All Over but the Shoutin'

by Rick Bragg

  There were worse spirits for my momma to absorb than the one of her father. He was a towering, sun-cured man with ears too big for his head, with bright blue eyes and perfect white teeth and light brown hair. His children worshipped him, because, while he whupped them too hard when they were bad, mostly he was kind, warm, laughing, solid. He drank, but instead of unveiling a hard and cruel inner man, as it so often does, the likker only revealed someone much like the sober version of himself, only one who bumped his head on the door facing.

  I never saw him with my own eyes. I know him only from faded black-and-white photographs taken during the Depression, and through the rich, vivid, Technicolor memories of his children, mostly from my mother and aunts.

  He never had much except laughter to give. He did not want to make his living selling whiskey on a large scale, even though some of his customers said he could have been a Rockefeller or, perhaps more fittingly, a Kennedy. The men who made it by the trunkload were much more inclined to prison, and that would have left his family alone in the teeth of the Depression. So he made a few gallons, enough to bring out the dogs and the deputies now and again, but never the federal men. It would be romantic to picture him as a big-time whiskey man, but it would be a lie. His daughters say he did it because he had to, when he couldn’t get work, and because he liked to sip it himself.

  It was a big family, as families went back then. He and Miss Abigail had eight children—James, Bill, Edna, Emma Mae, Gracie Juanita, Margaret, Jo, Sue—and he made his honest living in the most honorable way any man could, with a hammer. He was a carpenter, mostly a roofer, and he spent his days up high, tacking down sheets of shingle, and spent some nights and Sunday at his still, measuring the meal, the sugar, the yeast, always wary of the law, always ready to cut and run like hell through the weeds.

  The stills where he cooked his whiskey are lost in rust and pine needles now, scattered through the hills. But my brother Sam still has his old carpenter’s tools. He hung them, like a shrine, on the inside of his shed. He said he just likes to look at them sometimes, and doesn’t have much more to say on it than that. Sam believes in taking life in his two hands and squeezing and pounding it until it gives you something, even if it’s just a little bit. But the important thing is to keep squeezing, keep pounding, keep working. I believe that to him those rusted, pitted hammers, rasps and crowbars not only remind him of the first grown man who ever treated him with any kindness and love, but also represent a simple, basic principle of a man’s worth, one a man can live a whole life by. He would never say that, because he doesn’t talk that way, but I believe it to be so.

  My grandfather could not live in town, could not breathe in a place where there were too many people. So, chasing work, he moved his growing family from tiny house to tiny house on both sides of the Alabama-Georgia line. The whole of his life, he never went to sleep under a roof he owned outright. His children had one pair of shoes, and his wife cooked squirrel and rabbit he hunted and jack salmon he pulled out of the deep blue of Lake Guntersville. If there was not enough, like I said, she would just forget to eat, or say she wasn’t hungry, or just walk outside. I have seen my own mother do it.

  My mother never had a doll. When she was six, her daddy got her her first real toy, a wooden turtle with wheels that you pulled with a string. She dragged it around the dusty yard till it came to pieces. “Then I saved the pieces,” she said. “I pulled ’em out, and just looked at ’em. I saved ’em till I was almost grown.”

  It would have been a hellish life if her momma and daddy had been the hard, religious fanatics who peopled that part of the world back then, a humorless bunch who prayed and plowed and didn’t do much else, if you don’t count speaking in tongues or handling snakes, the Holy Spirit coursing through their bodies like antivenin laced with Epsom salts.

  I think Charlie Bundrum was unique for his time. He did not beat Jesus into his children, but believed in God. He drank but was prone to work hard and regular. He was fond of living, whereas most hard-drinking men hate life and only want to dull it. He got drunk, and sang.

