Telling God's Sanction: Storytelling in the Narrative Journalism ..., Slides of Storytelling

Download Telling God's Sanction: Storytelling in the Narrative Journalism ... and more Slides Storytelling in PDF only on Docsity! Telling God’s Sanction: Storytelling in the Narrative Journalism, Memoirs, and Creative Nonfiction of Rick Bragg Thesis submitted to The Graduate College of Marshall University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Humanities by Jennifer Nicole Sias Dr. Shirley Lumpkin, Thesis Advisor Committee: Dr. Dolores Johnson, Dr. Shirley Lumpkin, Dr. Reidun Ovrebo, and Dr. Fran Simone Marshall University 9 May 2003 Jennifer N. Sias Page 2 Table of Contents Abstract 3 Dedication 4 Acknowledgements 5 Chapter One – Rick Bragg’s “Dumb, Blind Luck” 6 Chapter Two – Rick Bragg’s Narrative Journalism 37 Chapter Three – All Over But the Shoutin’ 52 Chapter Four – Ava’s Man 72 Conclusion 101 Works Cited 105 Works Consulted 108 Appendix 111 Jennifer N. Sias Page 5 Acknowledgements: I must acknowledge and thank Dr. Fran Simone for providing me with my thesis topic. She introduced me to Rick Bragg’s All Over But the Shoutin’ in the class “Reading and Writing: Autobiography and Memoir.” I owe many thanks to Dr. Dolores Johnson for her support of me over the years and for allowing me to be a part of the West Virginia Writing Project. I am grateful to Dr. Reidun Ovrebo, from whom I have learned much about art and writing and various ways to tell a story. I am indebted to Dr. Shirley Lumpkin, my mentor and friend, who always has had a knack for getting me to come to an understanding by asking tough questions. I was sustained by the support of my colleagues at Marshall University Libraries, especially Monica Brooks and Judith Arnold, who showed sincere interest in my subject and encouraged me to take the time I needed for writing. I am grateful to Dr. Joyce East, Director of Humanities, for her support and advice, and to Marshall University for providing me with tuition waivers while pursuing my graduate studies. I owe many thanks to Yvonne Farley, formerly of Kanawha County Public Libraries, and Cindy Miller, who handles public relations for KCPL, for allowing me to be Bragg’s “keeper” during his visit in October 2002 for the West Virginia Book Festival. I also would like to acknowledge the sacrifices, love, and support of my own people, my parents, and Mary McGucken. Jennifer N. Sias Page 6 Rick Bragg - Chapter One He was destined to work with his hands. He might have made his living like his older brother, Sam, in the cotton mill of Jacksonville, Alabama. He might have continued the back-breaking, hand labor of clearing the land as he did as a teenager for his uncle, Ed. Or, like his younger brother, Mark, he might have learned to be a carpenter, albeit a sober one. Ironically, Rick Bragg has made a living with his hands. Thanks to being fortunate, being in the right places at the right times, and using the gift of storytelling he inherited from his people, Rick Bragg has made his living with his hands in an unlikely occupation: writing the stories of the less fortunate, the people who do not usually make it to the front pages of national newspapers, people who do not even rate few lines in regional newspapers, unless, of course, they appear in the police blotter or the free obituaries, people like his own. This thesis will examine the writing of Rick Bragg by analyzing his journalistic writing and how he evolved into memoir writing. Although Bragg’s journalistic writing style is unique and won him a Pulitzer, he did not invent the narrative style that he uses in his newspaper pieces. Long before him, writers like Truman Capote and later Tom Wolfe engaged in a new style which became known as New Journalism. Tastes changed over the years and hard-nosed editors often refused to allow their reporters to use this style. Still, there is a hunger for the narrative style among newspaper readers, which helps to explain Jennifer N. Sias Page 7 the success of Bragg and others, whose style is referred to as narrative journalism, creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, literary journalism or literature of fact. Because he was reared in a family and community rich with storytellers, this style seems natural for Bragg, who wanted to write a longer piece and put some of the stories of his childhood down on paper so people wouldn’t forget. Before analysis of Bragg’s journalistic and memoir writing and the influences of storytelling can begin, one must get acquainted with this award-winning writer from Possum Trot, Alabama to understand the writer, his motivations and his captivating writing style. A Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, Rick Bragg got his start at his high school newspaper, where he became sports editor during his junior year. He has said that he took journalism at Jacksonville High school because it was supposed to be easy and afforded him a press badge, giving him the freedom to roam the halls, shoot basketball in the school gym, and wander to nearby Jacksonville State University and flirt with college women, and he joined the school newspaper because “words didn’t cost anything” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 100). Mainly, he liked seeing his name in print because that made him feel important. Bragg writes: “I had no way of knowing, then, that it [journalism] would be my salvation” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 116). At the end of the summer after his high school graduation, Bragg was nearly broke, having spent most of his money on “cars and girls and drive-in cheeseburgers” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 121). Fortunately, he was able to Jennifer N. Sias Page 10 Shoutin’ 138). Once again he wrote about sports, covering high school wrestling matches and country club golf and even racing, which he loved. At the Talladega International Motor Speedway, Bragg got his first taste of writing about death, which was always just a twitch away for drivers at those high speeds. Experiencing a sort of revelation, Bragg writes: “I was slowly beginning to realize that the only thing that was worth writing about was living and dying and the trembling membrane in between” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 139). Bragg has said that he was drawn to stories of death and people in misery because stories about people in trouble, of the struggles of people at risk make other stories seem trivial. “They were the most important stories in the newspaper. I wanted to write them, only them,” he notes (All Over But the Shoutin’ 139). In writing about death and people in misery, Bragg found his calling and a way to force his readers to consider issues of class and the plight of the poor and underprivileged. In his early twenties, Bragg moved to the state desk of the Anniston Star, where he worked in a newsroom alongside graduates from Harvard, Yale and Columbia. About this time, the chip on Bragg’s shoulder emerges or at least is unveiled as he openly notes the envy he felt for some of these Ivy Leaguers and the contempt some of them had for him and his people. He describes them as being on safari in the South and doing “their tour of duty in the heart of darkness” (140). He now admits that these Yankees were okay by and large, and that he actually may have learned a little working with them: “The Jennifer N. Sias Page 11 experience of working shoulder to shoulder with so many educated and privileged young people was good for me, I am sure, but the chip I had carried on my shoulder for a lifetime grew in those years to about the size of a concrete block” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 141). It also did not help that the metro editor at his paper at the time stoked his attitude by telling him that he was not sophisticated enough to be the city reporter, a job offered to Bragg by the paper’s managing editor. Bragg took it despite the metro editor’s insult because by this time he had a house payment, mounting bills and a wife (All Over But the Shoutin’ 141-142). Just a few years later, Bragg was offered a job at Alabama’s largest newspaper, the Birmingham News, at nearly twice the salary he earned at the Anniston Star. This new position gave Bragg the opportunity to work again with Randy Henderson, a former editor of the Anniston Star who now gave Bragg the chance to do “big stories” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 146). For more than three years at the Birmingham News, Bragg found himself working among graduates of Alabama and Auburn journalism schools, not Harvard and Yale, and although he says it was not as heavy, “that chip on my shoulder was still there,” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 159). Bragg may have found himself fitting in a little more comfortably among these reporters, but he remained cognizant of class and in his place in it. Bragg had the opportunity to write those big stories, important ones, ones that made a difference, such as one he wrote with business writer, Dean Barber, on the slow deaths of coal mining towns, another he wrote with reporter Mike Jennifer N. Sias Page 12 Oliver about Alabama’s “shameful funding of social programs,” and another one that ended up clearing an Alabama preacher who had been wrongly convicted of murdering his wife (All Over But the Shoutin’ 158-159). Bragg recalls: “. . . the fact is, I learned to do the big story in Birmingham. The big story is one that anchors Page One, the one that can make careers. I wrote them and they put them in the paper, and you cannot ask for more than that in this business” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 158). Bragg was ready to move on at this time, but he ended up making a temporary, unexpected return to the Anniston Star so that he could be close to his mother, who was ill. He realized that his mother’s poor health was due to worry over Bragg’s youngest brother, Mark, a heavy drinker who was more often than not in trouble with the law, and although Rick tried then and many times thereafter, he could not “fix” the problem or convince Mark to stay out of trouble. Rick was 29 years old by this time and did not want to put his career on hold much longer, so he moved on to a job at The St. Petersburg Times, which was twice as big as the other newspapers he had worked for and had an admirable