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.
Prologue-Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: The Widow’s Mite
Prologue Summary
The author Rick Bragg explains why he came to write his and his family’s story. He states, “This is not an important book. It is only the story of a strong woman, a tortured man and three sons who lived hemmed in by thin cotton and ragged history in northeastern Alabama” (xi-xii). He talks about the sacrifices his mother made for him and his brothers and how he was able to “climb up her backbone and escape the poverty and hopelessness that ringed them, free and clean” (xii).
He also introduces the reader to his father, Charles, and the intense drama of his childhood and adolescence, wherein his daddy “whirled through our house in a drunken rage, and as always our momma just absorbed it, placing herself like a wall between her husband and her sons” (xvii).
Chapter 1 Summary: A man who buys books because they are pretty
In the first chapter, Bragg gives us the essential background information on his family. His parents were born in “the most beautiful place on earth, the foothills of the Appalachians along the Alabama-Georgia line...close to nothin’ but the dull red ground. Life here between the meandering dirt roads and skinny blacktop was full, rich, original and real, but harsh, hard, mean as a damn snake” (3-4).
Next, the author describes his last visit with his father, who was dying young from the effects of alcoholism. In that encounter, Bragg’s father gave him his inheritance: a library of beautifully bound books and a .22 rifle. “He said he bought it sometime back, just kept forgetting to give it to me. It was a fine gun, and for a moment we were just like anybody else in the culture of that place where a father’s gift of a gun to his son is a rite. He said, with absolute seriousness, not to shoot my brothers” (12). This last comment reflects the male culture of fighting that was omnipresent for Bragg and his brothers.
Chapter 2 Summary: A killing, and a man who tried to walk on water
This chapter relates the story Bragg’s father told on his deathbed of his experiences in the Korean War. The soldiers’ suffering was extreme in the often senseless killing over a supposedly strategic hill. For Bragg’s father there was also the terrible experience of being cold for the first time in his life, in an environment where “Men were sent home blown to pieces by mines and pocked with bullet holes, but more often with frozen feet, fingers, noses” (17).
Bragg’s father tells of only one deadly encounter. He was asleep when an assassin slipped into their camp and killed one of his fellow soldiers. He woke and chased the killer out onto a frozen lake. The fleeing Korean fell through the ice, and Bragg’s father pushed him down into the freezing water until he drowned.
Chapter 3 Summary: Fake gold, other people’s houses, and the finest man I never knew
This chapter introduces the reader to Bragg’s indomitable, self-sacrificing mother and her family. His mother’s family was dominated by Bragg’s grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, who was known for his wit, his generosity, and his deadliness in a fight. He also ran the leading local still, producing the finest illegal liquor in the region.
Chapter 4 Summary: Dreaming that a crooked man will straighten up and fly right.
The title of this chapter summarizes Rick Bragg’s early years, when his parents were sometimes together and often apart for long periods. His father, for example, did not see young Rick until he was two years old.
Prologue-Chapter 4 Analysis
The South that Bragg knew did not fit the stereotypes of mint-julep drinking rich people who felt guilty about having owned slaves in the past. In Bragg’s world, both whites and blacks struggled to eke out a meager existence and used liquor and the Bible to dull their pain. He wants the reader to understand that his experience was much harsher than what usually appears in stories about Southern whites. Readers may well expect black people to face starvation, but Bragg’s “white trash” family also went hungry.
Charles Bragg’s tale of hand-to-hand combat in Korea colors Bragg’s view of his father for the rest of his life. Bragg chose to believe “that there, in that wretched place where the ground blows up under your feet and dead men motion to you from the sidelines of war, a boy with thin blood was rearranged. I believe it. I want to. I have to” (21). Bragg cannot find any other reason to explain his father’s terrible neglect of his wife and children and his intense drinking.
Bragg’s mother’s experience as her father’s pet contrasts dramatically with the hard life she experienced when she married Charles Bragg. Her husband only cared and provided for her intermittently, and his drunken rages made her afraid for herself and even more for her young children. That she ever returned to him after one of their separations is in part a testament to her courage and strength and also to her desperate situation in a society where the man was the primary breadwinner and women were still largely dependent on their fathers and husbands.
Bragg’s mother was both father and mother to her sons. In her role as a father figure, for example, “She taught us the hooting of owls and the night birds are bad luck, and showed us how to find the best worms for fishing by looking under rotten planks. She showed us how to bait a hook so that the worm did not go flying free but mortally wounded across the water when you flicked your wrist. She showed us how to make a stringer for fish out of a tree branch, showed us how to spit on the hook, for luck” (47).
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