Ava's Man (Random House Large Print) - Hardcover

Bragg, Rick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375431209 ISBN 13: 9780375431203

Verlag: Random House Large Print, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

1. In the prologue, Rick Bragg wonders about his grandfather, “What kind of man was this . . . who is so beloved, so missed, that the mere mention of his death would make [his family] cry forty-two years after he was preached into the sky?” [p. 9] How does the book answer this question? What kind of man is Charlie Bundrum? Why does his memory evoke such powerful emotions in those who knew him? 2. Bragg says that he wrote this story “for a lot of reasons,” one of which was “to give one more glimpse into a vanishing culture” [p. 13]. How does he create a vivid picture of that culture? What does he admire about it? How is it different from “the new South”? What other reasons compelled Bragg to write about a grandfather he never knew? 3. Bragg says that Charlie Bundrum 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. . . . Yet he saw absolutely nothing wrong with downing a full pint of likker . . . before engaging in a fistfight that sometimes required hospitalization” [p. 53]. What kind of moral code does Charlie live by? Are his frequent acts of violence justifiable? In what sense can Charlie be called a hero? 4. Charlie is a man of great physical strength and courage, but what instances of kindness, generosity, and caring balance the violence and recklessness in his life? How does the inclusion of this kind of behavior in Bragg’s description create a richer and fuller portrait of the man? 5. In speaking of his grandfather’s legacy, Bragg says, “A man like Charlie Bundrum doesn’t leave much else, not title or property, not even letters in the attic. There’s just stories, all told second- and thirdhand, as long as somebody remembers” [p. 18]. What is the value of preserving the kind of stories that Bragg gathers in Ava’s Man ? 6. Ava’s Man is filled with dramatic confrontations and vivid scenes. What episodes stand out the most? What do these episodes reveal about the character of the Bundrum family? 7. In considering his grandfather’s drinking, Bragg writes, “I am not trying to excuse it. He did things that he shouldn’t have. I guess it takes someone who has outlived a mean drunk to appreciate a kind one” [p. 133]. What does this passage suggest about Bragg’s personal stake in reconnecting with his grandfather? What kind of portrait does he paint of his own father in Ava’s Man ? 8. Charlie Bundrum “was a man who did the things more civilized men dream they could, who beat one man half to death for throwing a live snake at his son, who shot a large woman with a .410 shotgun when she tried to cut him with a butcher knife, who beat the hell out of two worrisome Georgia highway patrolmen and threw them headfirst out the front door of a beer joint called the Maple on the Hill” [p. 8]. In what ways is Charlie free from the constraints of society? What is the cost of this freedom? Is Bragg right in thinking that Charlie’s way of living is something that more civilized men envy? 9. Bragg writes that Ava could have had her sister Grace’s life, a life of relative wealth and comfort, of fine clothes, good food, and travel, instead of a life of rented houses, poverty, and hard labor in the cotton fields. “She could have hated her life,” Bragg admits [p. 153]. Why doesn’t she? What does Charlie give her that other men cannot? What kind of woman is she? 10. Why does Charlie take in Hootie? What does this reveal about his character? What does Hootie bring out in Charlie? 11. Bragg writes that Charlie “could charm a bird off a wire” [p. 45]. What are the charms of Bragg’s own storytelling style? Where else does he use colorful similes? In what ways is his narrative voice perfectly suited to his subject matter? 12. What does Ava’s Man reveal about how the Great Depression affected people in the Deep South, especially those who lived in the foothills? How did it affect the Bundrums specifically? How are they treated by landlords, sheriffs, and others in positions of power? 13. For centuries, recorded history has largely been the account of those who have had the greatest impact on world events. Why is the history of a man like Charlie Bundrum important? In what ways does it offer a door into American history and culture that more conventional histories cannot provide? 14. In the epilogue, Bragg argues that when compared with the new South, Charlie Bundrum seems larger than life, because of “his complete lack of shame. He was not ashamed of his clothes, his speech, his life. He not only thrived, he gloried in it” [p. 248]. What accounts for Charlie’s pride? Why is Bragg so proud of him? What does Ava’s Man suggest about the way in which inner character is more important than external circumstances?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rick Bragg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996. A national correspondent for the New York Times, he lives in Miami, Florida.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Ava's Man

By Rick Bragg

Random House Large Print Publishing

Copyright ©2001 Rick Bragg
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0375431209

Chapter One

The beatin’ of Blackie Lee

The foothills of the Appalachians
the 1930s

Ava met him at a box-lunch auction outside Gadsden, Alabama, when she wasbarely fifteen, when a skinny boy in freshly washed overalls stepped from thecrowd of bidders, pointed to her and said, “I got one dollar, byGod.” In the evening they danced in the grass to a fiddler and banjopicker, and Ava told all the other girls she was going to marry that boysomeday, and she did. But to remind him that he was still hers, after the cottonrows aged her and the babies came, she had to whip a painted woman named BlackieLee.