reputation – “consistently, year after year, one of the top ten newspapers in America” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 174). Bragg knew it was a good fit when he spotted a bust of Elvis in the managing editor’s office and when Paul Tash, the editor who hired him, told him: “it takes all manner and texture of people to make a good newspaper, and he would be glad to say he was hiring a reporter from Possum Trot, Alabama” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 174). Jennifer N. Sias Page 15 his reporters and had a light hand when he edited a story” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 182). At this newspaper, Bragg realized that the writing mattered, not where one was educated, and this paper nurtured him. Bragg writes: I have said a few times that I try to lend dignity and feeling to the people I write about, but that is untrue. All you do is uncover the dignity, the feeling, that is already there. I learned to do that there . . . Almost all the time, you just paint a picture with words and let people make up their own minds and emotions, but this time I wanted to force them to feel. [Bragg refers to a story he wrote in 1990 about conjoined twins.] We are taught in this business to leave our emotions out of a story, to view things with pure and perfect objectivity, but that was impossible on this story. I learned that objectivity is pure crap, if the pain is so strong it bleeds onto the yellowed newsprint years, or even decades later” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 182-83). Bragg found that his style of narrative journalism not only had the power to make his readers feel for the subject, but it also could be moving and even painful for him because that style forces the writer to write with understanding and feeling. Although Bragg found his reporting situation ideal, a temptation that he could not refuse materialized – reporting for the paper from Miami, which he describes as a “reporter’s nirvana” because it was full of compelling stories just Jennifer N. Sias Page 16 waiting to be written. While Bragg did not speak Spanish or Creole and gained his only understanding of the place’s “complicated geopolitical situation” by reading books, he notes that “the editors decided they would rather have a reporter who could write good stories for their newspaper than someone who could sound good at a dinner party and shift languages like a Lexus changes gears” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 184). In this quotation, we again see Bragg’s wry sense of humor and his mindfulness of the issue of class. Miami was the right place for Bragg at this time in his life. He was young and full of adventure and willing to take some risks to write a good story. In All Over But the Shoutin’ Bragg tells a story that he rarely shared prior to writing the memoir. He explains: “ . . . it is personal in a way that leaps well beyond grief love, hate. It involves fear, and that is nothing to be proud of” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 185). On a hot Miami night in June of 1991, some African- American residents were outraged by the overturned conviction of a Hispanic Miami police officer in the manslaughter of two African-American men. Many saw this as just another injustice in a string of killings of African Americans by white officers or acquittals of the officers’ murders over the past decade. Bragg describes the June 25, 1991 court reversal of Miami officer William Lozano’s previous conviction as “a match scraped across the backs of black people here” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 186). For two nights after the court reversal, the city was tense, but the peace held – until another Miami police officer shot another African American man. Bragg and his friend, Sean Rowe, an investigative Jennifer N. Sias Page 17 reporter for New Times in Miami, knew they had to get close to the riot to be able to tell the story. As they drove, they found pockets of safety and pockets of violence; both were unpredictable. Unfortunately, they drove right in the middle of a pocket of life-threatening danger. They drove down Third Avenue Northwest in Overtown in front of a small housing project. Men, women and children quietly lined both sides of the street, and before they knew it, Rowe and Bragg found themselves under siege as rocks, bottles and curses were flung at them. One rock smashed through the car’s side window and hit Bragg’s jaw. He managed to mumble to Rowe: “Whatever happens, keep moving, just keep moving” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 188). The next thing they saw spelled almost certain doom – a long black, junker car was rolled out between the buildings to block the road. Fortunately, Rowe was able to whip their car onto the sidewalk, missing trees, parked cars and people, and they made it to a pocket of safety. As with the story of the alligator hunt, someone tried to make Bragg a part of the story as a television reporter tried to interview him. Bragg refused: “There were other people there who had been through the same thing and they were black. In the dark, in their anger, people had thrown rocks at anything that moved” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 189). While some may have developed animosity for African Americans after this experience, it would appear that Bragg’s sensitivity and understanding deepened as he recalls the anger and hopelessness of an eighteen-year-old African American man named Tony Fox, who explained that he saw rioting as a way to get even and to get people to Jennifer N. Sias Page 20 Bragg has noted that as painful as it is to observe misery on such a scale, in a sense it is easy to write about it because it is less personal than the stories about misery and injustice on an individual level, such as the one he wrote about a little boy know as Dirty Red, who lived in a housing project outside of Fort Lauderdale. At first nicknamed by his mother because of the red tint of his skin and his propensity to go out to play in the dirt right after a bath, Dirty Red painfully learned how his community could use his name to inflict baseless guilt, spite and other connotations, dirty ones. In his housing project, a seven-year- old girl was sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend, who forced her to lay the blame on Dirty Red. Before Dirty Red’s mother could do a thing, she saw the top of the six-year-old’s head in the back of a police car that drove away and delivered the little boy to a police station where he was fingerprinted, photographed for a mug shot and terrified. All the while, the little boy shook his head no (All Over But the Shoutin’ 196). Later, the Broward deputies learned the truth, but they never came back to the project to clear Dirty Red, to let everyone know that he indeed was innocent, or even to apologize for a mistake that was doomed to scar a little boy. Bragg writes: “The people in the project treated him like a pervert. They made him an outcast. Most of the children wouldn’t play with him, and chanted ‘Dirty Red, Dirty Red, Dirty Red,’ whenever he walked by. Grown men slapped him when he came close” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 196). His mother tried to spread the word of his innocence, but no one believed her; they just believed what they Jennifer N. Sias Page 21 saw the day the police car took Dirty Red away. She knew that the only way people might accept the truth was if it was written down, and that is just what Rick Bragg did; he told the real story of Dirty Red and what really happened to the little girl. Bragg sent Dirty Red’s mother a bundle of papers containing the story, which she took door to door in their housing project. Bragg recalls: “Seeing it written down, they began to believe . . . I didn’t get into this business to change the world; I just wanted to tell stories. But now and then, you can make people care, make people notice that something ain’t quite right, nudge them gently, with the words, to get off their ass and fix it” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 198). Bragg had learned that reporting and storytelling gave him the power to force others to face some uncomfortable truths, and by writing about those whose position in life made them powerless, he transformed the bit of power he had gained to them. For the most part, Bragg’s newspaper gave him the leeway to find his own stories, including the one about Dirty Red, for more than two years. His paper did send him to cover Operation Desert Storm, which forced him to get a passport and would mark the first time he traveled outside the United States. On his next assignment outside the U.S. he learned more about human misery than he could have imagined, more than he ever wanted to know. Bragg begged his newspaper’s foreign desk for the chance to go to Haiti in October 1991. Although he admits that “I was no kind of foreign correspondent,” Bragg pleaded for the chance to cover Haiti’s emerging story. He recalls: “A whole Jennifer N. Sias Page 22 country, ruled forever by despots and murderers and low-rent sons of bitches, had been promised something better, and seen it yanked away. I wanted to come here because I had read about it my whole life, not just as a place of misery, but magic” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 203). The kind of magic Bragg would become aware of in Haiti was voodoo, voodoo in the midst of poverty and cruelty. Bragg knew that Haiti’s poor thought they had found their savior in Jean- Bertrand Aristide, a priest who once was the target of military president Gen. Henri Namphy, whose “thugs” killed 12 people and wounded 70 at Aristide’s St. Jean Bosco Church. Elected president of Haiti on December 17, 1990, Aristide’s rule was short-lived. He did not have the support of the military and went into exile after soldiers opened fire on his home. In this hostile, lawless environment, Bragg positioned himself to find the truth and write about it, which would require him to risk his own life more than once. There was the time that a young soldier for sport stepped so close to the reporter that the muzzle of his low-slung rifle bore into Bragg’s ribs, and the violence he witnessed surely left emotional and spiritual scars on this truth-teller. He recalls: They [soldiers] had been told to shoot anyone in known