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Summary
Summary
In this final volume of the beloved American saga that began withAll Over but the Shoutin'and continued withAva's Man,Rick Bragg closes his circle of family stories with an unforgettable tale about fathers and sons inspired by his own relationship with his ten-year-old stepson. He learns, right from the start, that a man who chases a woman with a child is like a dog who chases a car and wins. He discovers that he is unsuited to fatherhood, unsuited to fathering this boy in particular, a boy who does not know how to throw a punch and doesn't need to; a boy accustomed to love and affection rather than violence and neglect; in short, a boy wholly unlike the child Rick once was, and who longs for a relationship with Rick that Rick hasn't the first inkling of how to embark on. With the weight of this new boy tugging at his clothes, Rick sets out to understand his father, his son, and himself. The Prince of Frogtowndocuments a mesmerizing journey back in time to the lush Alabama landscape of Rick's youth, to Jacksonville's one-hundred-year-old mill, the town's blight and salvation; and to a troubled, charismatic hustler coming of age in its shadow, Rick's father, a man bound to bring harm even to those he truly loves. And the book documents the unexpected corollary to it, the marvelous journey of Rick's later life: a journey into fatherhood, and toward a child for whom he comes to feel a devotion that staggers him. With candor, insight, tremendous humor, and the remarkable gift for descriptive storytelling on which he made his name, Rick Bragg delivers a brilliant and moving rumination on the lives of boys and men, a poignant reflection on what it means to be a father and a son.
Author Notes
Rick Bragg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996. A national correspondent for the "New York Times", he lives in Miami, Florida.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. In reading his latest autobiographical title, which alternates between the rough-and-tumble rural South of his origins and the contemporary suburban South of his preteen stepson, Bragg smoothly invokes colloquial pronunciations such as the dropping of the g sound in ing words. In the hands of any other narrator besides the author, such touches would seem stilted, but Bragg brings sincerity and dignity to the proceedings. He demonstrates a knack for building dramatic tension in presenting his narrative, holding back serious emotional fire for the most pivotal confrontations. One particularly memorable dialogue centers on his father's participation in the brutal sport of dog fighting and how one fateful act of alcohol-fueled desperation forever altered the family dynamic. In coming to terms with the cushy 21st-century existence of the boy, Bragg poignantly recounts a surprising exchange between his stepson and a less fortunate family at a roadside fast-food restaurant. As he straddles two contrasting identities, Bragg remains unafraid to demonstrate his vulnerability, and this nuanced performance perfectly matches the themes of his work. A Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 3). (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Whereas All Over but the Shoutin' (1997) provided a tribute to his resilient mother and Ava's Man (2001) chronicled his remarkable grandfather, Bragg, an Old World storyteller at heart, now aims his sights squarely at his much-loathed father. In an Appalachian village where bootlegging and brawling took up whatever hours weren't owed to the cotton mill, the Bragg men drank corn whiskey, played poker, rolled dice and settled arguments with fists and knives and sometimes just acted a little peculiar. Perhaps doomed from the start, his father's life crawls, runs, and staggers from an impoverished and roughshod childhood to a young man's tomcatting golden age to the abuse, neglect, and early death of severe alcoholism. Bragg attempts to reconcile but not forgive his father and his legacy as he himself becomes a stepfather to exactly the sort of boy who ought never be a Bragg; who, to his horror, wept from a boo-boo, or if he was tired. As the boy grows into a man, Bragg transforms into the sort of father he always lacked, and believed he could never be. A deeply felt and painfully honest portrait of folk, family, and fatherhood that will resonate with bittersweet harmony as long as fathers have sons, and sons have fathers.