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Soak Up Some Curious Facts About Making Illegal Spirits

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By ROGER K. MILLER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 28, 2008

"The Wettest County in the World," by Matt Bondurant (Scribner, $25)

Those who made it called it white mule, white lightning, popskull, mountain licka, mountain dew, stump whiskey and - at the low end of the illegal-spirits chain - rotgut, but never moonshine, and they called themselves blockaders, not bootleggers.

"The Wettest County in the World" offers many curious facts in the course of delivering an immensely interesting story.

The county is Franklin, in southwestern Virginia near the Blue Ridge Mountains, during the first four decades of the previous century. It got the "wettest" sobriquet from writer Sherwood Anderson, who in researching an article ("The Great Franklin County Moonshine Conspiracy") on the notorious female bootlegger Willie Carter Sharpe for Liberty magazine in 1934 found that the county "fairly dripped illicit liquor."

Anderson is not the only true-life element in this, Matt Bondurant's second novel (after "The Third Translation"). It is based on the history of the author's family, specifically the exploits of his grandfather Jack Bondurant and Jack's two older brothers, Forrest and Howard.

If those exploits were largely illegal, so were those of the officers of the law who pursued them ferociously in a barefaced effort to get a cut of the profits from the unlawful liquor.

The author depicts his forebears as the "terminally poor." He catches the dull menace of the hills and its people's sullen contempt for outsiders, their stoic endurance and "masterful silence."

The novel is soaked in liquor; making and drinking it comprise these men's way of life as well as their livelihood. Their lives are soaked also in violence and brutality, usually connected with the liquor-making.

When the powers that be - the state's attorney, sheriff and other officials - beat up Jack as a signal that they want a cut of the business, Forrest tells Jack he has to seek revenge because the family has to control the fear.

Fear abounds on all sides. A man is castrated and the byproduct of the assault placed in a jar of moonshine and delivered to the hospital in which he lies. All three brothers survive terrible attacks. Later, Jack is shot. Someone cuts Forrest's throat from ear to ear; someone else arranges for a truckload of logs to spill out and crush him.

Aside from some sloppy writing and occasional nearly run-on sentences, this is a good story well put together, right through the 1935 trial, at which the brothers testified, and the epilogue that summarizes their more peaceful later years.

The Anderson chapters are especially effective; besides telling what Anderson did, and in the process moving the Bondurant saga forward, they are an intelligent meditation on an increasingly forgotten writer and his contribution to American literature.

Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book review editor, is a novelist and freelance writer and editor.

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