ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTIN’
By Rick Bragg
Pantheon, 329 pages, $25
As a New York Times correspondent, Rick Bragg has covered major stories in recent years: the impact on a South Carolina town of the mother who strapped her children into auto seat belts and sent the car down a slope into a pond, the bombing in Oklahoma City, innocent youths killed in ghetto cross-fires, warfare in Haiti.
Bragg’s eloquent blend of portraiture and descriptive prose earned him a 1996 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Now comes “All Over But the Shoutin’,” a memoir of growing up poor in rural Alabama and how journalism afforded him a road to freedom.
The book has a strain of rags-to-riches melodrama. There is ya granddaddy who hides whiskey stills from sheriffs, and a violent, alcoholic father who, on his deathbed, gives the boy who reads voraciously a box of second-hand classics.
The prose occasionally comes off as a bit precious: “Anyone could tell (this story), anyone who had a momma who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes, who picked cotton in other people’s fields and ironed other people’s clothes and cleaned the mess in other people’s houses. . . .” In fact, few such people have the wherewithal to tell such a story, much less as well as Bragg.
He gives depth to a culture in capturing the sensibility of countless white folk across the South who were typecast a villains by the media of the 1960s. Bragg can be painfully candid. Of a black child who appears on the porch with a gift of corn for the starving white family, he reflects: “I would like to say that we came together, after the little boy brought us that food, that we learned about and from each other, but that would be a lie. It was rural Alabama in 1965, two separate, distinct states. But at least, we didn’t throw no more rocks.”
What drives the narrative is the author’s search for a resolution to his past. Bragg writes movingly about his mother’s personal isolation, and the struggle to raise three boys after a fourth dies in childbirth:
“It was a long time before I realized that she stayed home because she was afraid we might be ashamed of her, ashamed of the woman with rough hands like a man and donated clothes that a well-off lady might recognize as something she threw away. She could live with the fact that she wore old tennis shoes with the toes worn clean through, but she was afraid we would be ashamed of her.”
The childhood chapters are intercut with reflections of a seasoned journalist looking back. Memories he carries from Alabama return with the polished insights of a writer:
“The old women had an almost magical power. They were the shamans of their world, who could lift a crying baby from its own momma’s arms and, by pressing a wrinkled finger to its lips in just the right way, make it shush. They were the historians of the community, and kept a neat record of births and deaths in the blank pages of their Bibles. . . . They knew everything.”
Bragg captures the rhythms of small-town life–football season, the mores of corner stores, toil, religion and gossip–with the skills of a Pat Conroy and a fidelity to the people and their lives.
Anger is a deeper source that shapes the memoir. For a man who rose young to one of the best jobs in journalism, Bragg betrays a resentment toward people with whom he confided about his past:
“A hundred times in my life, people have asked me why didn’t (my mother) just get another husband. One idiot, one of those trust fund babies that the newspaper business is riddled with, even asked why she didn’t just go to college.”
For so many people to have asked such questions, Bragg must have told them a lot, but not enough. Only in writing the book, it seems, could he do justice to a story that may not have added up to all the people to whom he revealed it in fragments.
“I was openly scornful of people who rode their school ties like some chariot, ” he writes. “In fifteen years of writing stories for money, all I had needed was talent. I wore that chip on my shoulder like a crown. I hung my plaques on the walls . . . until my living room looked like a dentist’s office and I had some left over to give to Momma.”
Bragg writes with grace and pathos about the lot of marginal people–in South Bronx, Haiti or along back roads of his native South–yet he comes off as vexed by his own elusive leitmotif. The anger coursing through the story conveys a defensive pride, and a myopia to the similarities between poor folk he defends and colleagues he condemns.
Bragg circles his anger but never plunges in to wrestle with the demon. The sources of it seem clear–an abusive, drunken father; the helplessness of a boy who wants to help his mother but cannot–but the fathoms an author must descend to discover his motivations demand a more merciless introspection.
As his career soars, the reporter buys his momma a beautiful home. It is a tender ending to a deeply affecting book. Yet a writer of such gifts as Rick Bragg is sure to face a longer, greater challenge in taking that deeper measure of himself.
