, and somehow nourished her eight children through the Depression and two world wars. Charlie moved his family twenty-one times in a decade between the backwoods of Georgia and Alabama, sometimes looking for work, sometimes outrunning the law, and never more than a hundred miles either way.

When Bragg's own alcoholic father deserted his family for the last time, Ava took in Bragg's mother and three sons and became their stalwart caregiver. Bragg owns the horrific domestic violence, superstitions, cockfights, and alcoholism that characterized so much of those times, places, and people. But he dignifies their hard work, the dirt under their fingernails, music, foods, traditions, poetic dialect, and resilience. When Charlie Bundrum died at the age of fifty-one, a line of cars snaked a mile or more to his funeral at Tredegar Congregational Holiness Church. How many of us today can hope for a similar legacy that is so honored by your community?

If chronological order is important to you, Ava's Man should be read as the first in the series of Rick Bragg's three biographical novels. Charlie Bundrum's story is the first of what we will learn is two family's lives in the rural south during turbulent times. Then, as now, when life is hard people find many different ways to survive. Generations later, we have the luxury of looking back with a critical eye. That's easy. When you're cold and hungry, the view is different.

In this book, Bragg shares with us the life to Charlie Bundrum who, along with Ava manages to rear a house full of children who survive with him and sometimes without him. One of those children is Margaret, Bragg's mother. Hard working and hard living, Charlie did all he knew to do to get by.

More than in either of the other two books in Bragg's trilogy of his family, Ava's Man tells us more about the history of region, industry, and the impact of war, all of which contribute to the making of the man, Charlie Bundrum.

While Bragg writes, he always manages to let the characters tell the story...in their own words. That language, and the crafting of the true tale he tells, leaves this "their story." On the other hand, Bragg's own turn of a phrase is "my language," that upon which I was reared. And is that which makes me feel like going home.

I have read all of Rick Braggs books and thia was the best. I felt like I just wanted to keep on reading. He is such a powerful writer. I just wish he had more books out there, but the ones he has written are the best. You will not be disappointed reading any of his books. There is no wondering why he is a Pulitzer Prize winner.