WHEN I WAS YOUNG, a few times a year my family would make the drive down to Snow Creek, four hours from Alexandria, to visit my grandparents. My father’s brothers and sisters all lived in the area as well, so the gatherings usually bloomed into full-scale Bondurant family reunions each time we came to visit; all the uncles, aunts, cousins, and others crowding into my grandfather’s old farmhouse for giant breakfasts and long, slow talks before the woodstove where little was ever actually said. I spent most of the time wrestling in hay-filled barns with my giant cousins, riding tractors in the early morning along muddy creek beds, and grabbing electric cattle fences because they dared me to. My grandfather died in his late eighties; he had just bought a new truck the day before and was building a new house.
I have many important memories of my time there, and of my grandfather; his quiet, hawklike face, early rides in the pickup to feed the cattle, the staggering stoicism of this man. I also remembered the back utility room where he had a gun rack up on the wall. This wasn’t so unusual; in those days in Franklin County shotguns and rifles hung from nearly any flat surface, and in many houses they still do. What struck me about this particular gun rack was the pair of rusty brass knuckles hanging from a nail just below the gun rack. As a young boy the idea of a man putting on the heavy metal implement, purely designed to crush another man’s face, was a thrilling prospect and I spent long periods of time gazing at those brass knuckles. To me they represented something remarkably primal, hanging there below the guns, as if to say: If you are still alive when I run out of bullets I will pull this hunk of metal off the wall and pummel you into unconsciousness. Back at the dinner table my grandfather’s heavy, placid face would take on a whole new light. I was terrified of him and fascinated about the life he had led.
I didn’t know of his true past and involvement in the events of the early 1930s until much later. My father didn’t even know he had been shot until a few years before my grandfather’s death, when as part of his genealogical research he came across a series of newspaper articles documenting the events at Maggodee Creek in December 1930. When asked about the shooting my grandfather merely said: Oh yeah, shot me through here, and raised his shirt to show my father the entry wound under his arm. Not much more was said about it after that, which is the way my father’s family communicated about such things.
I must add here that my grandfather, after a few more run-ins with the law, went on to be a respectable, law-abiding, and even revered member of the Snow Creek community for many years until his death. His children and their children, including myself, have all basically faded into the gentle obscurity of decent citizens. It seems that perhaps that part of our blood that prompted such dramatic and dangerous behavior as committed by my grandfather and his brothers in those desperate times, has faded as well.
The basics of this story are drawn from various family stories and anecdotes, newspaper headlines and articles, and court transcripts, particularly from T. Keister Greer’s compilation of grand-jury testimony, titled The Great Moonshine Conspiracy of 1935. Greer’s book also provides testimony from the other major players in the conspiracy, as well as background and biographical information. However, this historical information does not help us fully understand the central players in this story, at least in terms of their situation or what their thoughts were; all involved are now deceased and little record exists. There are no letters, and my grandfather and his brothers did not keep diaries. My task in writing this book was to fill in the blank spaces of the known record. There are the family stories, and for this we must rely on the recollection of relatives, like my father, who was alive during the trial though as a very young boy, as well as other local people and friends who knew my grandfather and these other men. These memories and stories are vague and often specious at best, mixed with several decades of rumor, gossip, and myth. These were people who lived and died in real and dramatic ways, but due to the passage of time and circumstance it is difficult to render their lives with complete accuracy or fidelity to actuality.
In order to get at that truth, I created characters based on these people, some who are combinations of the original figures, some quite close to the historical record as we know it, and others who are almost wholly fabricated. Anyone who is a surviving relative of any of the involved parties should not assume that certain characters in this fictionalization are somehow meant to portray someone distinct. It was not my intent to flatter or slander anyone involved with this tragic story, least of all anyone in my own family. I suppose you can consider this a parallel history. I have imagined a number of things for which there is no record, and I have presumed upon the actual historical figures with the liberty that is granted a novelist. My intention was to reach that truth that lies beyond the poorly recorded and understood world of actualities.
There are the facts: The drought of 1930 was severely damaging to the already poor county, and moonshine activity exploded. The “Bondurant filling station” was known to be a hub for moonshining, drinking, fighting, and general mischief. My grandfather and his brothers Forrest and Howard were known around the county and in the papers as “the Bondurant Boys.” My granduncle Forrest Bondurant had his throat cut and somehow survived. He was then gut-shot at Maggodee Creek and later nearly his whole body was crushed by a load of lumber that was dropped on him. He survived all of this, finally succumbing when he fell through the ice in a shallow creek. Maggie was a real woman who stayed with my great-uncle under mysterious circumstances, and their relationship is a matter of family lore. Jack was also shot at Maggodee Creek, and a few years later he married Bertha Minnix, my grandmother, who was a skilled mandolin player who played on the radio and whose parents were members of the Dunkard Church, or Old German Baptist church as it was alternately called back then.
We know that the writer Sherwood Anderson did spend some time in the area seeking out the famous female bootlegger Willie Carter Sharpe, and he did attend the trial where my grandfather and granduncles testified. He spent several years in the area, working on his house in Marion and traveling the countryside. Anderson contributed a story to Liberty magazine in 1935 about the “Great Franklin County Moonshine Conspiracy.” His last novel, Kit Brandon, is commonly understood to have been greatly influenced by his experiences in rural Virginia, the legend of Willie Carter Sharpe, and the Great Moonshine Conspiracy trial.
The shooting of “the Bondurant Boys” at Maggodee Creek by Rakes and Abshire is well documented in court transcripts and newspaper articles, as is the horrific murder of Jefferson Richards and the curious death of Charley Rakes.
Everything else, as Sherwood Anderson would say, is “transmuted by fancy.”