All Over But The Shoutin' (1998) - Plot & Excerpts
Rick Bragg would get five stars for telling a good story. The fact of the matter is he got the Pulitzer Prize for telling good stories. I even liked most of his stories, even the ones about alligators. But I actually give him three stars because I did often wish that he wouldn’t be such a good ole boy and would just get to the point. The sad thing is that his mother had a really hard life and there wasn’t really very much he did to make it better. Sure, he saved his money and bought her a house. Of her, he says, “Of course, she was still there, surrounded by those old sadnesses. Nothing seemed to change on her side, except the calendar.”” I didn’t get into this business to change the world. I just wanted to tell stories. But now and then, you can make people care, make people notice that something ain’t quite right, and nudge them gently, with the words, to get off their ass and fix it.” --Rick Bragg I am a latecomer to the writing of Rick Bragg who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996 for the NY Times. All Over But the Shoutin’ is the first book in the Rick Bragg trilogy published in 1997 that has gotten very good reviews from members of the GR group On the Southern Literary Trail. Bragg is a journalist, a fact that attracted me to his work and to look forward to reading what he writes.At least part of a memoir is memories. I know I had a third brother, an infant who died because we were left alone and with no money for her to see a doctor, that he did not live long enough to have a name. I know his gravestone just reads Baby Bragg and my momma never mentioned him to us, for thirty years, but carried his memory around deep inside her, like a piece of broken glass. Rick Bragg describes a world that I can hardly imagine. This was, remember, a world of pulpwooders and millworkers and farmers, of men who ripped all the skin off their knuckles working on junk cars and ignored the blood that ran down their arms. 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 am not saying I agree with it. It’s just the way it was. When I started at the beginning, the book was hard to read. The words were skillfully written and sometimes beautiful but the meaning made it rough going, slow moving. Hard to read about such a hard life. But somehow Bragg writes about a hard life like it was more than a mite interesting. He says that even when you are poor, the “one great meal of the day was breakfast, because breakfast is cheap.” 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 real 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 black pepper. Just so you know that Bragg did not just write about breakfast in poverty, there was plenty of this: That night, for no reason at all beyond the fact that he was drunk, he went mean again. Momma, as always, tried to fend him off even as she herded us out of harm’s way, back into the bedroom. We hid not in the bed but under it, and whispered to each other of how you reckon you can kill a grown man. …Daddy would return from God know where every now and then, but only to terrorize us, to drink and rage and, finally, sleep like he was dead. He would strike out at whoever was near, but again it always seemed that she was between him and us, absorbing his cruelty, accepting it. Then he would leave, without giving her a dime, without asking if we had food, without giving a damn.How could anyone enjoy reading a book written with these details, even though it was well written? The book has a good reputation in the reading group, people assured me that I would be glad I had read it. What could they mean? Well written brutality could not be that attractive, could it?Bragg experienced plenty of religion in his youth and his mother bought it a dollar at a time from the TV evangelists when they were destitute.Some of those TV preachers did good things with their millions, and some lied, cheated and stole, so it’s unfair to lump them all into one pile. But I wish those bad ones could have seen my momma with her hand on her thirty-five-dollar television, believing. Maybe they would have done better. Probably not. It just makes me angry. I am just mystified by this book. Serious thing are buried behind a laugh. …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 hard not to kill nobody else, but if you have to, better if it ain’t fam’ly. “Life was sweet, often, and the crises were small.We were poor, but we were not dull.”Too many of the crises seemed more than small to my way of thinking. I just don’t have much of that kind of sense of humor, I guess. Maybe this is the place someone else might think bittersweet.The NY Times reviewer wrote when the book was published in 1997: In a time when Bragg's family was at rock bottom, without food, a black boy from down the road brought them some corn his mother had sent over. ''In the few contacts we had with them as children, we had thrown rocks at them . . . 