Maybe it isn’t quite right to say that she whipped her. To whip somebody,down here, means there was an altercation between two people, and somebody, theone still standing, won. This wasn’t that. This was a beatin’, andit is not a moment that glimmers in family history. But of all the stories I wastold of their lives together, this one proves how Ava loved him, and hated him,and which emotion won out in the end.

Charlie Bundrum was what women here used to call a purty man, a man with thick,sandy hair and blue eyes that looked like something you would see on a richwoman’s bracelet. His face was as thin and spare as the rest of him, andhe had a high-toned, chin-in-the-air presence like he had money, but he neverdid. His head had never quite caught up with his ears, which were still too bigfor most human beings, but the women of his time were not particular as to ears,I suppose.

He was also a man who was not averse to stopping off at the beer joint, now andagain, and that was where he encountered a traveling woman with crimson lipstickand silk stockings named Blackie Lee. People called her Blackie because of hercoal-black hair, and when she told my granddaddy that she surely was parched andtired and sure would ’preciate a place to wash her clothes and rest aspell before she moved on down the road, he told her she was welcome at hishouse.

They were living in north Georgia at that time, outside Rome. Ava and the fivechildren—there was only James, William, Edna, Juanita and Margaretthen—were a few miles away, working in Newt Morrison’s cotton field.Charlie always took in strays—dogs, men and women, who needed aplace—but Blackie was a city woman and pretty, too, which set the stagefor mayhem.

It all might have gone unnoticed. Blackie Lee might’ve washed her clothes,set a spell and then just moved along, if that was all that she was after. Butwe’ll never know. We’ll never know because she had the misfortune tohang her stockings on Ava Bundrum’s clothesline in front of God andeverybody.

Miles away from there, Ava was hunched over in the cotton field, dragging aheavy sack, her fingers and thumbs on fire from the needle-sharp stickers on thecotton bolls. Newt Morrison’s daughter, Sis, came up alongside of her inthe field, one row over, and lit the fuse.

“Ava,” said Sis, who had driven past Ava and Charlie’s houseearlier that day, “did you get you some silk stockings?”

Ava said no she had not, what foolishness, and just picked on.

“Well,” Sis said, “is your sister Grace visitin’you?”

No, Ava said, if Grace had come to visit, she would have written or sent word.

“Well,” said Sis, “I drove past y’all’s place andseen some silk stockings on the line, and I thought they must have beenGrace’s, ’cause she’s the only one I could think of that wouldhave silk stockings.”

Ava said well, maybe it was Grace, and picked on. Grace had wed a rich man andhad silk stockings and a good car and may have come by, just on a whim. Thatmust be it. Had to be.

Edna, then only a little girl, said her momma just kept her back bowed and herface down for a few more rows, then jerked bolt upright as if she had been stungby a bee, snatched the cotton sack from her neck and flung it, heavy as it was,across two rows.

Then she just started walking, and the children, puzzled, hurried after her.Even as an old woman Ava could walk most people plumb into the ground, and as ayoung woman she just lowered her head and swung her arms and kicked up dust asshe powered down the dirt road to home.

When she swung into the yard, sometime later, it was almost dark and Blackie Leewas on the porch, cooling herself. Ava stopped and drew a breath and just lookedat her for a moment, measuring her for her coffin. Then she stomped over to thewoodpile and picked up the ax.

About that time it must have dawned on Blackie Lee who this young woman was, whothese big-eyed children were, and she ran inside, put the latch down on the doorand began to speak to Jesus.

Ava just stood there, breathing hard, her long hair half in and half out of herdew rag, and announced that the woman could either open the door and take herbeatin’ or take her beatin’ after Ava hacked down her own door. And“you might not want me to walk in thar, with a’ ax in myhand.” Blackie Lee, hysterical, unlatched the door and stepped back, andAva, as she promised, dropped the ax and stepped inside.

She might not have beat the woman quite so bad if it had not been for thedishpan. It had dirty water in it, from that woman’s clothes. No one, noone, washed their clothes in Ava’s dishpan.

Edna stood at the door, peeking.

Listen to her:

“Momma 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 thather hands swelled up so big she couldn’t fit ’em in her apronpocket. Then she grabbed aholt of her with one hand and used the other hand toflag down a car that was comin’, and she jerked open that car door andflung that woman in and told the man drivin’ that car to get her ‘onoutta here.’ And that man said, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and droveoff with Blackie Lee.”

Charlie was at work when this happened, which was very fortunate, so fortunatethat, even now, his children swear that there was God’s hand in it. Evenwith temptation at his house, he went off to work, and made a living, and itsaved him, it saved everything. A weak man would have just laid out that day,and if he had been home Ava would have killed him dead as Julius Caesar.

Ava and the five children went back to Newt Morrison’s to spend the night.Newt was distant kin and Ava knew she was welcome there. But first she walkedinside her house and threw that dishpan out into the yard as far as she could.