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN June 1942, a United States naval convoy arrived in New Zealand, beginning a friendly invasion that would last two years and involve around 100,000 American soldiers and sailors. To help the visitors adapt, the New Zealand government published a booklet that made a useful point: "New Zealanders have been well trained by your movies," it said, "so we cotton (catch) on to most of your ordinary slang. But as we don't export films to Hollywood you won't know ours." That one-way flow of American culture has only gained momentum since then, which is why Christina Thompson's account of her own first visit to New Zealand strikes a jarring note. It's sometime in the 1980s, and Thompson has stopped off on her way from Boston, her hometown, to graduate school in Australia. In a pub north of Auckland she meets a group of Maoris - New Zealand's indigenous Polynesians - having a beer after a day out diving for crayfish. "I have often thought of that night as a contact encounter," she writes in "Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All," explaining that "'contact' is what we call it when two previously unacquainted groups meet for the very first time." Thompson persists with this meeting-of-alien-peoples theme as the tenuous link between the memoir part of her book, in which she is cast as a kind of explorer charting new cross-cultural territory in her relationship with a Maori ("I was small and blond, he was a 6-foot-2, 200-pound Polynesian. I had a Ph.D., he went to trade school"), and the history part (the European discovery and colonization of New Zealand). The late-20th-century pub incident, for example, segues into accounts of 18th-century encounters between Maoris and explorers like James Cook and Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne. Both of them were ultimately killed by the Polynesians they met; Thompson married hers. Later, the story of Omai, the first Polynesian to set foot in England, is woven into an account of Thompson's return home with her new husband, "for many people in Boston ... the first person they had ever met of his kind." In 1770s London, Omai was a hit - with one young lady asserting that "he is so polite, attentive & easy, that you would have thought he came from some foreign court." In modern-day Boston, Thompson's husband, known as Seven, attracted "a similar sort of admiration," something she found surprising. "He, after all, had little idea how things were done among people like my parents and could no more have been expected to know what passed for good manners among them than they would have known the protocol for being invited onto a Ngati Rehia marae." Really? I can see how middle-class Bostonians might not be steeped in the etiquette of the Maori meeting place, but there's been nowhere to hide from all things American - even in New Zealand - for quite a few decades now. The Maori chief Toot in his costume as a chieftain, circa 1818. From the Missionary Papers. We don't learn here of Omai's fate, though in her fine account of Captain Cook's voyages ("The Trial of the Cannibal Dog"), Anne Salmond rounds off his remarkable tale. After two years entertaining scientists and society ladies, Omai joined Cook's final South Pacific journey, eventually making it back to his home near Tahiti. There, he was set up with a house, a garden and a collection of animals including horses, sheep, turkeys, cats and a monkey. A few years later, though, Omai succumbed to a fever, all but one of his animals also having died, even the monkey, which was killed falling out of a coconut palm. As for Seven, at book's end he is still in Massachusetts, where the family settled and Thompson works as editor of Harvard Review. She wonders sometimes if he gets homesick. "'Don't you want to go back to New Zealand?' I would ask him. 'Not really,' he always said." Although Thompson's "contact encounter" parallels are strained, her observations about the enduring effects of colonization can be penetrating. She puts her vantage point of insider-outsider (she's never lived in New Zealand yet has an intimate connection with it) to good effect, tracing the genealogy of racial stereotypes and cutting through some of New Zealand's most cherished myths about itself. Like the one about how injustices of the past have been addressed, or that, unlike Australia, New Zealand is not racist. "What, after all, does the cluster of social indicators that includes low life expectancy, poor health, high unemployment and low levels of educational attainment suggest, if not poverty?" she asks. "And what is the root cause of Maori poverty, if not colonization?" Thompson now has interests on both sides of the postcolonial divide, feeling the dispossession suffered by her husband's (hence her children's) people as well as that perpetrated by her own. ("It was the Dakotas and Pennacooks and Pawtuckets who paid the price of our family's prosperity.") A difficulty with explorer stories, however, is that the voice of the explored is usually missing, and this is certainly the case here. Thompson explains it as a deliberate decision, a "gesture of respect." "It is not their story I am telling," she says of Seven's family, "it is mine." Actually, it is both - it's her story about herself and her story about them. Alison McCulloch, a former editor at the Book Review, lives in New Zealand.
