WILLIE - RUM RUNNING QUEEN

Bryant presents a historical novel based upon the true story of a woman who became one of Virginia’s most notorious bootleggers.

Willie May Collins, born in 1903 to a southwestern Virginian farming family, harbors a powerful streak of independence and a fierce desire to become something more than the wife of a poor farmer. She also has a knack with machinery, especially automobiles. In 1918, at 15 years of age, she takes a job in a tobacco factory rolling cigarettes. Two years later, she moves to a rooming house in Roanoke and lands a job at the local five-and-dime, where she attracts the attention of Floyd Carter, son of the richest bootlegger in the county. He picks her up after work in his Buick convertible. Willie convinces Floyd to let her drive his car, and the fire is lit. (She doesn’t love him, but she is having fun.) Before long, when Floyd promises to buy her a car of her own if she agrees to marry him, she becomes Mrs. Willie Carter. Married life is luxurious, but Willie becomes bored and irritated with Floyd. Her father-in-law, however, sees promise in Willie and offers her a job as one of his drivers delivering moonshine. It’s just what she’s been hoping for. Thus begins an exciting, dangerous, and heartbreaking career that will make her infamous. Bryant’s novel is packed with details highlighting the intricacies of bootlegging—the complicated routes and detours, the payoffs to local law enforcement, and, always, the incredible speeds at which the heavily fortified cars traveled. The book also has interesting tidbits about the manufacture of moonshine, a local industry that went back over generations of folks living in Floyd County, Virginia. Willie May’s tale is recounted in two voices, hers and that of her devoted younger brother, James (also called Junebug or Jimmy). In prose distinguished by a distinctly Southern musicality, Bryant captures the physical beauty and the atmosphere of southwest Virginia; Jimmy says of a summer day, “The humidity is so heavy I think about how a fish senses an angler’s bait underwater.”

Poignant and historically fascinating, with plenty of high-speed action.