All Over but the Shoutin'

“Anyone could tell it, 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, so that her children didn’t have to live on welfare alone, so that one of them could climb up her back bone and escape the poverty and hopelessness that ringed them, free and clean. Anyone could tell it, and that’s the shame of it”

Bragg views the poverty in which he grew up as unjust and unfair. He and his mother and brothers were allowed enough resources to survive but no more than that. There is something immoral about an economic system that oppresses those at the bottom so thoroughly.

“I came home to a pale and elegant body in an open coffin, her thin hands crossed on her breast...I have seen so many horrible things in so many places that I have suspicions about God and doubt about heaven, but in that funeral home, I found myself wishing for it, envisioning it.  I bet even God, unless he is Episcopalian, likes a little fais-do-do every now and then, and I like to think of her Up There, blowing a hurricane on her harmonica and singing a little too loud”

Bragg always struggles with notions of God and heaven and hell. However, he wants to believe that some people like his grandmother and his mother will be rewarded in heaven for their sufferings on earth.

“But it was then...as I stared down at that old woman I had seen for just a few hours on Thanksgiving and Christmas because I wrongly believed I was doing more important things, that I knew I could not wait any longer to write some of this down, whether anyone read it or not”

This quote is essentially self-explanatory. When Bragg’s grandmother died, he realized that those who knew his family history would all disappear. He needed to record the family stories while he still could talk to those who remembered.

“I miss my grandma most when I drive the back roads of the Deep South, the radio tuned to fiddle music on the Cotton States Network down around Troy, or to some wall-rattling black choir on the AM dial outside Hattiesburg. It is when I have long hours to look, think, remember. I know that any time I want to hear the rest of that haunted song, all I have to do is put on the record. But I want to have her sing it to me. After all the dying I have seen, I finally understand what death is: simple wanting”

Bragg carries with him the memories of his grandmother and her singing and playing the harmonica. Those memories are some of the most pleasant he has of growing up in the South.

“I know that even as the words of George Wallace rang through my Alabama, the black family who lived down the dirt road from our house sent fresh-picked corn and other food to the white lady and her three sons, because they knew their daddy had run off, because hungry does not have color”

Bragg grew up in a time and place where poor whites and blacks both suffered the degradation of being at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. He feels solidarity with black people who grow up poor and powerless. This helped him to write meaningful stories about the poor blacks in Haiti. 

“He was a fearsome man, the kind of slim and lethal Southern man who would react with murderous fury when insulted, attacking with a knife or a pine knot in his bare hands...in some sick way I admired him...In that world, strength and toughness were everything, sometimes the only things. It was common, acceptable, not to be able to read, but a man who wouldn’t fight, couldn’t fight, was a pathetic thing. To be afraid was shameful. I’m not saying I agree with it. It’s just the way it was”

Here, Bragg describes his father, with grudging respect for his strength and toughness. He is also drawing a picture of the macho culture that encouraged drinking and fighting as ways to demonstrate masculinity.

“They ain’t never come to see me. How come?” I remember thinking, fool, why do you think?  But I just choked down my words, and in doing so I gave up the only real chance I would ever have to accuse him, to attack him with the facts of his sorry nature and the price it had cost us all. The opportunity hung perfectly still in the air in front of my face and fists, and I held my temper and let it float by. I could have no more challenged him, berated him, hurt him that I could have kicked a three-legged dog. Life had kicked his ass pretty good”

Bragg has fantasized having a confrontation with his father in which he expresses his anger over the way his father treated him and his mother and brothers. When he gets the chance, however, his father is sick and dying and it seems unfair to him to kick a man when he is down. He also sees that his father is already being punished for his drinking, since alcoholism is the cause of his premature death. 

“He never said he was sorry. He never said he wished things had turned out different. He never acted like he did anything wrong...All I wanted was a simple acknowledgment that he was wrong or at least too drunk to notice that he left his pretty wife and sons alone again and again, with no food, no money, no way to get any, short of begging, because when she tried to find work he yelled, screamed, refused. No, I didn’t expect much”

Bragg wishes for the closure of a deathbed apology from his father. He is disappointed when his father refuses to admit his wrongdoings. Bragg also realizes that an apology at this point would not change his resentment and anger. 

“The first memory I have is of a tall blond woman who drags a canvas sack along an undulating row or rust-colored ground, through a field that seems to reach into the back forty of forever...The tall woman is wearing a man’s britches and a man’s old straw hat, and now and then she looks back over her shoulder to smile at the three-year old boy who hair is almost as purely white as the bolls she picks, who rides the back of the six-foot-long sack like a magic carpet”

Bragg has sentimental and romantic memories of his loving mother, including this one. These memories help him to cope with the anger and sadness he often feels about his traumatic childhood. 

“To this day I dream not of beautiful women and wealth and power as often as I dream of sausage gravy over biscuits with a sliced tomato on the side, and a small lake of grits—not that bland, pale watery restaurant stuff I would not serve on death row, but grits cooked with butter and plenty of salt and pepper”

For a boy who was often hungry, the memory of a filling meal that would stick with him far into the day is especially appealing. The type of food he dreams of also helps to define “home” for him and other exiles from the South.

“Sam and I stand together, understanding only a little of what is being said. The governor talks about a lot of things but mostly he seems to be telling us we are better than nigras. We had not known we were better than anybody”

For Bragg and his family, class rather than race was always the most important factor. He was poor. The blacks who lived nearby were poor. That was what was most important in the struggle to survive. 