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.'' In the brutal realities faced by those like Bragg who were not ''white,'' not really, poor whites chose not to band together with blacks but to instead live in ''two separate, distinct states.'' One would have liked to see even more commentary on this critical topic from so honest and thoughtful an observer.I can relate to that observation with the echo that this book is so much and yet still could have been so much more. Bragg brings us a real worldview from inside the life of white trash. He escaped that world and I want so much more from his award winning pen.Bragg learned early that you didn’t need to be black to be discriminated against. The principal and teachers, when they recognized who we were, where we ranked, told Sam that he could sweep the narrow halls, clean the bathrooms and shovel coal into the school’s furnace, to earn his free lunch. He took out the trash and burned it and unclogged the toilet. They never bothered to teach him to read very well; he learned that on his own. They never bothered to tell him about the world outside his narrow, limited one. They forgot to show him maps of the universe or share the secrets of history, biology. As other students behind the classroom doors read about empires, wars and kings, he waxed the gymnasium floor. OK, so here I am forty percent of the way through the book and tired of reading about being white trash in the South. Then, the scene changes and before I know it I am in Times Square New York City. And then I am covering football and stock car racing. And loving it. But Bragg couldn’t stay in college or remain a sportswriter. He was just too good a writer and story teller.In the rest of the time in the book he alternates between telling about his family, a family that often had a problem with alcohol, and telling stories about being a journalist. He tells stories about being in terrifying situations that are somehow told as adventuresome events. Like the one about the alligators. I dropped like a sack of mud straight down into the black water of the eighteen-foot canal, and knew that I would surely die. I rose up to grasp the side of the boat, scared to death, waiting for one of those twelve-foot monsters to clamp down on my legs and drag me down. … I know that gators prefer a nice piece of rotted turtle to human beings. I had read National Geographic, too. I know they usually will not attack human beings if there is a poodle anywhere near, but none of that went through my head as I hung there, helpless. It was only for a few minutes, but time has a different meaning when half your body is submerged in black water aswarm with alligators, the same gators your hunting partners had been jabbing with cold steel most of the night. He tells story after story while smiling at danger with a completely straight face. This is what makes him a great storyteller. I thought for just a second that I might die there. I am not trying to be melodramatic. Reporters live for war stories, except the ones who have been so genuinely frightened in so many terrible places that they do not need to scare themselves all over again with their own memories. But for just a second, on that sand road in the middle of the scrub, I knew I had risked my life for five or six paragraphs. Rick Bragg parted ways with the NY Times in 2003 with a disagreement over his methodology of writing. He took credit for an article that a freelancer had mostly written and then claimed that practice was common at the NY Times. When he left the Times, he reportedly had a million dollar advance from a publisher for his next book. So he wasn’t poor anymore. Now he writes for Southern Living magazine. Here is a short video that will give you a glimpse of what the man has become: http://www.southernliving.com/communi... . In this video he says, “Sweet tea might be a cliché, but it’s a delicious cliché.”Occasionally Rick Bragg does manage to get serious with his writing, to drop the folksy, Southern storyteller persona. But not often enough in this book as far as I am concerned. He is way too busy being a good ole boy most of the time, spinning the tales. Bragg considers himself to be a good talker. I can imagine him being a standup comedian talking about growing up poor in the South. He is a self-made man.I spent a lot of time looking for the “ring of authenticity” in his writing but not finding it except maybe when he was talking about covering sports from the press box early in his career and having trouble getting the numbers and names right. And his times in Haiti when he seemed to be a visitor to atrocities with a guide taking him to the stories and to the bodies for a price.I once worked closely with a man who talked by telling stories. He would never answer a question directly but instead would tell a story. You had to figure out what it meant. I was not that I never knew what the point was to his stories. I usually could figure it out. But it did make it hard to pin him down sometimes when he was especially indirect. Rick Bragg is like that for me. He is often interesting to listen to but sometimes you just want him to get to the point. To actually say something.One of the things that Bragg tells a lot of stories about is drunks. His father was a serious drunk. His younger brother is one. He is an incipient alcoholic himself, I would say. His Momma “has tolerated drunks all her life; she is good at it. She expects it.” I am curious about what has become of his life since this book was published over fifteen years ago. I have the next two books of the trilogy on my TBR shelf but my general disappointment with All Over but the Shoutin’ bumps them a little bit down on my list. Bragg described himself as “gothic, dark and personal” and I would like to see him show more of the man behind the screen.
