Lawless supplementAction and adventure films This article is more than 11 years oldMatt Bondurant: 'We discovered Grandpa Jack had a dark history'
This article is more than 11 years oldMatt Bondurant, the author of Lawless, on which John Hillcoat's film was based, says his family's role in the moonshine business only came to light in recent yearsEveryone in my family was aware that my grandfather used to run liquor when he was a young man. My father remembers as a boy being in the back of an old Ford, using his hands to steady the clinking of glass jars of "white lightning" packed around him while making deliveries. But these were things that were never discussed. This tradition is a matter of protection in small communities, where everyone knows everyone. Running your mouth off could get you into a lot of trouble. We assumed that Grandpa Jack's trade was small, similar to many in Franklin County, Virginia, in the 1930s.
So when my father unearthed newspaper articles about the shooting at Maggodee Creek bridge in 1930, we were shocked to learn my grandfather's involvement was deeper. In these articles, my grandfather and his brothers, called "the Bondurant boys", were described as a notorious group with a dangerous reputation. My grandfather was still alive, and when my dad confronted him, he merely demurred and lifted his shirt to show a wound from a bullet. That was it. I was living across the country, and didn't have a chance to question him. He died the next year, aged 81.
Grandpa Jack was an imposing man, a patriarch of the family and someone people around the county treated with great respect. Even as a kid, I understood that he lived a different life than anything I would know. Early in the morning he would wake me and we'd feed the cows, me in the bed of the pick-up, rolling out hay bales. We would spend the entire morning in near silence.
By the time we uncovered the articles I was in graduate school, studying literature, expecting to spend my life talking and writing about fiction and writers. My father and I began collecting accounts of the Bondurant boys as my career began to progress, and by the time my first novel, The Third Translation, was published in 2005, I knew exactly what the next book would be.
Franklin County back then wasn't a place where people spent much time documenting their lives. There are no journals, memoirs or letters. There are some events and situations that belong more to family lore, rumour, or even myth. For example, we do know that my grand-uncle Forrest had his throat cut from ear to ear in an altercation at his restaurant/moonshine way-station. The legend is that he walked nearly 10 miles through the snow to the hospital, holding his neck together. Often I think of the chances I had to talk to my grandfather, and I get angry, filled with regret. This amazing story, this doorway to the past was there in front of me. I was young and afraid. I won't make that mistake again.
Explore more on these topics- Action and adventure films
- Lawless supplement
- Crime films
- Drama films
- Period and historical films
- History books
- Lawless
- features
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJ6Zobpwfo9qaWiZpZx8c4KOpZiwpJWowG65wK2rZpqfo7G2vsCnq2aZpam1sL4%3D