Aristide neighborhoods. These are Aristide’s people, too, I learn. They are the poor that the army knows it can slaughter without repercussion. They shot women and children. I stood in the middle of it and tried not to cry like a baby (All Over But the Shoutin’ 207). Jennifer N. Sias Page 25 224). The chip was still on his shoulder, but Bragg made friends with many of the fellows despite their privileged backgrounds. He writes: The American Niemans, almost all of them, had already been to Ivy League schools. They were from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Swarthmore, almost all of them, so I was prepared to dislike them on sight . . . the truth is that most of them were good people, and couldn’t help it if the worst day of their lives had involved wilted arugula (All Over But the Shoutin’ 226). Although Bragg was a little concerned before going to Harvard about whether or not he would fit in, he only experienced one incident of outright rudeness and elitism directed at him. He was at a “white-tablecloth dinner” at the Harvard faculty club and found himself discussing then-President Clinton’s appointment of Attorney General Janet Reno with someone he had just met. Bragg thought they were having a friendly argument and told the fellow that he thought it might not be too wise to select an attorney general from what some considered the most ineffective justice system in the nation – Dade County Florida. Rather than politely telling Bragg that he didn’t buy his reasoning, which Bragg said he would have accepted, the fellow did about the worst thing one could do to the son of Charles Bragg and the grandson of Charlie Bundrum; he insulted him with the retort, “You embarrass yourself” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 223). Bragg writes: My whole life I had wondered if I was as good, as smart, as clean as the people around me. Now this, this insult, hurt like salt flung Jennifer N. Sias Page 26 in my eyes. “I’ll tell you what,” I said, “I’ll drag you out of here and whip your ass.” He turned bright red – I have never seen a man light up like that – and said again, insultingly, “No one’s said that to me since elementary school.” I just stared at him, and then I laughed in his face. It scared even me, that laugh. It sounded a little crazy . . . He left not long after that, to an uneasy silence that made me feel like I had dragged my sleeve through the peach cobbler or committed some other terrible faux pas (All Over But the Shoutin’ 224). Bragg’s “adversary” in this argument could have just told him that he did not agree with his reasoning; instead, with the clipped “You embarrass yourself,” he attempted to dismiss Bragg by “putting him in his place,” by suggesting that Bragg was not knowledgeable enough or perhaps even sophisticated enough to understand and debate the subject with someone of his stature. Bragg shows in this reflection that when someone blatantly exposes his own feelings of inferiority and resentment over class issues, he is capable of making his “chip” heavier while feeling honest rage over the cultural elite’s attempt to dismiss him and his people merely because of their class position. Meanwhile, the regular paying students seemed a bit wary of Bragg as he walked the campus. Bragg recalls: “I was twice their size – Harvard students tend to run small – and some of them would walk all the way off the concrete paths in Harvard Yard to avoid walking close to me” (All Over But the Shoutin’ Jennifer N. Sias Page 27 227). A friend in the know advised Bragg not to make any sudden movements and not to throw up his hand and ask students how they’re doing because they might hurt themselves trying to get away. In class, students saw him differently; maybe it was because he was sitting down. In class, Bragg asked questions and participated in discussions, and his classmates began quizzing him about the South. They asked him about race in the South, politics in the South, food in the South, and relationships between men and women in the South. Here, Bragg had a chance to contribute in a manner that would make the Nieman program proud. Bragg notes: “I was, by my very presence, a walking lab, a field trip. I had seen the meanness and killing that they read about in their texts on the Third World. I had seen George Wallace, big as life” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 227). Although Bragg no doubt contributed as a Nieman fellow in his capacity as a Southerner who has real-life experience living in the South, this reflection gives readers another glimpse at his wry sense of humor; he surely is aware that as an individual, he cannot possibly represent or know about all things Southern. Yes, Bragg did contribute and give back, but he also learned a lot in that year at Harvard; he has even said the place and the people opened his mind a little. The richest lessons Bragg learned came through the sage advice of his journalism idol, Bill Kovach. Kovach challenged Bragg, calling him “mush mouth” when he tried to sidestep a question or hide behind his Southernness or fast-talk his way through an answer. Kovach told Bragg he had a gift but that his writing could use some work. And Kovach saw something in Bragg that he could not Jennifer N. Sias Page 30 bodega in their search for the story and wrote about a store owner who still wore the jacket he was shot in, despite the bullet hole in its arm, and another who still wore the pants he had on the time he was shot in the hip. Bragg explains: “The difference between rich people and poor people is that poor people still wear the clothes they were wearing when they were shot. They save them from the emergency room floor” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 238-39). Once again, Bragg found a way to expose class issues through his narrative journalism. Working for The New York Times took Bragg many places and allowed him to write about unusual people, people who do not normally get coverage in newspapers. Most often, his stories were about people in misery. Three years after his first visit, Bragg headed back to Haiti, this time for The New York Times. Conditions were still dismal; the poor, Aristide’s followers, were still being persecuted. In Haiti, machetes were still being used to disfigure women for sport and to assert power. In Haiti, political prisoners disappeared into mass graves. In Haiti, babies with empty, protruding bellies co-existed with deformed children crawling like animals on streets where the ruling class’ Mercedes and Land Rovers whizzed by blindly. In Haiti, police still murdered the poor at random, because they could, and stole the bodies so that they could charge the families up to $100 to release them for burial (All Over But the Shoutin’ 255). Jennifer N. Sias Page 31 In Haiti, Bragg continued to write about the miseries, murders and injustices the poor faced and about the man President Clinton sent to broker peace – former President Jimmy Carter. Bragg recalls: Jimmy Carter came and brokered an unusual three-legged dog of a peace that spared the despots and absurdly married the U. S. military with the same soldiers who had been the instruments of torture and terror. I always liked Jimmy, until then. Aristide would return, but there would be no sweeping justice, no mass executions by flaming necklace, no satisfaction (All Over But the Shoutin’ 259). On the home front, Bragg wrote stories about domestic terrors for The New York Times; he wrote stories about Susan Smith, who claimed that her two young sons had been carjacked by a black man, a lie she perpetrated to cover up the fact that she sent her boys to a watery death so that she could be free to date and possibly marry the son of her rich boss. Bragg also covered the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. As he recalls the experience of reporting the tragedy, Bragg explains that a reporter has to learn to block out the pain and misery once the story is written so that he can continue to do the work. He writes: “You put it all into your stories, as your fingers hover above the computer keyboard, but when you get up, when it is done, you block much of it out. You have to feel for the people you write about or the words don’t amount to much, but you learn to put it down” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 289). This attitude may seem callous to some, but it is a matter of survival. In Oklahoma, Bragg recalls Jennifer N. Sias Page 32 having dinner with some reporter friends and discussing what they had observed and the stories they were writing. Perhaps they seemed a little too light hearted, seemingly to treat the matter a little too lightly, because they were chastised by someone at a nearby table who told them she was sitting with the mother of one of the children who died in the blast. Bragg apologized sincerely and told them they had not meant to be so insensitive, that in truth they all were sick at heart. He says that he was sorry about what happened but not ashamed, that he has never been ashamed to do the work of a reporter. He explains: It goes way beyond the craft itself. The assignment, the story of the year, was in my eighteenth year as a reporter, in the role, the only one I have ever felt at peace with, of paid storyteller. It had pulled me out of poverty, literally. It had shown me the world, and I did not mind that the world was so often on fire when I got there. It gave me an education, from books at Harvard, from a thousand stories where I was forced to understand something an hour before deadline. It gave me pride and money, but more pride. It saved me. It surely did. My mother gave me the boost up, and what I found, on the others side of that wall, was this (All Over But the Shoutin’ 290). As a storyteller, Bragg had learned that to tell a story with meaning, one had to tell it sometimes from an individual’s perspective, and sometimes that meant from a victim’s perspective. The trick to surviving and being able to continue Jennifer N. Sias Page 35 makes the reader feel as though Bragg is sitting with her or him on a porch and telling stories. It is accessible. In 2001 Bragg followed with another book, Ava’s Man. Although this work also is called a memoir, the content and the author’s position in terms of writing the story are vastly different. In the first memoir, Bragg was a character; the story was as much about himself as it was about his mother and family. In the second memoir, Bragg has said that he built himself a grandfather because Charlie Bundrum, the focus of this work, died one year before Bragg was born. So, it would seem that he approached the writing and research for this book in much the same way he does his journalistic stories; he interviewed his mother, aunts, uncles and others to find out what kind of man Charlie Bundrum was and listened to story after story about him. In Ava’s Man, Bragg retells many of those stories, sets them into the context of the times, and connects them to his own observations of his mother and other family members. In addition to the two memoirs, a collection of some of his newspaper articles, Somebody Told Me, was published in 2000 by The University of Alabama Press. Presently, Bragg still writes for The New York Times, which allowed him several months of leave in the fall of 2002 to promote Ava’s Man. He told me that he has another book in the works that will focus on the stories of the people who worked at the mill in Jacksonville, Alabama. First named Profile Mill and later Union Yarn, this is the mill where Bragg’s older brother, Sam, worked before it closed in 2001 and essentially ended a way of life for generations of Northeastern Alabamans. Bragg said that he likely will retire from full-time Jennifer N. Sias Page 36 journalistic writing within a year so that he can focus on writing books and possibly accept a visiting professor position at a college or university where he could teach creative writing. How does one who has labeled himself as “white trash” evolve into an award-winning, paid storyteller who might even consider teaching the art? This thesis will examine how Rick Bragg’s writing style has evolved through his journalistic writing and will focus on how he has used storytelling in his newspaper stories and memoirs to push the boundaries of creative nonfiction, perhaps even to create a new genre. In many of Bragg’s writings, interviews and presentations, he refers to what his mother calls “Telling God’s Sanction,” a phrase his people use to mean telling God’s honest truth, a phrase they use to underscore the importance of a story they are about to tell or have just told. Telling God’s sanction is precisely what this writer does in his newspaper stories, memoirs and creative nonfiction while he pushes their boundaries. Before one can analyze his memoir writing, one must consider Bragg’s journalist writing and place it within the context of new journalism, now known as narrative journalism or creative nonfiction. Jennifer N. Sias Page 37 Chapter Two – Rick Bragg’s Narrative Journalism It does seem unlikely that a boy from Possum Trot, Alabama with all the obstacles he faced would have come as far as Bragg has – to have made a good living at something other than a manual-labor job, to have his work recognized by scores of awards including the ultimate in his field, the Pulitzer Prize, and to have the opportunity to spend nearly a year at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow. His knack for telling stories has made his journalistic work utterly readable, engaging and meaningful. His style is unique, but it is not the first of its kind or brand new. Without knowing it, at least at the beginning of his career, Rick Bragg entered a tradition of journalistic writing made popular in the 1960s and ‘70s by journalists like Truman Capote, author of In Cold Blood; Gay Talese, who wrote newspaper stories that were considered “unreportable” in an elegant style, and Tom Wolfe, who wrote for the New York Herald and blazed a trail with stream of consciousness journalistic articles. Capote, Talese and Wolfe popularized this journalistic style, which became known as New Journalism, and Wolfe not only practiced it, but also wrote about it in a piece for New York magazine entitled “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’: An Eyewitness Report.” Published again in Part One of the book The New Journalism, edited by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson, this piece describes Tom Wolfe’s view of the kind of writing he and a few other journalists attempted in an effort to gain readers’ attention. Wolfe notes that he started experimenting with his non-fiction writing Jennifer N. Sias Page 40 centuries’” (Harvey 42). However, critics have noted that although 1960s and ‘70s writers like Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Gail Sheehy, Jimmy Breslin, Hunter S. Thompson, Gloria Steinem, Greil Marcus, Nicholas yon Hoffman and Marshall Frady did not invent a new style of writing, they certainly must be given credit for “doing it” and “doing more of it,” perhaps more self-consciously than ever before (Harvey 42). Roy Peter Clark asserts that Tom Wolfe not only practiced New Journalism, but he also “described what he was doing in such a way that it served as a blueprint for future generations of journalists” (Harvey 42). This kind of journalism is enjoying a revival today, although the style is now being called narrative journalism or creative nonfiction, even literary journalism or literature of fact by some. This is Rick Bragg’s journalism, the kind that won him the Pulitzer Prize. In the beginning of his career, Bragg most likely was not aware that he was a part of a tradition made popular by Tom Wolfe. Bragg’s narrative style was formed by the storytelling tradition that was so much a part of his formative years, and his narrative style was nurtured at papers like The Anniston Star and The St. Petersburg Times by editors who served as his teachers and guides and coaches in lieu of lessons he may or may not have learned if he had had a chance to continue his higher education studies. Bragg learned on the job and no doubt listened to the echoes of the stories with which his family and community back in northeastern Alabama enriched him. Jennifer N. Sias Page 41 The storyteller’s voice and methods are evident in his journalistic writing. Just examine his November 1, 1995 New York Times article “Where Alabama Inmates Fade Into Old Age,” and you will see those storytelling echoes and the reason why the Pulitzer Prize committee awarded him the 1996 prize for Feature Writing. One of the articles in the package considered by the Pulitzer committee, this story examines what happens to aging inmates in the prison system of Alabama and is reprinted in the collection of his newspaper stories, Somebody Told Me. In his lead, Bragg writes: “Grant Cooper knows he lives in prison, but there are days when he cannot remember why. His crimes flit in and out of his memory like flies through a hole in a screen door so that sometimes his mind and conscience are blank and clean” (Somebody Told Me 23). In this lead, Bragg has introduced readers to an aging, senile inmate whom he will use to illustrate the larger problem at the crux of his story – how to handle the aging inmate population in an overcrowded, overburdened prison system that needs to focus its efforts on younger, “hardened” criminals who still pose a threat to society. Yet, the reader must read on to know what the point of the story is, to get to the journalist’s point. Bragg has teased or enticed the reader to read on to learn why Grant Cooper cannot remember his crimes and why readers should care about the situation he represents. In this lead, Bragg also has used a literary element that, as Tom Wolfe has noted, one more likely would find in a novel or short story – the use of a simile to illustrate the fact that Cooper’s memories come and go as easily as a fly through a hole in a screen. And, Bragg Jennifer N. Sias Page 42 has introduced an element of tension by suggesting that at times Cooper, a multiple murderer, has a clean conscience when his memory lapses – a reality that readers may find hard to swallow or contemplate. Like any good storyteller, Bragg has set his story up by using a device that will ensure that the reader or listener will want to hear the whole story, will be engaged. Oftentimes, a storyteller will use an individual or a single animal to illustrate a greater truth, to represent a larger issue – as a metaphor for the important lesson, and that is precisely what Bragg has done with Grant Cooper. Bragg goes on to use tension and irony to illustrate the issue of once hardened criminals who now take up space and resources needed for those more likely to pose a threat. He notes, for instance, that Cooper committed murders in 1936 and 1954 and earned a life sentence. Bragg writes: Back then, before he needed help to go to the bathroom, Mr. Cooper was a dangerous man. Now he is 77, and since his stroke in 1993 he mostly just lies in his narrow bunk at the Hamilton Prison for the Aged and Infirm, a blue blanket hiding the tubes that run out of his bony body. Sometimes the other inmates put him in a wheelchair and park him in the sun. “I’m lost,” he mumbled. “I’m just lost” (Somebody Told Me 23). Using the literary device of irony, Bragg illustrates the contradiction of Cooper and inmates like him – at one end of his life, he was violent and a threat to Jennifer N. Sias Page 45 will be released in 1998, but two strokes have left him mostly dead on one side. “I believe I can make it,” he said. “I believe I can.” There will be nothing on the outside for him. Warden Berry said that when an inmate reached a certain point, it might be more humane to keep him in prison. Wives die, children stop coming to see him (Somebody Told Me 27). In this story, Bragg has presented readers with numerous ironies, including the compelling contradiction that although many of these inmates clearly are incapable of violence and are no threat to society, the society that punished and imprisoned them must care for them because there is no one on the outside to do so. Although some storytellers use their craft merely to entertain, others use storytelling not just to inform, but also to persuade or at least get their listeners to consider an issue from another point of view. In general, storytellers set out to tell a truth, perhaps, like a fable, to tell a tale embodying a moral. Rick Bragg has said that he does not set out to preach in his journalistic articles, but his writing is effective because he does force the reader to see certain truths by using literary devices, like similes, irony and repetition. Without telling a reader what to think, Bragg