That night, Charlie showed up to take them home. And Ava lit into him so hardand so fast that Charlie lost one of his shoes in the melee and had to fightfrom an uneven platform, which is bad when you have what seems to be a badgercrawling and spittin’ around your head. They fought, Edna said, all theway down the hall, crashing hard into the wall, making a hellish racket andscaring everybody in there to death. Children screamed and dogs barked andCharlie just kept on hollerin’ over and over, “Dammit, Ava.Quit.” Finally they crashed onto a bed, and into the room walked the oldman, Newt, barefoot, one of his overall galluses on and one off. Newt thoughtthat it was Charlie who was beating his wife to death, instead of the other wayaround, and all he knew was that this boy, Charlie, kin or not, had invaded hishome, rattled the walls and frightened his family.

Newt, stooped and gray and gnarly, was much too old to fistfight a man in hisown house. So he reached into his overalls pocket, fished out his pocketknifeand flicked out a blade long enough to cut watermelon.

Ava took one look at that knife and flung her body across her husband, to shieldhim. Then she looked up at Newt, and when she spoke there were spiders andbroken glass in her voice.

“Don’t you touch him,” she hissed.

* * *

Everybody has a moment like it. If they never did, they never did love nobody,truly. People who have lived a long, long time say it, so it must be so.

* * *

They never spoke about it. They never had another moment like it again. Theyfought—my Lord, did they fight—for thirty years, until the childrenwere 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 togetherwas some sweet revenge. Charlie and Ava did not get to grow old together. Whatthey got was life condensed, something richer and sweeterand—yes—more bitter and violent, life with the dull moments justboiled or scorched away.

She never bowed to him, and he never made her, and they lived that way, in thetime they had.

Every now and then, they would jab a little. She would stand over her newdishpan and recite a little poem as she gently rinsed her iron skillet andbiscuit pans:

Single life is a happy life
Single life is a pleasure
I am single and no man’s wife
And no man can control me

He would pretend not to hear. And bide his time, to get even.

“Daddy,” Margaret asked him once, when she was still a little girl,“how come you haven’t bought us a radio?”

Charlie would just shake his head.

“Hon, we don’t need no radio,” he would say, and then he wouldpoint one of his long, bony fingers at Ava. “I already got awalkie-talkie.”

And on and on it went, them pretending, maybe out of pride, that they did notlove each other, and need each other, as much as they did.

As time dragged on they would break out the banjo—Charlie was hell-hot ona banjo—and the guitar, which Ava played a lifetime. And in the light ofan old kerosene lantern, as the children looked on from their beds, they wouldduel.

Charlie would do “Doin’ My Time”—his commentary onmarriage—and grin while she stared hard at him from behind her spectacles:

On this ol’ rock pile
With a ball and chain
They call me by a number
Not my name
Gotta do my time
Lord, Lord
Gotta do my time

Then Ava would answer with “Wildwood Flower” or something like it:

I’ll sing and I’ll dance
And my laugh shall be gay
I’ll charm every heart
And the crowd I will sway
I’ll live yet to see him
Regret the dark hour
When he won and neglected
This frail wildwood flower

And Charlie would sing back at her with another song, about being on a chaingang, or doing time in a Yankee prison, or “All the Good Times Are Pastand Gone”:

I wish to the Lord
I’d never been born

Or “Knoxville Girl”:

We went to take an evening walk
About a mile from town
I picked a stick up off the ground
And knocked that fair girl down

But it always ended in dancing, somehow. He would beat those banjo strings andshe would buck-dance around the kitchen, her skirts in her hands, her heavyshoes smacking into the boards, and the children would laugh, because it isimpossible not to when your momma acts so young.

* * *

Much, much later, when she had passed seventy, she still played and she stillsang but she could not really see how to tune her guitar, and her hand shook toomuch to do it right, anyway. She would miss a lick now and then, and she wouldalways frown at what time had done to her. But she never forgot the words to“Wildwood Flower.”

I’ll think of him never
I’ll be wild and gay
I’ll cease this wild weeping,
Drive sorrow away
But I wake from my dreaming
My idol was clay
My visions of love
Have all vanished away

* * *

It didn’t all start there, of course, with the beating of that unfortunatewoman. The beginning of their story goes way, way back, beyond them, even beyondthe first Bundrum to drift here, to these green foothills that straddle theAlabama-Georgia border. In it, I found not only the beginnings of a familyhistory but a clue to our character.

All my life, I have heard the people of the foothills described as poor, humblepeople, and I knew that was dead wrong. My people were, surely, poor, but theywere seldom humble. Charlie sure wasn’t, and his daddy wasn’t, and Isuspect that his daddy’s daddy wasn’t humble a bit. And Ava, whomarried into that family, was no wilting flower, either. A little humility, alittle meekness of spirit, might have spared us some pain, over the years, butthe sad truth is, it’s just not in us. With the exception of my ownmother, maybe, it never was.

For a family so often poor, we have, for a hundred years or more, refused toadapt our character very much. But then, if we had been willing to change just alittle bit, we never would have gotten here in the first place.

We are here because our ancestors were too damn hardheaded to adapt, toassimilate. We are here because someone with a name very much like Bundrumpicked a fight with the King of France, and the Church of Rome.

Continues...

Excerpted from Ava's Manby Rick Bragg Copyright ©2001 by Rick Bragg. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Large Print
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0375431209
• ISBN 13: 9780375431203
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 385
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarien