Ava's Man

“Ava’s face had a line in it for every hot mile she ever walked, for every fit she ever threw. Her hair was long and black as crows, streaked with white, and her eyes, behind the ancient, yellowed glass of her round spectacles, were pale, pale blue, almost silver.”

This is Bragg’s first description of Ava, his grandmother, and it describes her physical appearance in older age. After a long, often difficult life, Ava’s physical appearance reflects her past, but her eyes reveal a hidden wisdom.

“He was a man whose tender heart was stitched together with steel wire, who stood beaten and numb over a baby’s grave in Georgia, then took a simple-minded man into his home to protect him from scoundrels who liked to beat him for fun. He was a man who inspired backwoods legend and the kind of loyalty that still makes old men dip their heads respectfully when they say his name, but who was bad to drink too much, miss his turn into the driveway and run over his own mailbox.”

This is one of Bragg’s first descriptions of Charlie that reveals his character and the effect his life had on the people and landscape around him. This description reveals how Charlie was a paradoxical man, capable of great good and sensitivity but also able to be tough when he needed to be. 

“In a time when a nation drowning in its poor never so resented them, in the lingering pain of Reconstruction, in the Great Depression and in the recovery that never quite reached all the way to my people, Charlie Bundrum took giant steps in run-down boots. He grew up in a hateful poverty, fought it all his life and died with nothing except a family that worshiped him and a name that gleams like new money. When he died, mourners packed Tredegar Congregational Holiness Church.”

This describes the socio-economic landscape that Charlie was born into, and how he had to work with the cards he had been dealt. While he never gained monetary wealth, by the end of his life, he was rich with a large family that loved him beyond words.