The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative

12. Two Selves Authenticated

12 Two Selves Authenticated Rick Bragg Who better to root for among the likeable protagonists of recent memoir than Rick Bragg, the hero of All Over but the Shoutin’ (1997). Bragg is the lovable southerner, the bootstrap poor boy of the 1970s. His tale has two parts: his Alabama childhood, during which he is raised by his unselfish “Momma,” and his journalism career, in which he rises to the top. He’s got two lofty desires. First, he wants to repay his mother for the sacrifices she made while raising him and his two brothers; he is determined that she have her own home, which he’ll buy as soon as he saves the money. Second, he will earn the down payment by being the best journalist he can be, eventually joining the staff of the New York Times, and winning recognition and awards. This is not just a storybook life, but one he’s already made happen in accord with his plan. Life makes book—one of the ways it’s supposed to be with memoir.  larson.100-212 4/26/07 11:46 AM Page 137  The Memoir and the Memoirist Bragg casts his journalist’s vocation as one of hardship, in which he parlayed a chip on his shoulder into reportorial success. From where comes his anger? His alcoholic father (a ruined Vietnam vet) has abandoned the family, in essence sentencing them to poverty. Bragg and his brothers are raised by their mother, who does field work, cleans houses, and takes in laundry and ironing. She is nothing short of a saint: “She walked around with her toes sticking out, but we got new shoes” (75). What’s more, Bragg acknowledges the guilt he feels for having watched his mother wear the destitution on her sleeve. She went out “only to buy groceries.” “It was a long time before I realized that she stayed home because she was afraid we might be ashamed of her, ashamed of the woman with rough hands like a man and donated clothes that a well-off lady might recognize as something she threw away” (74). Since Bragg has never had it easy, he gravitates to trouble. He relates a number of fast-driving and girl-crazy stunts that, as an adolescent, almost land him in jail. As a reporter, he volunteers for or is sent on the most arduous assignments. He writes of other people’s pain in flinty and affecting prose. Though he covers riots, civil war, murder, and tornadoes in the South and the Caribbean, he never shares these with his mother on his frequent phone calls. Rather, he lies to her so as to assuage her worry: life’s tough enough as it is. Still, his mother’s plight is always on his mind. His debt to her drives him psychologically and materially. To buy her a house, he must succeed in the moneyed world. The small-town gazette sportswriter makes it to the St. Petersburg Times and their Miami bureau; then, after a stint at Harvard in a journalism program, he’s hired by the New York Times. His page one stories win him a Pulitzer Prize, the money arrives, and he buys Momma the house. Behind Bragg’s success is gnawing unease at what his family has endured—his mother’s piecework and his older brother’s jobs, among them loading coal and castrating hogs. Bragg bows to their labor. Although he does some backbreaking jobs while young, he larson.100-212 4/26/07 11:46 AM Page 138 realizes that he will in time “pass” this kind of work; his writing talent and his tenaciousness to see his talent through will take him far. But as he rises, he tells us his brother is shackled to “a long, long walk, where the scenery seldom changed.” The point is, writing will never compare to those jobs his family must hold: their trials “would make every other job, every other thing I ever did for the rest of my life, so laughingly easy by comparison” (103). The hyperbole, the poor-me tone, is thick throughout: Bragg refuses to affirm the intrinsic value of his own work. Writing and farm labor are not comparable, but he persists in elevating one over the other. Such commentary muddies things up: if Bragg so honors his family’s labor, then why does he focus less on their difficulties...