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-Bragg revisits his Alabama hometown for the third time, following All Over but the Shoutin' (1998) and Ava's Man (2002, both Vintage). He attempts to retell the story of his father, vilified as an abusive drunk in the earlier works, and gives him a more in-depth treatment in an effort to determine what made him the way he was. While by no means sympathetic, the portrayal shows readers a man who had limited choices in education, employment, relationships, and, ultimately, behavior. Before he became an absent father, Charles Bragg was a good son; a handsome man with a sexy car; a fighter and carouser, and eventually a mean, spiteful drunk. Described through recollections of friends and relatives who knew him when, the figure who emerges coped the only way he knew how, with exaggerated machismo, in a small town that he never left for any length of time. The author's realization that he might have been harsh in his previous memoirs comes through as he views his new 10-year-old stepson as soft. Even with all the benefits of education and a Pulitzer Prize, that seed of the immature Bragg tough guy remains. The story unfolds in alternating chapters, shorter ones about the stepson interspersed with longer ones about Charles Bragg. The stepson stories have a '40s-something navel-gazing quality about them that could put off some teens, but most of the book, masterfully told, is the kind of dysfunctional family memoir that teens tend to love.-Jamie Watson, Harford County Public Library, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Library Journal Review
With this wrenching story of fathers and sons, Pulitzer Prize winner Bragg completes the personal saga he began with the best sellers All Over but the Shoutin' and Ava's Man. After 40 years of self-proclaimed bachelorhood, Bragg finds himself thrown into the uncomfortable and challenging position of becoming a stepfather. Learning to have a son brings to light the chasm separating Bragg from his own father. Readers are at last allowed to catch a glimpse of this passionate and clearly troubled alcoholic and Korean War veteran, dismissed in the earlier memoirs as a deadbeat villain. Abandoned by his father at age six, Bragg relies on accounts from his mother, brothers, cousins, and family friends to piece together his father's story, riddled with tales of white-whiskey bootlegging, run-ins with local law enforcement, and domestic disputes. Here, Bragg continues in the vein of his legendary storytelling, breathing life into a father he barely knew while learning to love a son. Recommended for public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/08.]--Erin E. Dorney, Rochester, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The ditch cleaved frogtown into two realms, and two powerful spirits heldsway,one on each side. One was old, old as the Cross, and the other had aged only a few days in a gallon can. Both had the power to change men's lives. On one side of the ditch, a packed-in, pleading faithful fell hard to their knees and called the Holy Ghost into their jerking bodies in unknown tongues. On the other side, two boys, too much alike to be anything but brothers, flung open the doors of a black Chevrolet and lurched into the yard of 117 D Street, hallelujahs falling dead around them in the weeds. In the house, a sad-eyed little woman looked out, afraid it might be the law. When your boys are gone you're always afraid it might be the law. But it was just her two oldest sons, Roy and Troy, floating home inside the bubble of her prayer, still in crumpled, cattin'-around clothes from Saturday night, still a little drunk on Sunday morning. They were fine boys, though, beautiful boys. They were just steps away now, a few steps. She would fry eggs by the platterful and pour black coffee, and be glad they were not in a smoking hulk wrapped around a tree, or at the mercy of the police. She thought sometimes of walking over to the church to see it all, to hear the lovely music, but that would leave her boys and man unsupervised for too long. Her third son was eleven or so then. He could hear the piano ring across the ditch, even hear people shout, but he could smell the liquor that was always in the house on a Sunday and even steal a taste of it when no one was looking, so it was more real. The holy ghost moved invisible, but they could feel it in the rafters, sense it racing inside the walls. It was as real as a jag of lightning, or an electrical fire. The preacher stood on a humble, foot-high dais, to show that he did not believe he was better than them. "Do you believe in the Holy Ghost?" he asked, and they said they did. He preached then of the end of the world, and it was beautiful. They were still a new denomination then, but had spread rapidly in the last fifty years around a nation of exploited factory workers, coal miners, and rural and inner-city poor. Here, it was a church of lintheads, pulpwooders and sharecroppers, shoutin' people, who said amen like they were throwing a mule shoe. Biblical scholars turned their noses up, calling it hysteria, theatrics, a faith of the illiterate. But in a place where machines ate people alive, faith had to pour even hotter than blood. It had no steeple, no stained glass, no bell tower, but it was the house of Abraham and Isaac, of Moses and Joshua, of the Lord thy God. People tithed in Mercury dimes and buffalo nickels, and pews filled with old men who wore ancient black suit coats over overalls, and young men in short-sleeved dress shirts and clip-on ties. Women sat plain, not one smear of lipstick or daub of makeup on their faces, and not one scrap of lace at their wrists or necks. Their hair was long, because Paul wrote that "if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her, for