Front Page

The 'Zine

Sunsphere City

Bonus Track

Market Square

Search
Contact us!
About the site

Advertisement


 

Comment
on this story

 

WHO:
Rick Bragg, author of All Over But the Shoutin'

WHEN:
Monday, May 1 at 8 p.m.

WHERE:
Bijou Theater

TICKETS:
Call Friends of the Library at 215-8775 for ticket information

Talkin' About Shoutin'

Rick Bragg talks about his mother, the South, his book, and (yes) Elian Gonzalez

by Matthew T. Everett

Elian Gonzalez has run Rick Bragg ragged. The 6-year-old Cuban boy's story has dominated the news in Miami since last fall, and Bragg, as the head of the New York Times Miami bureau, has grown to hate it.

"It's the dumbest thing I've ever covered," Bragg says in a telephone interview, just after returning from one of the many Elian-related press events staged in Miami on a regular basis. "Some people think hell is a place where you wake up in the morning in a bed of coals. I think it's where you wake up and find out you'll be writing about Elian for the next 643 days."

In fact, Bragg, who will speak at the Bijou Theater on Monday, May 1, says everything about his latest term in Miami—he also worked here for the St. Petersburg Times in the early '90s—has been somewhat hellish. After a few years as the New York Times' southern correspondent, working out of Atlanta, Bragg, 40, accepted the Miami job a year ago, thinking that he needed a fresh perspective after the success of his best-selling 1997 memoir, All Over but the Shoutin'. Now he insists that he probably won't stay in Florida much longer.

For one thing, he simply doesn't like the responsibility that goes along with the bureau chief job. "I pretty much run the place, and as you probably know, I have a real lack of respect for responsibility," he says. "I have plenty of respect for authority, just not for responsibility... The Times covers everything, and when they cover everything, that usually means that I cover everything. I definitely made a mistake."

But Bragg also thinks the Miami job has taken him too far from home and the family that he chronicled in All Over but the Shoutin'. In Atlanta, he was always just a few hours' drive away from northeastern Alabama, where his mother and two brothers still live.

"What I didn't count on was missing home. I got used to it," Bragg says. "I could watch the Braves on three different television channels, and I didn't have to ask for sweet tea. And I was able to drive over and see my mom. I was used to being at home. Atlanta's not home, but it's really close to home. I got spoiled knowing there'd be cold fried chicken in the Tupperware when I got home, or knowing that I could go fishing in a pond when I wanted to."

In All Over but the Shoutin', Bragg told the story of his mother, Margaret Bundrum Bragg, a poor, uneducated Southern woman who washed other people's clothes and picked cotton in the red dirt of Alabama, who never owned her own home until her son bought her one a few years ago, who endured post-Depression poverty with dignity and resilience, who raised three sons, one of whom went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for reporting at the most prestigious, respected newspaper in the country.

Bragg's relationship to his mother is often a difficult one. He recognizes that he now lives in a different world than his mother and brothers, and that the distance will probably never be closed.

"She's mad at me right now," he says. "I bought her a washer and dryer, and she thinks buying the dryer was wasteful. She said she's lived 63 years without one and doesn't understand why she couldn't go the rest of her life without one, so she got mad at me. We're haters. We can keep a grudge like nobody's business."

All Over but the Shoutin' is also Bragg's own story, about his rise from humble beginnings to the top of his field. Almost by chance, with no intention of making newspapers a career, Bragg, while a part-time student at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, landed a $50-a-week sports writing job at a small weekly newspaper in Jacksonville. He gradually moved up through the ranks of Southern newspapers, reporting for the Anniston Star, an award-winning small daily in northwestern Alabama, then the Birmingham News, then the St. Petersburg Times. After an unhappy two-week stint at the Los Angeles Times, Bragg accepted an offer from the New York Times in 1994 and then, in 1996, won the Pulitzer for what the judging panel called "elegantly written stories on contemporary America."

"It was a dream job, to cover the Deep South for a great newspaper. But it was also an unusual time," he says. "There was the Susan Smith trial, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Jonesboro killings. And in between there were so many other good stories. I feel like there will never be another time like that, another four- or five-year stretch like that, again."

Bragg also feels that his time at small papers—"I love newspapers. I'll probably always be linked to newspapers... I was a part of that era when a whiskey bottle was in the drawer of the city editor's desk, or at least one of the copy clerk's"—helped him develop the empathy for the underdog that he demonstrated in All Over but the Shoutin'.

"Newspapers are still the best source of thoughtful news, thoughtful, considered, packaged news. I'm really proud I did it for them," he says. "I worked on some heart-wrenching stories—the death of a baby in ICU, plane crashes, acid spills, old murders that had been blamed on the wrong people, stabbings in the housing projects. Death is the story. You don't write about the plane when it lands safely."

While All Over but the Shoutin' is a very personal, autobiographical tribute from a son to his mother, it's also, in a bigger sense, a story about the South and its people, who still struggle with an economically impoverished past and a morally murky history.

Anthony Walton, writing for the New York Times Book Review, described Bragg's book as "sad, beautiful, funny and moving ... a report from the forgotten heart of 'white trash' America." Kirkus Reviews called it "rich, empathetic, and compelling. ... a model of humility combined with pride in one's accomplishments." Even more than critics, readers responded to Bragg's detailed examination of a world rarely explored by outsiders and rarely revisited by survivors.

"People seem to find something in it that seemed like family," Bragg says. "That's a great compliment that they see and understand it, that they know what I'm talking about before turning the page. I guess there's a great truth in it. People seemed like they found a sense that they had already lived it before, that they had seen it before... The nice thing about Shoutin' is that it gave me a chance to talk to people who were in the same boat, who had seen their mom and daddy work themselves to death, or who were working themselves to death."

In fact, Bragg has found that the story he began the book with has stories behind it. He is currently at work on a second family history, with a tentative publishing date of 2001, centered on his maternal grandparents, particularly his grandfather, a man he never knew but whose presence he has always felt.

"They were two of the most interesting people I ever heard of," Bragg says. "She was a gifted, eccentric, hot-tempered woman. She could tell your fortune by looking in a can of coffee grounds. He was a carpenter and poacher and roofer and whiskey maker who raised his children, two boys and six girls, in the teeth of the Depression.

"As I said in the last book, anybody can be loved if everything is electric blankets and warmth and comfort, but to be beloved, really, truly beloved, a man needs a dragon. He has to protect the people he loves from something clawing at the door. In his case it was the Depression... His daughters still cry when they talk about his funeral, and he died more than 40 years ago. Everybody has somebody like that in their family, but his grandson just happens to be somebody who writes for a living. The book has very little to do with me, and a lot to do with a man I admire very much."

The new project requires more research than Shoutin' did, prompting Bragg to dig through old family photos and documents and to listen again to the stories he has heard throughout his life. The book has also gotten him out onto the land that his family once worked, picking cotton for landowners at pennies a pound, and the connections he found there are one reason he wants to be closer to home.

"There's a whole big paragraph in the book about dirt," he says. "I was back home and went for a walk in the dirt. It occurred to me then that I ought to come home pretty soon. And I will as soon as I can."
 

April 20, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 16
© 2000 Metro Pulse