Moonshine by Alec Wilkinson

 

For more than thirty years Garland Bunting has been engaged in capturing and prosecuting men and women in North Carolina who make and sell liquor illegally. To do this he has driven taxis, delivered sermons, peddled fish, buck danced, worked carnivals as a barker, operated bulldozers, loaded carriages and hauled logs at sawmills, feigned drunkenness, and pretended to be an idiot. In the minds of many people he is the most successful revenue agent in the history of a state that has always been enormously productive of moonshine.

This volume’s full title is Moonshine: A Life in Pursuit of White Liquor. It is a non-fiction work written in 1985.

Wilkinson, our reporter, spends much time with Garland Bunting, a renowned revenuer and raconteur. While not fiction, it reads as smoothy and beautifully as the best of the genre.

Wilkinson has an eye for detail that rings true.

Having grown up in moonshining districts and having known many an extracurricular distributor, hell, I live not four miles from the famed Thunder Road, Wilkinson’s world is A1 authentic.

And I’ve got to mention that he writes like a dream.

It all plays as if Larry McMurtry [or his songwriter son, James] spent time in the milieu of the Deep South drive-in flicks of the 1970s and told you what he saw.

It is deep, sweaty, affectionate and our protagonist drops a line of patter to chew on about every page.

For example:

These folks are suspicious and they'll kill you. They'll shoot the grease right out of the biscuit and never even break the crust.

Along the way you’ll learn more about making and distributing illegal liquor than you ever knew was possible.

It all goes down smooth unlike the product in question.

This one, my friends, is an easy A

It’s called corn liquor, white lightning, sugar whiskey, skull cracker, pop-skull bush whiskey, stump, stumphole, ‘splo,  ruckus juice, radiator whiskey, rotgut, sugarhead, block and tackle, wildcat, panther’s breath, tiger’s sweat, sweet spirits of cata-a-fighting, ally bourbon, city gin, cool water, happy Sally, deep shaft, jump steady, old horsey, stingo, blue John, red eye, pine top, buckeye, bark whiskey, and see seven stars.

In times when the price of sugar has risen high enough to make the use of it unprofitable, bootleggers have substituted molasses. Moonshine made with molasses called monkey rum.