  He had wit like a razor, and while he had never cracked a book he was a wizard with language, with stories. Like a lot of Southern men, he could tell a story and have you sitting dead quiet, waiting for the next word, said the people who knew him well. My momma inherited his love of stories but not his timing, so that when she talks about him the words come out in a jumbled rush, like puppies spilling out of a cardboard box, jumping all over each other. She speaks in the up-country twang of the poor South, not the refined drawl of the Delta, an affectation borrowed by the rich people of our own region. The rich folks, like those of the lower South, do not pronounce their r sounds, so that “mother” becomes “mu-thah” and “never” becomes “nevah.” You have to try, to talk that way.

  My grandfather didn’t talk that way. In contrast, he stuck the r in even where it don’t need to be, and I see the ghost of his language, my language, with every trip home I make. For instance, my aunt Gracie Juanita is “Niter,” and Aunt Edna is “Edner.” You can pick us out of a crowd that way, as easy as finding a Cockney in the House of Lords. Anyway, I have always liked to hear my mother talk about her father, because when she does she is as close to happy as I think I have ever seen her. Listen to her:

  “As each baby was born he give ’em a nickname, and that’s all he ever called us. Juaniter was Snag, Edner was Rusty, William was June Bug, James was Shaker. He called Phene, James’s wife, Polecat, but she stayed so mad at him that he changed it to Tadpole. I reckon because she was short. I don’t really know. He called me Pooh Boy and I don’t why, ’cause I was a girl and all.

  “I was his pet. He only whupped me twice in my whole life, when I was five and when I was thirteen, because I kicked Jo one night in the bed and she screamed and hollered like I’d kilt her, and then acted like she went into a comer. And Daddy whupped me and whupped me and I thought Lord God he’s gonna kill me, and I didn’t talk to him for three months until one day his ol’ car was broke down and he had to walk to the store and he asked me if I wanted to walk with him. And I went but I wouldn’t walk beside him. I walked a long way off behind him. But then I got to lookin’ at his old clothes, how he walked kind of stooped over, sad, and then with every step I’d just run up a little bit, closer and closer, till finally I was walkin’ beside him.”

  Even though his pockets were empty as a banker’s soul, even though his family was as poor as poor got outside the shantytowns of the Depression, he wore pride like a suit of mail. Like my father, and yet so very unlike him, the big-eared man in the raggedy overalls would fight a man at even the vaguest insult. His hands were so strong from decades of manhandling mules across rock-strewn fields, of gripping that hammer, he could squeeze an apology out of a man just by taking his arms and pressing a little bit at a time. If a man pulled a knife on him, he went and got his hammer, which in his hands was about as lethal as a thunderbolt. Again, I understand how people who grew up in other places, in gentler cultures, might not understand why men had to fight each other. I think it is much more civilized to knock someone of your own gender on their ass than it is to stand on a street corner cussing yourself into an embolism, like they do in New York.

  We know of only one time when one of these arguments resulted in a shooting, when my mother was four or five, and a man accused him of stealing. He might as well have spit in my granddaddy’s face, shot his mule, talked down his dog and called his momma a bad name, ’cause you don’t tell a good man that he stole, and expect to walk away.

  What happened next remains one of those pages of family history that no one really wants to tell, but just can’t help themselves. My momma can tell it better than me, but not quite as good as Aunt Gracie Juanita, who is the only person who can do so without giggling. Listen to them.

  “It was them Reardens. I don’t know what they said Daddy stole but Daddy didn’t steal, so Daddy just loaded his shotgun and walked to meet ’em when they come to the
house,” said my momma. “I was little. I laid in the bed and covered my head up, but I heard the shot.”

  Aunt Gracie Juanita was an eyewitness.

  “This big woman come at Daddy with a long ol’ knife, and he shot ’er,” said my aunt Gracie Juanita, who has always been willing, ready and able to plug someone her ownself if they got her mad. “It went clean through ’er buzzoms. Both of ’em. Clean through, hon.”

  I surmised that the woman had been standing sideways.

  “Mmm-hmmm,” said my aunt Gracie Juanita.

  I asked her, not sure if I wanted the answer, if the woman was killed.

  “Lord no, hon, they was this big,” and she made a circle with her hands about the size of a truck tire.

