A moving recollection of growing up poor and white
in the red clay foothills of east Alabama
Review by Todd Keith
Memoirs -- traditionally reserved for elder statesmen and those who, in the course of experience, have acquired that hard-won acumen we tend to respect -- often come late in life. Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New York Times at age 36, declined to wait. Part coming-of-age story, part homage to a hardworking mother who made it all possible, "All Over but the Shoutin' " is Bragg's recollection of growing up poor and white in the red clay foothills of east Alabama. It is the tale of an alcoholic father deserting his family and the mother who toiled in the fields or at any odd job to keep food in her three boys' stomachs. To some, Bragg's experiences may sound like Southern cliches, but what is to be done if the cliche rings true?"My parents grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in the poor, upland South, a million miles from the Mississippi Delta and the Black Belt and the jasmine-scented verandas of what most people came to know as the Old South," he explains, clearly out to demystify one stereotypical Southern landscape. "My ancestors never saw a mint julep, but they sipped five-day-old likker out of ceramic jugs and Bell jars until they could not remember their Christian names." Out of such a legacy, the man that Bragg is today slowly emerged, and perhaps the greatest lesson of his journey thus far has been that sometimes leaving a place is easier than returning.
From his gradual acceptance of his father's shortcomings to Bragg's incessant drive and passion for chronicling the lives of the downtrodden in his work as a reporter, Bragg's tone and his very language reveal a fundamental American dilemma -- after "succeeding" against the odds to get out of a dead-end existence, where do you go? And perhaps more important, what about the loved ones left behind? As he examines the often conflicting reasons he desperately wants to buy his mother her own house -- the first home she will ever own -- submerged frustration seeps through his prose, revealing a man still struggling to overcome the adversity that shaped his past, and in many ways, still forms his future.
There is value to be found recording the history of the ordinary in a world where "ordinary" experiences often do not count for much. But in Rick Bragg's capable hands, the otherwise conventional tale of growing up poor in Alabama becomes genuinely moving. Through his hard-edged, gritty realism, humor and a natural storytelling ability to find the miraculous in the everyday, "All Over But the Shoutin' " becomes a document of one man's effort to unravel the meaning of his family's past in order to better understand the meaning of where he has been and where he may yet go.
Todd Keith is a writer in Birmingham, Alabama.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.