49 pages 1 hour read

Rick Bragg

Ava's Man

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2001

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Chapters 21-29

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 21 Summary: “Free cheese, cold water and gentle horses/The Cove Road/The late 1940s”

Charlie and his family finally settle into a place for seven years. It’s not a mansion by any means, but it’s also not a “sharecropper’s shack or river cabin but had three big, open rooms, and for the first time in as long as the Bundrum children could remember, the family would not all sleep in one room” (164). This is also the first house that has a deep well with clear, clean water, and a free horse that the previous tenants left behind.

During this time, the family begins receiving commodities, “just plainly packaged surplus foods that the government handed out at National Guard armories and courthouse auditoriums” (167). The older children move out and get married, but they stay close by Charlie and Ava’s place because “[i]t was as hard for the older children to leave as it would have been for a planet to break free of the sun. The tie was still way too tight, too strong, to the man and woman who had raised them” (170).

Chapter 22 Summary: “Do like I say, not like I do/The Cove Road/About 1948”

One night, James decides he’s going to kill a man named George because he called James a liar. James is drunk, and he goes inside Charlie’s house to grab a gun.

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By Rick Bragg