Comments on: Rick Bragg’s Hard South

By: Tena D

Tena D — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:54:14 +0000

Every once in a while an author comes along who can write straight to your heart. You can hear the music, smell the food in the kitchen, and see the people of the story just as clearly as if they were sitting across from you on the front porch.
Mr Bragg is such a story teller: I have read the first two books of the trilogy and am having the fine experience of hearing him read this work. The wait was a little long. Probably the writting of it was longer for him.
I have grew up in the west but come from a long line of Southerners. My husband says I am a pig in mud as soon as I cross the mason/dixon line, where sweet tea is the house wine and biscuts are as they should be; made with white lilly flour and love. It is in the blood, the story, the people. the life. Thanks for putting the music of your story on to paper Mr. Bragg.

By: Robin Gaylor

Robin Gaylor — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 04:39:46 +0000

I just finished “Shoutin”. I’m glad I read “Ava’s Man” first, so I was familiar with how Margaret grew up, and where she got her strong family ties. My daddy grew up on Lookout Mountain, in Ft. Payne, and we used to travel through all the “foothills” of the mountains to get there when going to visit grandparents, and kinfolk.
It’s funny how little you take in all the details when you are a child – things you would give a million dollars to get to go back and see again now.
Here’s a funny story that came to my mind as I was reading “Ava’s Man”. This is from the other side of my family – my mother’s side. Her grandfather, my Great Grandfather, used to have an old pick-up truck in the 1940’s, and would move people when they needed help. One family called him so many times to help them move, that – so it was told – when his truck drove up, their chickens would just jump up on the back without being made to! There were actually LOTS of things in his books that made me think of my wonderful, country, wouldn’t-trade-em-for-the-world, kinfolks. If the world had more like them, we wouldn’t have to worry about tomorrow.

By: Belinda Whorton

Belinda Whorton — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:11:14 +0000

I have read all three of Mr. Bragg’s books that describe his various family members. I’ve heard similar stories my entire life, because my parents met while my mother was living in a mill village and working in a cotton mill in Guntersville, AL, not very far from Jacksonville. My father was there to putty the windows. He tossed balls of putty down to hit this pretty lady and flirt, and it was my mother. Her nickname for him, and the only thing I ever heard her call him, was “Putty.” To read Rick Bragg’s books warms my heart in a way I can’t describe. My parents moved to Rome, GA, just over the state line from Jacksonville, AL, and this is where I was born and raised. Since I have knowledge of Mr. Bragg’s old stomping grounds (my father’s family is still on Sand Mountain in Geraldine and in Gadsden, and I traveled through the Jacksonville area so many times — spent lots of summer hours on Lake Weiss), I swear I feel like I know the man!

My father was there to putty the windows. I am 50 years old, and was born in 1958 to two folks in their mid-40s. My parents were the same age of my friends grandparents! So, I was a generation off, and enjoyed hours of countless stories just like the stories told by Mr. Bragg in his books. After my father died at age 56, when I was 10, we spent our summer vacations, not at the beach, but at the home of one of my mother’s friends in the same mill village….just visiting, sitting outside in the evenings and talking, and telling (and my listening and absorbing) the old stories. I now live in Cartersville, GA, and one of my friends actually remembers Rick Bragg at parties during her time at Jacksonville State U. So, like I said, I feel like I know him. After his first book, I decided I needed to marry hime (ha! just kidding, I’m married), but that’s how much I loved his book, All Over But the Shoutin’. I wonder if everyone has an unfulfilled wish like me? When I grow up, I want to be an author just like Rick Bragg.

By: Claude Jones

Claude Jones — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 04:26:57 +0000

I stand amazed at the abilities of southern women who raised families, survived unimaged hardships and sacrificed too often their chance for common happiness, in order to give their children a opportunity to have better and to enjoy the chance to live free of the handicap of addictive men.

My Mother, like yours, chose to hide her feelings, swollow her pride, work harder than most others and yet retain her reputation by refusing the mundane offers of men you could have provided her with the financial means to live the dream presented to us all on television and cheap novels.

How I hated the alcohol that changed (or freed) my Daddy’s personality and so marred his judgement. Now it is a craving that haunts me daily. “I am different” I claim, but fail to loose my smart ass mouth.

Thanks for telling ‘our’ story.

Claude Jones, Pontotoc MS

By: william davidson

william davidson — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:18:37 +0000

Thanks to all those who left comments, throwing some light on Rick Braggs’ writings and attitudes, and my own – having lived in the south for over 30 years. There can still be a lot of defensive anger just under surface around here, and sometimes it just doesn’t help us live a decent life.
Nevertheless, re-reading my earlier comments I find them cryptic and mean spirited, and I apologize for that.

By: A Listener and Reader

A Listener and Reader — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 01:04:35 +0000

A bit too much hyper-sincerity and false modesty in this hour for my taste. What a joyless, humorless conversation. So many have come up so much harder than Bragg, yet they maintain some balance of sorry AND joy in telling their story and in their perspectives…

This interview did nothing to motivate me to sample this well-regarded author… a failure on both sides of the table.

By: karen sundstrom

karen sundstrom — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:12:55 +0000

(hit the submit button too soon)

When we’ve got the history of more than just our own family’s pain some of the personal bitterness and rage drains away and we can honestly say ‘that’s not all they are’.