  The wounding of their matriarch seemed to take the fight out of the Reardens, who retreated, carrying the big woman. I think that Granddaddy helped haul her to the car. I do not know if the Reardens ever apologized for accusing my grandfather of stealing, but I guess once you’ve shot one of their women in the buzzoms with a deer slug, any apology would be a long time coming.

  Like my mother, my granddaddy had no luck at all. “He used to go fishing up in Guntersville for jack salmon, and he’d always holler when he caught one, and you know I do that, too, I holler like a wild woman when I catch one,” said my momma, thinking back. “Then he’d just put them jack salmon in his coat pockets, and we’d laugh when he’d tell us that when Momma washed his coat we’d see minners in the tub, and when I was little I used to stand over it, waitin’. And one time when he was up there on the lake his ol’ car broke down and he had to catch the bus and ride it home, and the police arrested him in Anniston when he got off the bus and sent him to Birmingham because he walked off behind these men and they thought he was with them, that he was a, what do you call it, a vagrant, and we couldn’t find him and he had no way of tellin’ us, and it was days and days and days and we didn’t know what had happened to our daddy, until finally we called all the jails and found him. They had spelled his name so bad wrong that they couldn’t find him the first time, and then he come home and we was all afraid to even talk because he was so mad, so mad somebody could do that to him. And while he was in jail for nothin’ the floodwaters come up at Lake Guntersville and washed over his ol’ car, and rurnt it. No, he never did have no luck.”

  If nothing else validates the decency of that man, then the story of Jessie Klines will. Everyone called him Hootie, back before rock bands thought that name was cool, and he was a harmless, simpleminded man who lived with my mother’s people their whole life. When I asked where he came from, my momma just said: “Daddy got ’im off the river.” He had lived like an animal in a shack on the Tallapoosa until my grandfather rescued him, took him into his own home, and fed him and clothed him like he was a member of the family. Sometimes he toted the shingles my granddaddy hammered in place, and sometimes he didn’t, but there was always a place for him at their table. I asked my momma why, in a time when they had so little, my granddaddy adopted this man. My momma just told me he felt sorry for him.

  Hootie had only one real job, and that was to ride in the back of the pickup with the children and keep them from falling out. He rode miles and miles with his legs stretched out across the open back of the pickup, taking his job seriously, because Mr. Charlie had told him it was important to arrive at a place with roughly the same number of kids they left with. He was an old man in ragged overalls, and the children loved him because he would play with them, and was tall enough to fix things like tire swings and tree houses. He loved my grandfather and his children, but Miss Ab scared him a little bit.

  Abigail was a Hamilton, a Presley on her momma’s side, and yes, the same ones as Elvis, although I don’t think her branch of the family ever got anywheres close to Tupelo. The Hamiltons were quick-tempered and sometimes hard-hearted people, but the Presleys were gifted, could play anything and sing like angels. All my grandma’s people picked banjo, guitar, mandolin, blew the harmonica—which we called the French harp—and played the piano, fiercely. Miss Ab never had a music lesson in her life, but could play anything. I have no doubt that if she had ever heard it she could have played Beethoven. She knew all the words to all the songs on the radio and in the hymnal, and made her children laugh with verses like:

  Where the steak it is cooked rare

  and the biscuits have gray hair

  at that hungry hotel where I dine

  Miss Ab picked cotton for Walter Rollins, a good-humored fat man who pretended not to notice that her children and grandchildren were stealing his watermelons by the wheelbarrow load. In the hot summer she wore a bonnet and in the cold she wore a man’s knit cap, which we called, for reasons I will never understand, a “bogan.” Indoors she wrapped her long gray hair up in a bun and covered it with a rag or scarf twisted tight around her head, like the black people of that time. I reckon it was to keep the gray hair out of the biscuits.