“If I live to be a hundred, I will never forget her, eyes closed, lips moving in prayer, both hands pressed to the warm plastic top of the black-and-white television. One the screen was a young Oral Roberts in shades of gray, assuring my momma that God was close, that she could feel Him if her faith was strong enough, coursing through that second-hand Zenith”

Bragg’s mother is a woman of strong religious faith. It is what comforts her and gives her strength in her difficult life. Bragg is skeptical himself, especially about TV preachers who are perpetually asking for donations.

“She didn’t have many sit-down talks with us, so when she did, it was serious...she said we were worrying her to death, and she extracted three promises from us, before we went out to play. One: Don’t kill yourself. Two: Don’t kill each other. Three: Try not to kill nobody else, but if you have to, better if it ain’t fam’ly”

This is one of the humorous moments in the Bragg saga. The author’s mother is obviously serious, but what she says is very funny. 

“We were part of it, of that night, because we were poor and because we were children, and I like to think that the frat boys and their Little Sisters still do that for the poor children in and around town. But you simply outgrow your invitation into that better world, as your childhood races away from you. You reach the age, ultimately, when that barrier slams down hard again between you and them, and the rest of the nice, solid, decent middle-class. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad, if it was a wall of iron instead of glass”

Bragg returns again and again to the issue of class. There are middle-class people who have it made, and poor people who never get through the glass ceiling, or as he says here, glass “wall.”

“The only girls I had any interest in were the ones who represented the world I wanted to be part of, the ones above my station, and in my part of the world class is damn near as strong as color. Luckily a few of them liked slumming...that was enough, then. Someone else could take them to the big dance. I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind” 

It seems likely that Bragg’s very short marriage and inability to form long-term relationships was affected in part by his low social status in adolescence. Though he later rises to the middle class and becomes more eligible, he still has trouble with women in his life. His repeated assertion of his indifference suggests that, actually, he did mind.

“I should have studied hard and tried to win a scholarship to college, should have seriously prepared myself or the future, should have focused on dragging myself out of poverty, the way so many people do. But of the varied weaknesses in me, the strongest is a desire to live for the moment, and let tomorrow slide. That is fine, if you are a Kennedy. It was dangerous for boys like me, or at least, it should have been’

Bragg attributes much of his professional success to luck. He has, however, already described his self-directed education, achieved by reading every book in his school library. He was not nearly as lazy as he suggests in this quote.

“I would call her Sunday and tell her I went up to Harlem to eat turkey wings and cornbread at a place called Sylvia’s, that New York was just on Big Rock Candy Mountain where the people talked slow so I could understand, that they ran everything I wrote on the front page, both of them. That, I thought, was all she needed to know. When I wrote a happy story, I would send it to her with a hundred dollar bill taped to the inside, and she would show the newspaper around and put the hundred dollar bill under her mattress”

Bragg knows that his mother is a worrier. He chooses to spare her the reality of his working life, which is very disturbing and often dangerous.

“We are taught in this business to leave our emotions out of a story, to view things with pure and perfect objectivity, but that was impossible on this story. I learned that objectivity is pure crap, if the pain is so strong it bleeds onto the yellowed newsprint years, or even decades, later” 

This is key to why Bragg became a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist; he is able to empathize with people who are in trouble and in pain and to write so that the reader feels for the people in his stories. 

“But it was the anger and hopelessness in the words of one young black man, an eighteen-year-old named Tony Fox, that I remember most. To him, rioting was a way to get even, to make people listen...in his neighborhood blacks owned nothing. They just lived in the hot houses with the two-inch-long palmetto bugs, almost in the sight of the more prosperous Hispanics who came to Miami and flourished, leaving black people behind. In their eyes...now they were subjugated again by people who were not even born here...That’s why they destroy the buildings. It’s a way to get even”

This is a very perceptive comment on conflict between racial groups, and how racial tensions can be exacerbated by class differences. 

“An editor had asked me, sneering a little, who taught me to write. I told Kovach that. ‘The next time someone asks you that,’ he said, ‘tell ‘em it was God”

Bragg is obviously an extraordinarily gifted writer. He developed his craft through hard work and persistence. He read widely and gave himself models to emulate. But he also had “natural” ability. This quote also suggests that, despite his success, he continued to encounter class prejudice in his professional life.

“So here we are, Daddy. I did what you didn’t do. It took me a long time, all of your life, most of hers, perhaps even most of mine. But it is done. She wakes up in a house of her own, a real home, and she is as good as anybody on that road. She lives warm when it is cold and cool when it is hot...”

Buying a house for his mother was Bragg’s major goal in life. When he fulfilled this ambition, he had every right to celebrate—and to brag about it to his father’s ghost.

“You do the best you can for the people left, a yard-fighting, teeth-gnashing, biscuit-eating, ugly-dog-raising, towel-stealing, television-praying, never-forgiving, hard-headed people that you love with all the strength in your body, once you finally figure out that they are who you are, and, in many ways, all there is”

Bragg has always been aware of where he came from: up from poverty in the hardscrabble South where people behave in ways that seem abnormal to outsiders who haven’t been through what they have experienced. He sees his own family as people who often act in strange and dangerous ways. But these are his people, and he is always a part of them and they a part of him no matter how successful he has become.

“...looking at me was too much like looking in the mirror, for her. She could see the strain of it, in my face maybe, maybe my eyes, could hear that old anger and lingering resentment on my lips. I guess it wasn’t pretty, that well-worn chip on my shoulder still sticking up, like a hump on my back. But I swear, it seems slighter now. It seems a little bit lighter now”

Bragg, looking back over his life after a conversation with a woman who grew up poor in New Orleans, sees himself as having been driven by anger and resentment to prove he could succeed despite his background. However, he did reach his two main goals of winning the Pulitzer Prize and buying his mother the house she always longed for. These essential achievements have made Bragg see his life in a different, less challenging light.