66 pages • 2 hours read
Rick BraggAll Over but the Shoutin'
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 9-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: The Widow’s Mite
Chapter 9 Summary: On the wings of a great speckled bird
Chapter 9 focuses on religion and faith. It begins with a description of Bragg’s mother’s devotion to watching religious broadcasts on television. She was part of a culture that supported the TV evangelists and believed in their message of redemption through faith. This religious belief was one of the things that helped Bragg’s mother survive her difficult life.
Bragg himself tried, at age nine, to join the church-going community all around him. He went to church with his cousins and listened intently to the preacher. However, he never found the faith he sought.
Chapter 10 Summary: If you got to kill somebody, better it ain’t family
This chapter covers Bragg’s life from age ten to thirteen, when he spent much of his time reading books. He was also active socially, with “a new girlfriend every year from first grade on” (96). He got his first motorized vehicle, a moped that “would run sixty miles an hour on a straightway” (93), and he and his brother played basketball on the school team.
Chapter 11 Summary: Under a hateful sky
In this chapter, Bragg describes his summer job doing grunt work on a construction site for his Uncle Ed. It was hard work in hot weather, and Bragg dreaded the end of school and the start of the summer and long workdays.
Chapter 12 Summary: Getting above your raising
Bragg is reminded of his low status when his girlfriend comes to his house and sees how he and his mother live. As a result, she breaks up with him because they are “too different” (106).
Chapter 13 Summary: Fine qualities
Bragg’s father dies at the age of 41. Bragg feels no grief, and he and his family do not go to the funeral.
Chapter 14 Summary: 100 miles per hour, upside down and sideways
During the summer before his senior year in high school, Bragg got a fast car. He had worked to save enough money to buy what he really wanted. However, he raced against another boy and crashed at high speed. Miraculously, he survived the wreck without injury.
Chapter 15 Summary: The usual suspects
In this chapter, the author describes yet another incident in which he is reminded of his low status and vulnerability in the community. There is a murder nearby and the police “rounded up everyone who lived close to the scene who was either poor, black, had a criminal record, or was retarded” (119-120). The police question Bragg and briefly suspect him or his brother Mark of being involved.
Chapters 9-15 Analysis
This part of the book emphasizes two important themes: religion and poverty. Chapter 9 is specifically about Bragg’s mother’s faith and his own doubt. Bragg’s mother truly believed in God and prayer. She did not go to church but practiced her religion via television evangelists’ broadcasts. Her belief in God was a very important consolation to her in her difficult life.
In these chapters Bragg describes his adolescence, which was influenced greatly by his family’s poverty. It affected Bragg’s social life, as girls would reject him because he was poor. In Chapter 15 it affected him and his brother and their mother because the police considered the Bragg boys to be potential criminals just because they are poor. Bragg’s mother “was frantic. She knew we had not done anything, but for a woman who grew up at the mercy of rich folks, that did not mean a damn thing. It terrified her because she thought the police would hang the crime on one of us purely because they could, purely because we were who we were” (120).
This section also reemphasizes the contrast between Bragg’s childhood and his brother Sam’s. In some ways Rick Bragg had a “normal” adolescence revolving around cars and girls and sports. His older brother Sam, however, was pigeonholed as an unskilled, uneducated laborer in high school. At age thirteen Sam was already working and helping to support the family financially.
This section ends as Bragg’s career begins. He took one journalism class in college, wrote for the college paper, and got a job as a sportswriter with a local paper. Bragg always considered himself lucky, and this was the start of his luck in the writing world.
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