entices his readers to see the story from his, the narrator’s, point of view. His journalistic articles contain the five Ws and the H (who, what, when, where, why and how), but they do not necessarily follow the traditional Jennifer N. Sias Page 46 inverted pyramid style. His stories are more like short stories, as Tom Wolfe might say. Consider another newspaper article, “Tender Memories of Day-Care Center Are All That Remain after the Bomb,” a May 3, 1995 New York Times piece about the Oklahoma City bombing reprinted in the collection Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg. The reporter grabs readers with the lead: “The babies used to try to grab the sunlight” (202). In one sentence, Bragg has seized the reader’s attention with the phrase “used to,” making the reader wonder why he has used the past tense. With the past tense “used to,” Bragg has introduced tension and has invited readers to wonder why the babies are not still grabbing for the sunlight. Additionally, Bragg has focused on an image in the lead that any reader could recognize and all would agree about – the innocence of babies, babies who are so unknowing that they try to grasp the ungraspable, just as readers cannot grasp the unbelievable, the idea that an individual would intentionally blow up a building full of people and, yes, innocent babies grasping at sunlight. Bragg notes that four baby cribs were lined up next to the windows on the second floor of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in the America’s Kids day-care center. The day-care center’s owner, Melva Noakes, told Bragg that the sunlight was good for the babies and that passersby on the street enjoyed looking up at them. Because the babies in their cribs were so visible to anyone on the street, Noakes told Bragg that she believed that the bombers knew children were in the building, even though many did not want to Jennifer N. Sias Page 47 believe that anyone could be so cruel, so evil to bomb a building filled with so many innocents. Fifteen of the 21 children in the day-care that day died, including all four babies in the crib by the windows, the babies who, as Bragg wrote, “slept, played and cried in the sunshine by the second-floor windows, just a few feet from the origin of the explosion” (204). When Bragg wrote this story for The New York Times, the explosion had just happened 14 days before, and rescuers were still searching for survivors. Bragg writes: What they have found are mangled tricycles, shredded teddy bears, melted dolls and pieces of carriages, but no children in the past several days. There were story books in ashes, but no toy guns. The teachers did not allow them. They said they wanted to protect the children from things that represent violence (204). Again, Bragg has used irony to note that the children who were protected from violent things were destroyed in an act of ultimate violence. This piece was a so- called straight news story in The New York Times, not an editorial, and Bragg has said that he tries not to preach in his stories, to keep himself out of it and just tell the story. Although he has not injected his opinion directly, the way he describes the setting and his observations of what rescue workers were finding are heartfelt. He uses descriptive, powerful words to tell the readers about the conditions of what rescuers were finding, not just teddy bears but “shredded” teddy bears, not just dolls but “melted” dolls, and not just carriages but “pieces” Jennifer N. Sias Page 50 Someone would have had to broken up a fight between 3-year-old Zachary T. Chavez and another child. Zachary died in the blast. The director, 24-year-old Dana Cooper, would have been surrounded by children, wanting a cookie a story, a hug. “She was a pushover,” and the children knew. She and her 2-year-old son, Christopher, who was there with her, were both killed. “Now her husband has a big empty house,” Mrs. Noakes said. Wanda Howell, a 34-year-old teacher, would have had a child on her lap, reading a story” (205). To emphasize what might have been, what the routine would have been if Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh had not blown the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building apart, Bragg used the phrase “would have” or close variations of it 18 times in this article. The repetition is Bragg’s hammer as he pounds the point over and over, giving the reader a sense of just who was affected by the Ryder truck full of explosives. The babies and the older children had faces, habits, personalities, routines, lives, and Bragg has hammered out their personalities for the reader with this repetition so that they do not seem like distant statistics, some inanimate objects we might read about in a newspaper article. He has made them real, and his use of repetition was no accident in this article; it is one of the tools that makes Rick Bragg’s writing distinctive, recognizable, powerful, and it is the mark of a storyteller. Jennifer N. Sias Page 51 From the beginning of Rick Bragg’s career as a journalist, he was fortunate to work with supportive mentors, patient editors who guided him and allowed him space to develop and use his own style once he proved himself. Occasionally, he ran into or up against colleagues and other editors who perhaps thought Bragg did not have the appropriate journalistic training, schooling or even personal pedigree, and although the chip on his shoulder weighed heavily on him at times, the work ethic he had learned from his mother, his uncle, Ed, his older brother, Sam, and others in his community forced him to persevere. The lessons in storytelling that he learned at their knees allowed him to prevail. Jennifer N. Sias Page 52 Chapter Three - All Over But the Shoutin’ It was almost inevitable that Bragg’s mastery of storytelling in journalism would lead to another genre, memoir. His journalistic writing having been recognized with numerous awards, including the ultimate in his field, the Pulitzer Prize, Bragg received two interesting telephone calls at about the same time. The first was from an editor who said she liked his writing and asked him if he had ever considered writing a book. Ever humble, he said he had not and seemed a little dumbfounded at the inquiry. Soon after, Bragg received a call from an agent, who like the editor, said she liked his writing and wondered if he had ever considered writing a book. Again, he answered no. When he relayed these inquiries to a friend, that friend told him that he was an idiot for not following up. “These two women [the editor and the agent] were at the top of their games,” Bragg recalled during a conversation with high school students at the West Virginia Book Festival in Charleston, West Virginia in October 2002 (Personal Interview). After giving the prospect a little thought, Bragg called the editor and the agent back and told them of some of his ideas, the stories he would like to tell, and this was how his first memoir, All Over But the Shoutin’, was born. Once again, Bragg, unaware, entered a tradition that has seen cyclical practice and popularity, a tradition that dates back to at least 1673, which the Oxford English Dictionary notes as the time when the term memoir was used and Jennifer N. Sias Page 55 Bragg’s memoir can be divided roughly into three sections or what he calls seams. Section one is entitled “The Widow’s Mite” and is the portion in which he explains the background of his mother and father and focuses on stories that show his mother’s sacrifices in raising three sons after being abandoned by a drunken husband. Section Two is “Lies to My Mother” and details Rick Bragg’s career as a journalist. The finale and third seam, “Getting Even with Life,” explains some of Bragg’s triumphs, including fulfilling his mother’s dream of having a home of her own. In his introduction, Bragg makes the point that his mother’s sacrifice is symbolic of the kinds of sacrifices a lot of mothers have made for their children. His is a story that could be told about a lot of people’s mothers, fathers and extended family, “families [that] just came to pieces in that time and place and condition, like paper lace in a summer rain” (All Over But the Shoutin’ xii). Bragg used a simile, “like paper lace in a summer rain,” to illustrate the fragility of families and life in that place, in that time. When Bragg refers to the method in which he told this and other stories, he is referring to the rich storytelling tradition his mother and family bestowed upon him. His use of storytelling makes this memoir flow like the best of his journalistic pieces, engaging the reader, allowing the reader to relate to the story of deprivation and resolve and even triumph in the rural South, in the foothills of Appalachia. William Zinsser and Judith Barrington note that honest reflection is required in memoir, and All Over But the Shoutin’ is filled with several stories accompanied by Bragg’s adult reflection on what they meant then and mean now Jennifer N. Sias Page 56 – how as an adult he has come to terms with those experiences. However, in a sense, Rick Bragg rejects the label “memoir” for this work. In his prologue, Bragg writes: “The people who know about books call it a memoir, but that is much too fancy a word for me, for her, for him. It is only a story of a handful of lives . . . In these pages I will make the dead dance again with the living, not to get at any great truth, just a few little ones” (All Over But the Shoutin’ xxi-xxii). I do not think he rejects the term because the definitions of memoir do not fit this work (because they do); I think he shrugs off the term because he and his people are humble and avoid what his mother refers to as “false pride.” I think Bragg still has something of a chip on his shoulder, however whittled away by now, and does not feel completely at ease having his work described in literary terms. Thus far, he has been a journalist and has had to struggle to carve a niche for himself in that world. Considering himself and his work now in another genre, one linked to academia, perhaps is overwhelming to a man who technically still is a freshman at Jacksonville State University. Despite Bragg’s reluctance to classify his work as a memoir, does All Over But the Shoutin’ meet the criteria or definitions of memoir? Many describe the genre as a slice of life, a memorable