I wish I could give this book a higher rating. Many people swear by it, and it was a good read. But I fear I've been focused too heavily on the craft of memoir writing the last two years, because while reading I kept seeing so much more the author could have done with it.The opening is one of the best I've ever seen in a memoir. It sets just the right level of humility while making me curious about his poor upbringing, his saintly mother, and his demon father. And his story is a compelling one, and an uplifting one. I was happy for him when he got his first out-of-town newspaper job; when he won the Pulitzer; and when he was able to buy his mother a house. But the voice of the book is so thick with bitterness, resentment and, I'll venture, insecurity. He admits near the end of the book he has a big chip on his shoulder, but says it's getting smaller. It's still very big to tolerate for an entire book. I get that he has felt looked down upon because of his poor upbringing and initial lack of education (he later got to study at Harvard, so he's now ahead of most folks in that department), but I found his continued clubbing on these points uncomfortable. I say insecurity because often people who have to keep harping about how far they've made it still deep down don't believe they deserve to have made it. If he came out and confessed to deep-seated insecurity that would add some nuance to the read, but Bragg mostly, well, just brags.He has covered some interesting stories, and it's interesting to hear him retell them in the book. But at times he seems to fall in an easy trap for a journalist, a sense that because others experienced the story because of your writing that you are part of the story, or as big as the story. In my time in the world of journalism I've tended to surround myself with those who truly saw themselves as outside of the story, separate from it. I found myself wondering sometimes why so much of the book focused on his reporting career. At times he seemed to use those stories as a vehicle to look into his past to show the reader how far he had come. I would have liked more of that.What I really would have liked more of is actual scene. A memoirist naturally has to do a lot of telling, more so than a novelist. But a little show is nice as well. Bragg, like most feature reporters, is good at painting scenes. But usually he would write conditionally, as "we used to do this" or "I remember Mama always doing that." I don't think it was the journalist in him afraid to do a scene from memory, because he does write some scenes. The scene where he visits his father for the last time before the man dies is really powerful. I fear he didn't have more because it's simply easier to write in summary, and what we learned of how his journalism career ended--relying on an intern's reporting and taking credit for it--suggests someone open to short cuts.My only concern with the otherwise brilliant opening was that he seemed to present such polar positions of the parents, the saintly mother and the demon father. I liked that the father was actually painted in a more nuanced way, with some back story on how his war experience may have affected him, and later with the author admitting he may have some of his father's flaws himself. (A memoir is always at its most powerful when the author looks hardest at him/herself.) But the mother doesn't come across as a saint. It's clear Bragg loves his mother and wants to honor her with the book. But the way he slants details suggests a certain condescension. I realized that there are a lot of times where he talks about her more like you would talk about your love for a really simple but loyal farm dog. He allows us to hear her poor grammar and almost mocks her resistance to the trappings of his success. I found myself cringing at times, while realizing Bragg himself likely did not intend that reaction in me.Bragg is a great writer, and he has a good story to tell. It could have been told so much better, and that is too bad. It is still worth a read if you keep in mind that you'll be spending a lot of time with someone who is still pretty bitter.
What do You think about All Over But The Shoutin' (1998)?
One of my favorite genres is the memoir and this one tops my list. You could say it is the Southern version of Angela's Ashes, written by a son in tribute to his mother.Bragg is a "good ole boy" whose narrative voice is as thick and Southern as sweet tea. He and his two brothers grew up dirt poor in Alabama with a long suffering mother and a ne'er do well father. Rick is the brother who made good, becoming a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. But no matter where his stories took him - to major cities and far flung locales - his heart remained in the Deep South with his Momma.This is his Momma's story and it isn't a pretty one. His family didn't live in proud, genteel poverty, they lived in squalid, spirit crushing poverty. It is an old story in many ways with an alcoholic father battling his demons and a mother unable to see her way out of a hopeless situation. His mother never prevailed, she was barely able to raise her children. But what she lacked in vision, she made up for in determination to feed her sons no matter what. Rick watched her grow old before her time doing hard physical labor of the most menial kind in a world where that appeared to be the only option. In his adulthood he wanted nothing more than to share his success with his beloved mother, only to find that she could never relate to his world. She was a simple woman with simple needs whose past could never be mended by her son's well meaning gifts and adulation. She looked for no compensation for the years of hardship and she held no bitterness towards the people and the circumstances that kept her mired in a life of deprivation and heartache. The story is told with unflinching honesty. Bragg is forthcoming about his own failed relationships and the demons his father passed down to one of his brothers. He admits his ongoing struggle to forgive his father who lived and died a broken man, leaving a damaged family behind. He traces some of his family back a generation or two in order to explain his mother's world view which would otherwise seem nearly incomprehensible to an outsider. At the end of the book Bragg doesn't have a resolution to the grim reality of his childhood, but his memoir is a catharsis and a tribute to his mother's redeeming love.
—Mary
Published in 1998, I believe, this memoir describes the author's childhood growing up very poor in rural Alabama and his path towards becoming a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist at the New York Times. The final chapters are absolutely beautiful and it was nice to end the book on a high note, because parts of the story became very stale for me. I give the author a lot of credit for being honest about himself and his weaknesses (the chip on his shoulder about growing up poor and not having access to opportunities and resources; his bad temper; the way in which he pushed people who cared about him away and just focused on his work), but sometimes it got hard to read the memoir of someone who wasn't particularly nice and who kept talking about the ways in which he wasn't. Tangentially, I liked many of the descriptions of the stories he covered in the U.S. (New York and the South) and Haiti in the early-mid 1990s. In college at the time, I wasn't very tuned in to national and world news and these descriptions reminded me of some dark things that happened at the time. It helped fill in a news/history gap for me.
—Jenny