  Like a lot of women in that time, she walked in the shadow of her man even as she kept him upright. But like a lot of creative people, she was prone to periods of brief … well, she could go a little peculiar. When she got mad she could cuss paint off the wall, cuss crows from the trees, cuss the lame straight and the wicked pure. She could cuss Hootie and he would drop what he was doing and run for the woods. When she got really wound up she could talk loud for ten, twelve hours straight. My granddaddy would just bow his head and let it rain over him like hail, or flee.

  It was this world, of rich poverty, that shaped my mother. Her older sisters helped raise her and her older brothers tormented her, especially William. Instead of throwing a rock in the creek to scare off the snakes, “he just throwed one of us,” my momma said. When little Emma Mae died of fever when my momma was just four or five, he told her that she was still alive and one day they would go dig her up. “I dragged a hoe around with me everywhere I went, for weeks, because I believed we was goin’ to get Emma Mae.”

  Her two brothers escaped jail, though no one is really sure how. They stole chickens, and worse, because they got hungry. When they got thirsty, they crawled under the plank floor of their Uncle Newt’s house to the spot where they guessed he stored his whiskey barrels. They took a brace and bit, and drilled a hole through the floor and the barrels and drained it into jugs.

  My uncle Bill used to wait until my grandma would leave the house and then cut my momma’s hair. He would cut one side of her head short and leave one side long, and even though Grandma would whup him he would laugh and laugh and laugh. “I was sixteen years old before I knowed people wasn’t supposed to have hair like that,” my momma said.

  The girls were better behaved, but they were not delicate flowers. They learned how to use a hammer and saw and level, and even now, as most of my granddaddy’s girls near or have passed sixty, you still see them toting two-by-fours around the yards of their houses. My aunt Gracie Juanita could build Tara if you gave her a year and a key to the Home Depot. They dropped out of school, all of them, to go to work, to help the family live. Some of them even climbed the roofs of houses and worked beside my grandfather, others picked cotton beside my grandmother.

  Sit long enough with the people in my family and the talk always turns to the fields, because all of them did their time there. They were the center of the family’s life, even though they never owned land, never made more than a few dollars a day. When carpentry and whiskey making failed to put food on the table, there was always cotton. The big sacks could hold more than a hundred pounds. The best pickers picked out the trash and sticks, the worst would shove a big rock in the bottom of the sack and hope no one saw it when it was upended into the cotton wagon. Whites and blacks picked together, but did not make the same money. It wasn’t right but it was the way it was.

  “Even when Momma was old, she was still pickin’,” said my momma. “She could pick purty good. She could outpick Niter, but then anybody outpick poor ol’ Niter. She could pick a hundred pounds, too, but it took her five years
.”

  The only work the family did not share was the still. Like most cultures where hard likker and religion flowed together, Granddaddy did his whiskey making and drinking away from the children. It was fine for a man to drink, as long as he didn’t expose his children to it, and it was fine to get blind drunk as long as a man could keep his dignity and his hands off his wife and children when he was angry or had the blind staggers. It is an odd thing now, thinking back, that even though I grew up surrounded by drunks, not one time can I remember any man besides my father openly drinking. I would see an uncle or two sneak a nip from a bottle hidden under the seat, but they did it furtively, almost ashamedly. It is why my grandfather never respected my father. He couldn’t hold his likker or his temper, but we will get to that later.

  Now and then, the law would come to visit. The sheriff would make a perfunctory trip out, but instead of searching through the pines for the still he would sit on the porch until suppertime, and have some beans and cornbread. Other sheriffs were more vigorous, but my granddaddy fooled them again and again. He would walk the hills until he found a nice bluff, hollow out a place to put the still, and cover the opening with brush. He would walk a different way to the still every time, to avoid wearing down the grass and weeds and leaving a trail. He probably could have ridden a rhinoceros through the ragweed for all the danger he was in of being found out, since the typical Southern sheriff was not exactly Daniel Boone when it came to following a trail. My uncle Jimbo likes to tell the story of the time a sheriff came out and stood on top of the hill, sniffing the air, smelling the whiskey cooking almost under his feet, but just stomped around and cussed. Then my grandma invited him to supper.