portion of a life. In his introduction of Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, William Zinsser notes that “unlike autobiography, which moves in a dutiful line from birth to fame, memoir narrows the lens, focusing on a time in the writer’s life that was unusually vivid, such a childhood or adolescence, or that was framed by war or travel or public Jennifer N. Sias Page 57 service or some other special circumstance” (15). That definition proves problematic in applying the label of memoir, then, to Bragg’s work because Bragg’s story encompasses something more than a portion of a life, yet it could not be called an autobiography because it is not a record of his own life from birth to death. Nor is it a biography of his mother because it is not simply a record of her life from birth to death; it is a story of both of their lives in a sense with a focus on struggles and a few triumphs. Zinsser also points out that an effective memoir is one that focuses on a distinctive moment in the life of a person and a society, thereby becoming a work of history (15). Bragg’s work certainly fulfills that criteria in that it chronicles a period and a culture in the South, in the foothills of Appalachia. Bragg’s work includes issues of class, race and poverty and is deeply embedded in the context of the times. In Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Judith Barrington suggests that it is essential for the memoirist to both tell the story and muse upon it “trying to unravel what it means in the light of her current knowledge” (20). Barrington maintains that retrospection in memoir is a must and that readers want to know how the writer understands the events of the past on which the memoir focuses. Retrospection is evident in many parts of All Over But the Shoutin’. In one story, Bragg recalls the time when he had his first experience with the class system and the educational system of Alabama, and he learned that classrooms could be divided into a rigid caste system as he was put not into the Cardinal section of the affluent children but with the Jaybirds who were poor or “just plain dumb” Jennifer N. Sias Page 60 governor because he was “out-niggered” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 62). It was against this backdrop that Bragg’s family experienced abandonment once again, and they hit rock bottom. This time they did not have welfare checks or government commodities to sustain them because those handouts ceased when Bragg’s mother went back to his father. Bragg’s mother put off going back to her mother’s or being rescued by her sisters, who often came to her aid, because “hurt and bad feelings” grew when she had gone back to her husband this time. Bragg explains: “Out of pride, she wanted to wait as long as she could” (All Over But the Shoutin’ 65). Before long, however, their credit ran out at a nearby store, and the milkman stopped his deliveries. They ate what was left in the house until Bragg’s memory recalls nothing but hoecakes. Then, Bragg’s mother “got sick,” and she struggled out of bed each day long enough to find something for the boys to eat. Although the boys did not realize it then, their mother was pregnant with her fourth child. This is when something short of a miracle happened, when Bragg and his brothers learned a powerful lesson about kindness and generosity and character from a black family who lived down the road. They sent one of the children, a little boy “the color of bourbon” to the Bragg’s door with some corn (All Over But the Shoutin’ 65). Bragg writes: They must have seen us, walking that road. They must have heard how our daddy ran off. They knew. They were poor, very poor, living in unpainted houses that leaned like a drunk on a Saturday Jennifer N. Sias Page 61 night, but for a window in time they had more than us. It may seem like a little bitty thing, by 1990s reasoning. But this was a time when beatings were common, when it was routine, out of pure meanness, to take a young black man for a ride and leave him cut, broken or worse on the side of some pulpwood road. For sport. For fun. This was a time when townspeople in nearby Anniston clubbed riders and burned the buses of the Freedom Riders. This was a time of horrors, in Birmingham, in the backwoods of Mississippi. This was a time when the whole damn world seemed on fire. That is why it mattered so (All Over But the Shoutin’ 65-66). Bragg recalls that they had seen the children and their families before at a distance. Like Rick and his brothers, these children climbed the same trees and swam in the same creek, but somehow their paths did not connect, except in a few instances when Rick and company threw rocks at them. Bragg remembers: I knew only one of them by name. He had some kind of brain condition that caused tremendous swelling in his head. The others called him Water Head, and he ran slower than the rest and I bounced a rock of his back. I heard him cry out. I would like to say that we came together, after the little boy brought us that food, that we learned about and from each other, but that would be a lie. It was rural Alabama in 1965, two separate, distinct states. Jennifer N. Sias Page 62 But at least, we didn’t throw no more rocks (All Over But the Shoutin’ 66). Bragg’s reflection reveals the complex world he grew up in and his complicated feelings about it, about the racism prevalent in that time and place. By resisting the temptation to “revise” this story and reflecting on what he learned, he has gained more credibility and understanding among his readers. These are just two of many stories in this work accompanied by the adult Bragg’s reflection. In All Over But the Shoutin’, Bragg reflects on his father’s treatment of his mother and his sons. He reflects on the fact that his mother took his father back so many times after his cruelty towards them all. He reflects on his mother’s sacrifices that he did not fully understand or appreciate at the time. He reflects on issues of race and culture and poverty of the time and place. He reflects on the chip on his shoulder and the many times he did not feel good enough to fit in with the company around him or was made not to feel good enough. Bragg is reflective on most issues in the memoir that are of importance except for one, his seeming inability to sustain an intimate relationship with a woman. Divorced in his twenties after just a few years of marriage, Bragg notes countless times in this memoir, in interviews, and in discussions that he has been dumped by a multitude of “good women,” 43 as of October 2002. He jokes about it and mentions that his bad habits get in the way. The closest he comes to reflecting on the issue is to say that he just did not allow the time in his life for a relationship, that his job always took Jennifer N. Sias Page 65 is one of many uses of repetition in All Over But the Shoutin’ as he recalls a story he wrote about the 1994 tornado that hit northeastern Alabama and his own hometown: This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven. This is a place where the song “Jesus Loves Me” has rocked generations to sleep, and heaven is not a concept, but a destination. Yet in this place where many things, even storms, are viewed as God’s will, people strong in their faith and their children have died in, of all places, a church (All Over But the Shoutin’ 246-247). Bragg’s repetition of “this is a place” and “yet in this place” gets the reader’s attention and asks him to listen closely to what follows, for it is important. Bragg also uses another one of his most potent storytelling weapons in this opening – irony. He sets the reader up to understand that this is a place of faith and comforting grandmothers and innocent babies and where most people live their lives with the intention of making it to Heaven, and just as Bragg has lulled his readers into picturing this picturesque place, he turns the scene upside down in the same breath as he reveals that these, some of “God’s people” have died in the house of God, a church. Both in his journalistic writing and now in All Over But the Shoutin’ Bragg loves to play with repetition and irony, and he is good at it. He uses repetition Jennifer N. Sias Page 66 and irony as devices to paint the reader a picture, to make him see and feel what Bragg, the observer sees and feels. Bragg has said that he does not preach in his writing, does not tell the reader what to think or feel; he does not have to because his use of these and other storytelling devices are persuasive enough. In a chapter in which he describes moving to New York City to work for The New York Times, Bragg juxtaposes reality with the stories he told his mother. He writes: I settled on the Upper West Side, near the corner of 110th and Broadway. The homeless were five to a block, there had been a fatal stabbing two doors down. It was a real neighborhood. I told my momma it was safe as a church. I had two rooms, a galley kitchen and a view of nothing. It cost just $1,185.50 a month, and it was on the subway line to Times Square, a straight shot. Across the street there was a place that sold hot dogs for fifty cents. I told my momma I was eating right. My belongings arrived in early July. I walked around the opened boxes and thought to myself that a thirty-five-year-old man should have more stuff than this. There was a couch and chair, book shelves, a bed, and television and stereo, some pictures. I told my momma my life was rich and full . . . Jennifer N. Sias Page 67 The next day, the foreign desk asked me if I would like to go back to Haiti. A week later I was disembarking at what they used to call Duvalier Airport, searching the sky for smoke, and the ground for bodies, again. I told my momma I was going to spend a few weeks in the Caribbean (All Over But the Shoutin’ 253-254). Bragg often uses juxtaposition to unveil irony, and his use of repetition is almost oral; the reader can hear the story, almost hear Bragg say the words. The detail and length of the sentences describing reality versus the brevity and fantasy of the stories he told his mother are compelling, and his use of “I told my momma,” a down-home phrase sounds comfortable, safe, and familial. In “Rick Bragg on the Art of Storytelling,” an article for the periodical Writer, Elfrieda Abbe observes: “His writing simmers with down-home phrases: ‘His temper was as hot as bird’s blood.’ ‘His daddy was just a name, but his momma was a bird flying’” (23). In this article, for which Abbe interviewed Bragg, Bragg directly addresses his use of storytelling and offers advice to those who would like to do what he has done – tell stories about their own families and make them interesting enough for others to read. Bragg offers: I tell people to tell the stories the way they heard them. It’s hard to scratch a culture and not find a storyteller somewhere in it. Tell it with the flavor, the drama, the grace and the wit that it’s told to you. People say [my] language is so beautiful. Well, the language Jennifer N. Sias Page 70 sacrifices in raising her three sons, Bragg’s career as a journalist, which was made possible by his mother’s sacrifices, and finally getting even, enjoying some triumphs that resulted from all their hard work. All Over But the Shoutin’ is a memoir. It may not neatly fit all the criteria that critics say a memoir must fit, but Bragg has successfully bent boundaries to fit his needs. Although his work covers a lot of territory and incorporates many stories, they are all masterfully tied together by a common theme and by the narrative order he impresses upon it by using effective storytelling skills. Writing about the “new memoir,” Zinsser argues that the best of them “elevate the pain of the past with forgiveness, arriving at a larger truth about families in various stages of brokenness. There’s no self-pity, no whining, no hunger for revenge; the writers are as honest about their own young selves as they are about the sins of their elders” (5). Although there is no evidence in All Over But the Shoutin’ that Bragg has forgiven his father for his abandonment of and cruelties towards his mother, his brothers and himself, he does seem to have come to terms with or dealt with that issue as he has worked through many other deprivations of his past, which in many ways have made him a stronger person, like his mother, a person who endures and emerges stronger and more sensitive to the world around him. Bragg writes: “I hope she sees some of her gentleness and sensitivity in my words because if there is any of that in me still, it came from her” and that his goal with this work was “not to get at any great truth, just a few little ones” (xx-xxii). As many readers and critics will attest, All Jennifer N. Sias Page 71 Over But the Shoutin’ is so powerful because it speaks many truths in a voice that is lyrical, a storyteller’s voice that enthralls the reader. Jennifer N. Sias Page 72 Chapter Four – Ava’s Man In 2001, Bragg followed his memoir, All Over But the Shoutin’, with Ava’s Man, which became a national bestseller as well and bent the notion of genre even further. In Ava’s Man, Bragg tells the story of Charlie Bundrum, his mother’s father and source of strength, a beloved grandfather he never knew. Bragg’s grandfather died in 1958, a year before Rick Bragg was born. Bragg laments: “I have never forgiven him for that” (Ava’s Man 8). Bragg says that the work grew out of the prodding of readers who came to his book signings for All Over But the Shoutin’. Invariably, they asked him about the source of his mother’s strength and character and told him that he “left out the good part” (Personal Interview). Although both parents provided support and a positive influence on Margaret Marie Bundrum Bragg, Bragg’s grandfather was the main source of his mother’s strength and character. In many ways, however, Bragg’s grandfather remained an enigma to him; over the years, he noticed that his mother and aunts talked little of their father and seemed almost secretive on the subject. Occasionally, Bragg’s grandmother, Abigail, better known as “Ava,” would refer to him when her grandsons pestered her too much. Evidently, the widow caught the fancy of a traveling salesman for the Saxon Candy Company “who seemed to have a lot more on his mind than salt-water taffy.” When her grandchildren kidded her about the peddler of sweets and asked, “Grandma, you goin’ to get you a man?” she occasionally applied the brakes to her rocking chair Jennifer N. Sias Page 75 what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has described as the “speakerly text” (The Signifying Monkey 174). Bragg essentially has created a speakerly text with Ava’s Man by combining oral storytelling and fictional devices to tell the story of Charlie Bundrum. Ava’s Man is not a verbatim story from start to finish in his family’s voice or language; it is a combination of three voices: his family’s language and stories, the language of Bragg-the-son/grandson/nephew learned at the knees of those family members, and the language of Bragg-the-journalist. The work has become a speakerly text with that combination of voices telling the story of Charlie Bundrum. In the text and in the oral presentations Bragg gives on Ava’s Man, he moves smoothly, seamlessly among the three voices. In his prologue, Bragg is open about the methods he used to investigate and then write about his exulted grandfather. Bragg explains: “I built him up from dirt level, using half-forgotten sayings, half-remembered stories and a few yellowed, brittle, black-and-white photographs that, under the watch of my kin, I handled like diamonds” (Ava’s Man 10). Once Bragg enticed his kinfolks into letting down their guard and talking about his grandfather, the stories flowed, and Bragg learned that although Charlie Bundrum left no material goods when he left this world, he left behind a legacy and was regarded as a hero by his family and by many in their community. A great-nephew of Charlie’s told Bragg: “’He ought to have a monument because there ain’t no more like him. All his kind are gone’” (Ava’s Man 12). Bragg’s grandfather was not entirely unique in his time. There were other men like him, blue-collar men who loved their Jennifer N. Sias Page 76 families and who toiled to try to make enough to keep them fed and clothed and safe. However, history books and other genres tend to ignore this type of man and woman even though they comprised an essential part of the fabric of this country. Bragg begins Charlie Bundrum’s story with a story and chapter entitled “The Beatin’ of Blackie Lee” because he argues that the story proves to him how much his grandmother both loved and hated his grandfather and “which emotion won out in the end” (Ava’s Man 19). Bragg’s aunt Edna told him that evidently her father stopped by a bootlegger’s, a locale he was not averse to visiting, and met Blackie Lee, “a traveling woman with crimson lipstick and silk stockings” whose coal-black hair earned her a distinctive name and who told Charlie that “she surely was parched and tired and sure would ‘preciate a place to wash her clothes and rest a spell before she moved on down the road” (Ava’s Man 20). Known for taking in strays – dogs and men - Charlie told her she was welcome at his house. As the story goes, Ava and the five children, James, William, Edna, Gracie Juanita and Margaret (Bragg’s mother), were working a few miles from the house in Newt Morrison’s cotton field. Morrison’s daughter, Sis, had driven by the Bundrum house earlier and approached Ava in the cotton field, where she “lit the fuse” by telling Ava that she noticed some silk stockings hanging on her clothesline and wondered if her sister had come in for a visit. Ava told her that her sister was not visiting and that she would have written or sent word if she had planned such a trip. Ava continued to pick cotton for awhile but suddenly Jennifer N. Sias Page 77 “jerked bolt upright as if she had been stung by a bee,” hurled her cotton-filled sack across two rows and walked purposely the miles towards home. Her children were puzzled by her behavior and followed (Ava’s Man 20-21). By the time Ava made it home, it was nearly dark, and the traveling woman was still cooling herself on Ava’s porch. Bragg writes: “Ava stopped and drew a breath and just looked at her for a moment, measuring her for her coffin. Then she stomped over to the woodpile and picked up the ax” (Ava’s Man 21). Blackie Lee must have realized who Ava was and what she had in mind because she ran into their house, bolted the door and “began to speak to Jesus.” Ava announced to the woman that she could come out and take her “beatin’” or Ava would chop down her own door, and she’d still have to take a “beatin’” at the hands of a woman with an ax (Ava’s Man 22). The traveling woman chose the beating without the ax, and Bragg’s aunt Edna told him that Ava’s punishment of her might not have been so bad if Blackie Lee had not had the misfortune to wash her soiled clothes in Ava’s dishpan. Bragg writes: “No one, no one, washed their clothes in Ava’s dishpan” (Ava’s Man 22). For flavor, Bragg allows Edna to tell the story directly as he writes: Edna stood at the door, peeking. Listen to her [Edna]: “Momma beat her all through the house. She beat her out onto the porch, beat her out into the yard and beat her down to the road, beat her so hard that her hands swelled up so big she Jennifer N. Sias Page 80 protecting them, a code he taught years later to his grown son when he had a baby of his own by instructing: “Don’t let nothin’ happen to it. Kill if you have to, but don’t never, ever let nothin’ happen to it, because it is weak, and small, and it belongs to you” (Ava’s Man 76). They told him stories about his fierceness and hot temper, the danger of it never directed towards family but only towards those who threatened someone he loved, like Old Man Dempsey, who set his fighting dog on Charlie’s son, William, for sport, for fun. When Charlie, who had been at work when it happened, learned that the dog gnashed out part of William’s side, he quietly but fiercely faced down Old Dempsey and, shotgun in hand, told him he had come for his dog. When Dempsey told Charlie he couldn’t have the dog, Charlie gave him a choice, saying: “I’ve come for the dog . . . or I’ve come for you” (Ava’s Man 78-79). They told him stories about Charlie’s goodness, his sensitivity and tendency to protect whomever and whatever needed protecting, like Jessie Clines, known simply as “Hootie,” a little gremlin of a man who was harmless, kind and talked to the owls but who became a target of rumors and then the brutality of drunks who made a ritual of beating him. Charlie essentially adopted the little man, who loved to listen to Charlie’s stories, and