When I ran down this history I felt the tight, hard knot in my heart let loose a little. Not just me, not just Uncle Joe and Uncle Henry, not just my moma.

No need to add a word to Rick Bragg, just thankfulness and a full heart.

There are many sources for this web and some of them can be found and named. When they are named and seen, they can lose their sense of the inevitable.

In his interview with Tom, Rick talks briefly about class and our people ‘the foot soldiers in someone else’s war’, the anger and the quick reach for whiskey and the quick fist.

So there are people writing that history: the story of poorer white people – mostly Scotch-Irish – all over the south, how our ways came out of our history, cruel and lovely. Starting with “Albion’s Seed” by David Hackett Fischer, the story of four great British migrations to America (the biggest was the Scotch-Irish in the 1700s). In that book we and them are described. so clear it left me speechless. “Born Fighting, the story of the Scotch-Irish” by Jim Webb (yep, the senator from Virginia). Some of the cruelty is pushed aside and this work glorifies too much, but there is truth here too. “All Gods Children” by Fox Butterfield, a stunning book on the persistence and spread of these ways of behaving and thinking. And anything by Rev. Will Campbell, a Tennessee Baptist minister and writer.

None of these works is too academic or dry or shallow. They give me the way to see Rick Bragg’s stories and family – and my stories and family – in full.

Tomorrow I’ll be going to a funeral in Florence SC. One of those tough, strong Funny women, my Aunt Faith has died at 83. Bless god I got many stories over the years and shared with her what I learned about history. Red-headed and full of fun, she was, coming out of hard times

When I see them fully I can love them more and understand better. And I can thank them with no regrets.

By: william davidson

william davidson — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:09:34 +0000

Dear Mr. Braqg,
The value of work is not determined by whether it was done with the hands or the head.
I actually did let the wrench slip, cut myself close to the bone, and was involuntarily taken off the case. So? Not heroic – just dumb.

You have a highly evolved ability to refine bitterness. One can have a seriously hardcore love/hate relationship with oneself.

enjoy your time,
wtd

By: April Dawley

April Dawley — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:58:27 +0000

“It’s more about class,” said a caller. Author Bragg agreed. I, too, agree. The characters described remind me, not of my dad and mom, but of an aunt (my mom’s sister) and uncle. He was an bullying alcoholic; she survived for many years by waitressing. She finally left him, took the three kids, met another man, had his child. Her youngest two, by my uncle, had to be placed in foster care for awhile. In the end, the middle child, who was the target of my uncle’s drunken temper, became an alcoholic himself. Now recovered, and running a recovery program for others, he and his dad, my uncle, reconciled with the help of AA.

The words read by the author moved me to recall my own childhood in the same way Willa Cather’s “My Antonia” did, and remind me so much of my working class Ohio roots.

Beautifully done. I look forward to reading Mr. Bragg’s books.

Thank you, Tom Ashbrook, for this program – for each and every program for that matter. Fuel for the mind.

April Dawley

By: karen sundstrom

karen sundstrom — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:37:02 +0000

My Mama’s people are the Hodges, Olivers, Langstons, Purvis, Hills and more of the Pee Dee in South Carolina. On my husbands side they come from Edgefield district: Busseys, McDaniels. Some of them came out of the same cruelty, poverty, violence and drinking. Most of us got out, educated out, worked out, clawed out, prayed out, got lifted out by somebody. These family stories are mostly buried, sometimes rewritten with all the hurt bled out, retold, argued over. I know these people. Some of them are mine. Digging them out from the memories of my mother and aunts and cousins has taken decades. So much grief and anger too. Took me till I was in my 40s to put myself among them without shame or re-touching them to pretty them up.

Many thousands – like Bragg says – at the readings saying ‘that was my Daddy’ or ‘you stole my story’.

So there’s the other part of this story – why so many, in one region, holding on over time. Its the piece of the story that Rick Bragg brings in, but he’s writing a memoir of individuals and not a history.

But the history counts. And we can’t grab hold of this without the history. When we’ve got a clear and full picture of our history

By: suzanne finnamore

suzanne finnamore — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 07:42:11 +0000

“My father was the prince of Frogtown..”

I am at page 37 of your latest book. I had to stop, because my eyes were already tearing up, something that doesn’t happen to single mothers unless someone has hurt my child – and that hasn’t happened for real since his daddy left us, my boy still in diapers. My son is ten now — the age you were when you met your Boy – and here in California at twenty six minutes past midnight, I’m beginning to see why Pat Conroy called reading you ‘…like reading one of the prophets in the Old Testament,’ and why he wrote you what amounts to a love letter and sent your momma flowers when he finished All Over But The Shoutin’. Pat Conroy, who I think of us as a living saint. And now I know what the shoutin’ is about. This is a stupendpous, lyrical memoir. You make me want to write so much better than I do, and in just two chapters, you make me believe that perhaps family is possible after false starts, can grow right out of dry dirt, and that maybe men do fall in love with women with children. Bless you for doing that. So at page 37, I have shut the book and Googled you, to see where I could reach you to tell you how you’ve already touched me so deeply, and it’s only page 37. And here you are, about to go on the radio in a few hours, far away from where I am, me with Frogtown in my hands and a knot in my throat. My God, you are an amazingly gifted man, and that Boy is one lucky soul. Thank you, Mister Bragg. You are something else. Many people give laughter or irony or show their craft, but tonight you gave me awe, inspiration — and hope, something I had forgotten I even require.