May 21, 2008

• ‘The Prince of Frogtown’
  

  
     Many
  of the writers I most admire are fellow Southerners. With almost 200
  years of Mississippi blood running through my veins, you'd think I'd
  choose a writer from the Magnolia State as my premiere idol — Eudora
  Welty, who shares my alma mater; or Yazoo City's legendary Willie
  Morris, who used to speak to us at our state English teachers'
  meetings; or Mr. Bill Faulkner, who sat drinking bourbon on his Oxford
  front porch when my mama and daddy were at Ole Miss.
     I
  respect and admire all of those literary giants, but my truest idol is
  a good ol' boy from next-door Alabama — a slow-talking newspaperman
  named Rick Bragg.
     A country boy who grew up red-dirt-poor
  in northeast Alabama, he started his career covering sports for a
  little weekly paper, and ended up a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter for
  the New York Times. He has no college education, no fancy degrees after
  his name. What he has is bone-deep, God-given talent, a rare gift for
  red-hot words that jump off the page and lodge deeply in your heart,
  like bullets.
     I'd never heard of Bragg until I picked up
  a paperback copy of his first family memoir, "All Over But the
  Shoutin'," in Tuscaloosa about 10 years ago. When I read the first few
  pages, chillbumps jumped out on my arms, and tears blurred my eyes. I
  had found someone who wrote like I longed to be able to write.
     "Rick Bragg writes like a man on fire," author Pat Conroy said, and he's right.
     Bragg's
  third book in his family trilogy — "The Prince of Frogtown" —  is just
  out, and I snatched it up and read it as fast as I could. It's his best
  one yet.
     "The Prince of Frogtown," about the author's
  father, closes the circle that was begun with "All Over but the
  Shoutin'," the story of Bragg's early life, focusing on his good mother
  and how her strength enabled him to break free of the cycle of poverty
  and despair that imprisoned his family. In that book, he spoke with raw
  bitterness of his alcoholic father. He spoke of him as a "daddy who ...
  allowed the devil inside him to come grinnin' out every time a sip of
  whiskey trickled in, who finally just abandoned his young wife and sons
  to the pity of their kin and to the well-meaning neighbors who came
  bearing boxes of throwaway clothes."
     But in this new
  book, published 11 years later, the older and wiser Bragg has come to a
  more complete grasp of the man his long-dead father really was.
     In
  his younger years, Bragg had tried to deal with the pain he carried by
  ridding himself of his father's memory. "I sawed my family tree off at
  the fork, and made myself a man with half a history," he writes in "The
  Prince of Frogtown."
      But that didn't work. Bragg’s
  friend Willie Morris told him he would never have any peace until he
  wrote about his father. “’My boy,’ he said, ‘there is not a place you
  can go he will not be.’” The younger writer took his friend’s advice.
     Woven
  into this story of his heartfelt search for the truth about the man who
  was his father, in counterpoint, is the story of another father and son
  — Bragg and the young stepson he acquired in childless mid-life, who is
  teaching him elementary lessons about the relationship between a boy
  and his dad. And learning to love this stepson is helping him look back
  at his own father with a faltering, courageous attempt at forgiveness.
     Bragg
  says he had never wanted children, and made a point never to date a
  woman with children —  then found himself hopelessly in love with the
  boy's mother. "By the time I regained what sense I had, I was driving
  car pool next to a ten-year-old boy who, for reasons I may never truly
  understand, believes I hung the moon.
     "I guess it is
  natural that, in the company of the boy, I almost always think of my
  father....With the weight of that new boy tugging at my clothes, I went
  to find him."
     Bragg writes about his pilgrimage back in
  time on his search for his father. He digs deep into his father's
  family history, of the clan that came down from the Appalachian
  foothills to work in the cotton mills, learning stories of the men who
  drank whiskey like water and fought like wildcats and broke their
  women's hearts.
      Along the way, he found a handful of
  people who remembered Charles Bragg with love, who remembered the good
  man inside the tortured whiskey-ravaged veteran, and were glad to share
  that man with the son he had lost.
  One of those people,
  surprisingly, was Margaret, Bragg's angel of a mother, who he finally
  realized had never stopped loving her black-haired, smiling husband, in
  spite of the years of agony he put her and their boys through.
     "'I loved him,' she told me, and in all my life, I had never heard her say those words," he writes.
     After
  I read the last pages of his new book, after I wiped the tears out of
  my eyes, I wrote Rick Bragg a note and emailed it to his office at the
  University of Alabama, where he's now teaching writing and working on
  his next book.
  “Thank you,” I told him, “for showing the
  rest of us who dare to call ourselves writers what can be done with the
  English language when the words are powered by love.”

  By Celia DeWoody
  Copyright 2008 Harrison (Ark.) Daily Times
  May 21, 2008
  
  

  • 1:41 pm
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