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 was
barely fifteen, when a skinny boy in freshly washed overalls stepped from the
crowd of bidders, pointed to her and said, “I got one dollar, by
God.” In the evening they danced in the grass to a fiddler and banjo
picker, and Ava told all the other girls she was going to marry that boy
someday, and she did. But to remind him that he was still hers, after the cotton
rows aged her and the babies came, she had to whip a painted woman named Blackie
Lee.
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, the
one still standing, won. This wasn’t that. This was a beatin’, and
it is not a moment that glimmers in family history. But of all the stories I was
told 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 ... read full excerpt from Ava's Man ebook