her hair is given her for a covering." Their hair and long dresses were always getting caught in the machines, but it was in the Scripture, so they obeyed. Some wore it pinned up for church, because of the heat, but before it was over hairpins would litter the floor. They listened as the preacher laid down a list of sins so complete it left a person no place to go but down. "They preached it hard, so hard a feller couldn't live it," said Homer Barnwell, who went there as a boy. The people, some gasping from the brown lung, ignored the weakness in their wind and pain in their chests and sang "I'll Fly Away" and "Kneel at the Cross" and "That Good Ol' Gospel Ship." A woman named Cora Lee Garmon, famous for her range, used to hit the high notes so hard "the leaders would stand out in her neck," Homer said. Then, with the unstoppable momentum of a train going down a grade, the service picked up speed. The Reverend evoked a harsh God, who turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, and condemned the Children of Israel, who gave their golden earrings to Aaron to fashion Baal, the false god. "I have seen this people," God told Moses, "and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Now therefore let me alone, so that my wrath may wax hot against them." As children looked with misery on a service without end, the preacher read chapter 2 of the Acts of the Apostles: And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues . . . The congregants' eyes were shut tight. "Do you feel the Spirit?" the Reverend shouted. Their hands reached high. "Can you feel the Holy Ghost?" They answered one by one, in the light of the full Gospel. "Yeeeeesssss." Then, as if they had reached for a sizzling clothesline in the middle of an electrical storm, one by one they began to jerk, convulsing in the grip of unseen power. Others threw their arms open wide, and the Holy Ghost touched them soul by soul. Some just stood and shivered. Some danced, spinning. Some leapt high in the air. Some wept. Some shrieked. Some of the women shook their heads so violently that their hair came free and whipped through the air, three feet long. Hairpins flew. The Ghost was in them now. They began to speak in tongues. The older church people interpreted, and the congregation leaned in, to hear the miracle. It sounded like ancient Hebrew,maybe, a little, and other times it sounded like nothing they had heard or imagined. They rushed to the front of the church and knelt in a line, facing the altar, so the preacher could lay his hands on them, and-through the Father, in the presence of the Holy Ghost-make them whole. One by one, they were slain in the Spirit, and fell backward, some of them, fainting on the floor. The services could last for hours, till the congregants' stomachs growled. "If it's goin' good," Homer said, "why switch it off ?" As strong as it was, as close, it was as if sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, across that ditch. "We could have by God stayed longer if you'd have brought some damn money," griped Roy, as they meandered toward the house. It is unclear where they had been that weekend, but apparently they had a real good time. Roy, the prettiest of all of them, leaned against the car for balance, and cussed his older brother a little more.Roy's eyes were just like my father's, a bright blue, and his hair was black. He was tall for a Bragg, and the meanest when he drank. He was not a dandy and just threw on his clothes, but was one of those men who would have looked elegant standing in a mudhole. Troy cussed him back, but cheerfully. He always wore snow-white T-shirts, black pants and black penny loafer shoes, and as he blithely dog-cussed his brother he bent over, took off one loafer and dumped several neatly folded bills into his hand. Then, hopping around on one foot, he waved the bills in his brother's face. "You lying son of a bitch,"Roy said. Troy, his shoe still in his hand, just hopped and grinned, trying not to get his white sock dirty. He sniffed the money, like it was flowers. "I'll kill you,"Roy said. But they were always threatening to kill somebody. Troy, in a wobbly pirouette, laughed out loud. In seconds, they were in the dirt, tearing at clothes and screaming curses, and rolled clear into the middle of D Street, in a whirl of blood and cinders. The commotion drew first Velma and then Bobby from inside the house.Velma, unheard and ignored, pleaded for them to stop. Bobby, on a binge and still dressed only in his long-handles, cackled, hopped, and did a do-si-do. My father banged through the door and into the yard, and, like a pair of long underwear sucked off a clothesline by a tornado, was carried away by the melee. In the rising dust, they clubbed each other about the head with their fists, split lips and blacked eyes and bruised ribs. My father, smaller than his brothers, was knocked down and almost out. Velma bent over my father, to make sure he was breathing, and yelled at the older two: "I'll call the law." Then she left walking, to find a telephone. How many times did Velma make that walk to a borrowed telephone, having to choose between her sons' freedom and their safety? My Aunt Juanita, driving through the village, remembers seeing her walking fast down the street. "Her heels was just a'clickin' on the road," she said. She stopped and, through the window, asked Velma if she was all right. "The boys is killing each other," she said. In the yard, the boys were staggering now, about used-up. The neighbors watched from their porches, but no one got in the way. The distant scream of a police siren drifted into the yard.Velma had found a telephone. By the time the police came, the street was empty and quiet in front of 117, the brothers inside, ruining Velma's washrags with their blood. Bobby had enjoyed