Moon Shiner
On his way to Pakistan to cover the aftermath of 9/11 for the New York Times, Rick Bragg opened the newspaper to find his grandfather’s face staring back from a full-page ad for Bragg’s newest book, Ava’s Man. “I thought, here I am going to write about this great tragedy, and I still miss this old man,” Bragg says.
People who had read Bragg’s memoir All Over but the Shoutin’ wanted to know more about his hard-as-nails grandparents — especially his grandfather. “You left out the good part,” cheek-pinching old ladies scolded him. So Bragg sat back down and spent three years recreating the grandfather he never knew. Charlie Bundrum was a roofer, moonshiner and family man who solved problems with his fists and his gun — a man so impressive that, even forty years after his death, his daughters couldn’t talk about him without crying.
“All the things you ever learn about interviewing people don’t work with family,” Bragg says. “The best phrase I ever heard for trying to do the impossible is herding cats, and that’s what it’s like trying to get my folks to stick to the point.” Ava’s Man reads like a family get-together: Aunts and uncles trading stories of wild exploits and shared misfortune over plates of food in the back yard.
Even following the success of Bragg’s first memoir, a number of reviews of Ava’s Man have taken issue with the fact that Charlie Bundrum’s life was essentially unremarkable — a common life, not the kind usually portrayed in biographies. “I think there’s a very strange notion out there that only the lives of the rich or famous are worth telling about,” Bragg says. “But I’ll maintain that Charlie’s life was a hell of a lot more interesting than someone who made $40 billion.” Bragg may be right, considering that few business tycoons lived life the way Bundrum did, dodging moonshine hunters by running through familiar woods and tossing rogue deputies out the front door of the local beer joint, known as Maple on the Hill.
Though Bragg lives in New Orleans, traveling the world on assignment for The New York Times, he hasn’t left his childhood so far behind that he can imagine washing his hands of his gritty past. “I’ll probably write about these people all my life,” he says. “I’d much rather spend time with an accomplished chicken thief than a captain of industry.”
Critics are also calling Ava’s Man a vision of a bygone era and an examination of class issues, but Bragg says he simply wanted to bring Charlie back to life, if only for a moment. “It always amazes you when reviewers say you did these things you didn’t know you meant to do. Like, “You told the story of the vanishing South.” I think that sometimes things just happen when you tell a good story about a decent man.”
