If you subscribe to the popular magazine Southern Living, then most likely you - like me - have yanked the latest issue straight from the mailbox and opened up to the last page to read Rick Bragg’s column, Southern Journal. Anyone born anywhere due south of Maryland will understand Rick’s flavorful, sometimes sobering and always humorous references to life in the South — and if you weren’t born in the South, you will definitely garner a new understanding of the people of the region.
Born into a family of front porch storytellers in the Northeastern Alabama foothills, Rick Bragg was raised primarily by his mother, Margaret. His father, a Korean War veteran, struggled with alcoholism and domestic abuse, remaining absent for most of Rick’s childhood. Margaret worked hard and sacrificed many comforts (including not buying a new dress for 18 years) to support her three growing sons by picking cotton, taking in laundry for payment and cleaning houses. But what she also gave her boys in the long run was even more sustaining… a deep devoted love for their family, flawed though it may be, and an enduring fondness for her magic in the kitchen.
Rick will tell you himself that his childhood was abundant in both deeply-rooted love and dirt poor hardship. But all of his combined experiences left him with the wonderful ability to be a full & rich voice of his people - both in Northeastern Alabama and around the South. His insightful gift of language makes reading his works profoundly satisfying. His gift of storytelling is intimate - sifted through the rough Foothills earth and his personal history of living in the Deep South, lyrical and well-crafted.
“It is easy to be liked when the world has no jagged edges, when life is electric blankets and peach ice cream. But to be beloved, a man needs a dragon.”
― Rick Bragg, Ava's Man
Rick Bragg worked as a journalist for several newspapers before writing for the New York Times and it was coverage with the Times that won him the Pulitzer Price for Feature Writing in 1996. His honors have also included a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University, the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of the Year for 2009 and more than 50 awards for writing over the years.
But it is his books about home, family and living in the South that have so endeared him to his large body of followers. His trilogy of stories about his family - All Over but the Shoutin’ (1997), Ava’s Man (2001) and the Prince of Frogtown (2008) combine to give a portrait of his mother (All Over but the Shoutin’), his maternal grandfather (Ava’s Man) and his father (Prince Of Frogtown).
Published in 2001, Ava’s Man was Rick Bragg’s own journey to discovering the grandfather he never knew. To do that, he set out to collect stories. He laughed and cried with elderly aunts, family friends and former neighbors, listening to their stories and still vivid memories. When asked in an interview if he put all of his relatives' stories in, Rick stated that there were definitely a few that were withheld from print “so that he would still be invited to their Thanksgiving table”. He wasn’t going to risk that.
“What kind of man was this, I wondered, who is so beloved, so missed, that the mere mention of his death would make them cry forty-two years after he was preached into the sky?”
― Rick Bragg, Ava's Man
“What kind of man was this, I wondered, who is so beloved, so missed, that the mere mention of his death would make them cry forty-two years after he was preached into the sky?”
― Rick Bragg, Ava's Man
Ava’s Man became a colorful portrait of Rick’s hard-living, largely uneducated moonshiner grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, who supported his wife and eight children during the Great Depression by working as roofer, bootlegger, carpenter, general laborer & skilled fisherman who could catch catfish (and even squirrels) with his hand.
Through the worst of the Depression, his family always managed to have food on the table and fierce protection from a man with a deeply ingrained sense of what was expected and what was right. He was proud and self reliant. Wanting to be informed and not “ignorant”, he had his wife Ava read the newspaper to him every day at the kitchen table.
Ava’s Man is a book that will make you hungry for cornbread and pinto beans. For catfish and hush puppies and darkly sweet iced tea. You will remember hot, dusty summers and the shock of cold creek water. Many readers over the years have regaled Rick Bragg with stories of their own fathers and grandfathers that were “just like Charlie Bundrum”. It is easy to find yourself in the well-crafted writing of any of Rick’s works, but Ava’s Man is especially fertile and ripe for remembering your own family history.
We will visit this contemporary Southern classic with this quarter’s read - Ava’s Man by Rick Bragg - to be discussed over a Spring Book Breakfast on Saturday, March 28, 2020. Give this deep & rich book a read and see if you see a little of your own family through the pages.