himself immensely, and gone a half day without pants of any kind. Velma walked back, her flat shoes clicking slowly now. But her boys were safe, and nothing mattered next to that. In the aftermath, she cooked a five-pound block of meat loaf, a mountain of fried potatoes, a cauldron of pinto beans, and dishpans of squash and okra-nothing special, just the usual supper for the kin that, every Sunday, trickled in to eat. It was nothing special, either, that fight, nothing to get all worked up about. The brothers regularly fought in the middle of D Street. "I watched 'em fight," said Charles Parker, who lived next door. Or, as Carlos put it: "You didn't never ask about that big fight Roy and Troy had, you asked about which one. It happened regular." It was just part of the rhythm of the week, the rhythm of their lives. Most lives move to one kind or another. On the coast, they move to tides, and in a factory town they move to an assembly line. For Carlos, a body and fender man and wrecker driver, life moved to the rhythms of the highway, to the voice of the dispatcher on the radio. In the week he cruised slow and easy, but on Friday nights, when drinkers hit the roads, the dispatcher's voice crackled with possibility. He stomped the accelerator and raced from ditch to ditch, his winch cable whining, yellow lights spinning, mommas crying, ambulances screaming away or, if it was a bad one, not screaming at all. For his cousins on D Street, it was the bootlegger's rhythm. "The boys and Uncle Bobby all worked, and only dranked on weekends. They'd get goin' real good on Friday and still be goin' on a Sunday. Of course, sometimes they could still be going on a Tuesday, depending on how much liquor they had. They were the best people in the world, gentle people, when they were all right. But all your daddy's life, on a weekend, there was liquor there in that house." In the calm of a Monday, the nights had a warmth and peace in Velma's house. After work, her extended family gathered in her kitchen, eating, talking, babies riding on their knees. But mostly, in that quiet, she cooked. "Oh my," said Carlos, "did she cook." She cooked showpiece meals, meals most people only got on Thanksgiving or Christmas Day, and Carlos loved to go see his Aunt Velma in the calm. "It didn't matter what time of night or day it was, or even if she had to get out of bed, when you went to Aunt Velma's house the first thing she did was ask you, 'Y'all boys had something to eat?' It didn't matter if you'd done eat, 'cause Velma was gonna feed you anyway." The iron stove had a cast-iron warmer on the top, and in that warmer would be pork roasts and pork chops and fried chicken, twogallon pots of butter beans with salt pork, navy beans with ham bone, rattlesnake beans glistening with bacon fat, pans of chicken and dressing, macaroni and cheese, cornbread and cathead biscuits, mounds of mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes, skillets of fried green tomatoes. She made meat loaf in a washtub, working loaf bread into the meat, onions and spices with her hands. There would be fried pies, apple and peach, in the warmer, and a banana puddin' in the icebox. She cooked her pies in a pan the size of a Western Flyer, and she did not cut you a piece but scooped out a mound, a solid pound of pie. It was not just food. There was a richness in it, of cream and butter and bacon fat. Her dishes were chipped and her forks were worn, pitted steel, but when people were done the utensils looked like they had been licked clean, and sometimes they were. She taught generations of women to cook, including my own mother, who thinks of her with every shaker of salt. Generations of men, like Carlos, get teary-eyed when they think of her supper table on a random Monday, because they know it will never be that good again. In the calm of a Tuesday, the mercurial Roy lay on the couch in the living room with a baby asleep on his chest. He would fight an army when he was drinking, fight laughing, bleeding, but sober he was a gentle man. "Whose baby are you?" he always asked, as the infants opened their eyes. "Roy rocked the babies in the rocking chairs, when he was all right," my mother said. "He would sing, and hum to them, and he would even diaper them-I guarantee you that your daddy never got nowhere near a diaper." Roy was not married then, and had no children of his own. He just loved babies, and would rock Troy's children and sing, and hum the part where the bough breaks, and the baby falls. He was a mechanic, a good one, with a set of paid-for tools. Women chased him. He had everything to live for, on a Tuesday, and no reason to dull his life with liquor, no reason to hide in a whiskey haze. In the quiet of a Wednesday, Troy walked home from his job at the mill, to tend his birds. In that time and place, it was as noble a job as being a horse breeder. He opened the coop and stuck his hand in toward the fierce creature inside, eyes yellow, beak sharp as a cat's claw, trilling a warning so low it was almost a growl. But it did not draw blood as he reached in and lifted it out. He would sit on the porch, a cup of Red Diamond coffee on the rail, and stroke its beak, cooing to it, as if he wanted it to understand the awful sacrifice he was asking it to make. He had one bird that had won seven fights, a remarkable feat in a death sport, and he would run his fingers through its feathers, looking for parasites. He would treat it with Mercurochrome, like a child with a skinned knee, and let it peck corn from his palm. He fed them a mix of vitamins and racing pigeon feed, to make them strong and fast, and spiked their diet with pickling lime, to stanch the bleeding when they were cut. Excerpted from The Prince of Frogtown by Rick Bragg All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