he became a part of the family. They also told their nephew stories about the moonshine Charlie made, which was pure and clear and much sought-after by those who wanted safe “likker,” not the kind manufactured in rusted truck radiators that became contaminated by lead salts; the moonshine that Charlie made also was sought by Jennifer N. Sias Page 81 revenuers and police. Based on the stories he was told, Bragg explains his grandfather’s moonshine escapades by explaining the context of the times. Although Prohibition was history by that time, Georgia and most of Alabama were officially “dry,” but bootleggers supplied the constant demand for the kind of whiskey that made a man feel like blue fire coursed through his veins and made him forget just for a little while the poverty that bound him. Although Charlie most definitely sampled and enjoyed his own product because he wouldn’t sell a drop that had not been tested first by his own liver (his method of quality assurance), he made the moonshine to help supplement his meager income. Bragg explains: I am not trying to excuse it. He did things that he shouldn’t have. I guess it takes someone who has outlived a mean drunk to appreciate a kind one. But he never poisoned anybody. He never caused anyone to go lame or bind from bad whiskey, and if you’re going to have whiskey – and it, like the mountains where it was made, will always be with us – you might as well have memorable whiskey. And people do recall it [specifically Charlie’s moonshine]. They truly do (Ava’s Man 133). Like good moonshine, the stories about Charlie Bundrum flowed clear and hot once his grandson tapped the source. His family told him the story of how a thug named Jerry Rearden and his two-hundred-some-odd pound girlfriend, Norris, came for Hootie one day with evil intentions. Evidently, Jerry had been Jennifer N. Sias Page 82 one of the drunks who in the past had beat Hootie for the sport of hit. In his hot-rod Ford, Jerry rumbled into the Bundrum’s yard with Norris seated in the rumble seat “like a chubby child on a kiddy car, drinking soda pop and looking mean” (Ava’s Man 145). Ever the protector and not pleased that Jerry had come to his house threatening violence in the presence of his wife and children, Charlie told him to leave. Jerry raised his .410 shotgun and leveled it at Charlie as Charlie, unarmed, walked towards the enraged man. Jerry shot but barely missed Charlie, who with a “fist the size of a lard bucket,” knocked him out. The play-by-play having been told to him by the daughters who were there to witness the violence, Bragg continues the story by describing what happened next: Jerry dropped like a box of rocks, his face and teeth a red mess. And just then Charlie saw a huge figure hurl itself at him from the shadows. It was that big woman, and she lunged at him with a hog-killing knife. Charlie whirled and fired. The woman, who was turned sideways to stab him, took the shot in the side of her breast, point blank. The shot passed through the breast and went into and through the other one, and the woman fell hard and heavy onto the grass . . . She was blessed that day, that woman, and Charlie was, too. The gun he snatched from Jerry Rearden was a little .410 used for squirrel and rabbit and sometimes deer, not a Jennifer N. Sias Page 85 verbal art grew further apart. So long as writing was in the hands of an elite minority these changes did not affect the masses, who still received their lore orally (1). Given that an elite minority owned the written word originally, one may better understand the roots of the negative attitude that some academics today have for storytelling and the oral culture. However, the invention of movable type made the written word more accessible to the masses, who became more reliant on the printed word as literacy increased over time. In the twentieth century, television, computers and the Internet have become powerful influences on communication that compete for individuals’ attention. Burrison suggests, then, that the importance of oral storytelling has diminished unsurprisingly with the advent of “communications advances that require less human involvement and energy” (1). Burrison goes on to point out, however, that some types of oral narration have survived and flourish because there is a hunger for the type of interaction that “impersonal media” cannot provide. Burrison argues: Nowhere in the United States is storytelling more vital than in the South, where skill with the spoken word has always been emphasized. Strong traditions of storytelling from such Old World source areas of the southern population as Ulster, West Africa, and southern England, reinforced by the physical isolation of dispersed Jennifer N. Sias Page 86 settlement and a conservative mindset that valued the old ways, certainly contributed to this tendency (1-2). Marginalized groups have depended on storytelling as a way to transmit their knowledge, history and values. Like African Americans, those of Scots-Irish descent in Appalachia, can be defined as a marginalized group. Bragg’s people, who are Scots-Irish, are considered Appalachian both economically and geographically. This is supported by the Appalachian Regional Commission’s map, “The Appalachian Region,” which defines Appalachia as the area from the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York through Bragg’s area of Northeastern Alabama and below and west into Mississippi (The Appalachian Region – see appendix). Marginalized groups like Bragg’s family, then, have relied on storytelling to inform, to teach, to persuade, to warn and to entertain. With Ava’s Man, Bragg effectively translates oral storytelling to written storytelling; he not only wanted to tell the story of his grandfather, but he also wanted to preserve something larger, the tradition and the culture that created him. In an interview by Ellen Kanner for the online site, Book Page, Bragg comments on the storytelling of his people. He told Kanner: “’You can’t assume storytelling stops at the county line, but I believe we have a richer tradition of storytelling . . . It’s deeper and wider. You can’t walk down the street without hearing a good story” (Kanner). In the interview with Kanner as well as with me in Charleston, West Virginia last October, Bragg said he worries that this part of his culture and their unique speech patterns are vanishing. He seemed almost Jennifer N. Sias Page 87 angry or at least irritated as he recounted to me that young girls from the area he grew up in sounded as though they were from “the valley” in California and that school children in Atlanta are made fun of if they sound “Southern.” It seems natural, then, or actually quite deliberate, that storytelling would enter into Bragg’s genre of memoir. Making his living by telling stories, Bragg simply used the stories his family finally shared with him to tell the story of his grandfather, and many readers and reviewers refer to the work as a memoir, the label also applied to All Over But the Shoutin’. Although his first work may have pressed the boundaries of the definition of memoir, All Over But the Shoutin’ can be included in that genre as it is Bragg’s story of his mother’s life and his own as shaped by his mother and family. It is fair to question, however, if a story constructed about a grandfather he never technically met can be considered as part of that same genre. If one writes a story about another, familial or not, by interviewing, researching and gathering information on that individual, whom he has never met, might it be more aptly classified in the genre biography? Indeed, other readers and reviewers of the work have labeled Ava’s Man a biography. In fact, in its cataloging of the book, the Library of Congress classifies the work as: “1. Bundrum, Charlie. 2. Working class whites – Southern States – Biography. 3. Depressions – 1929 – Southern States. 4. Southern States – Social life and customs – 20th century. 5. Southern States – Biography” (Back side of title page of Ava’s Man). However, the Library of Congress also applied the term biography to All Over But the Shoutin’, which Jennifer N. Sias Page 90 then was approached by a top-rate editor and agent to write his first book, which was published by Random-House, a leading publisher. He pushed the boundaries slowly and steadily under the direction of supportive editors. He pushed the boundaries later because he could, because his success allowed him the power to “break rules.” In pushing the boundaries in all of his creative nonfiction, that is narrative journalism and the two memoirs, has Bragg essentially created a new genre? Are the boundaries of genres fixed? Can they be redefined? Students of literary criticism argue that genres are fluid constructs of a given society and its sense of history and values at the time. In “Genre Theory, Literary History, and Historical Change,” an essay in Theoretical Issues in Literary History, Ralph Cohen writes: “In their reemergence, genre criticism and theory have moved from assumptions of genres as fixed to genre as process of textual change” (86-87). Cohen traces the debate of the “fixity of literary genre classifications” to Northrop Frye, Alastair Fowler, Rosalie Colie, and Barbara Lewalski, who show that such debates took place in the Renaissance (89). Cohen argues that “genres are cultural formations and their relation to cultural forces should perhaps begin with an inquiry into their critical and theoretical reemergence” (89). Cohen questions: Why at this time have generic theories once again become important? In recent years a huge number of little known texts written by women, by African Americans, and other minorities have been recovered. They reveal the inadequate “data bases” for Jennifer N. Sias Page 91 constructing genres in the past. We now know that critics and theorists have disregarded texts such as slave narratives, domestic journals, feminist autobiographies, and confessions and kept them outside the range of literary study. Such genres did not fit a conception of education aimed at preparing white males for advancing in social and economic hierarchies. The need now is to educate people to understand that received genres, the so-called mass culture genres such as Westerns and detective stories and new ones such as advertising or television sitcoms, affect their thinking, feeling and knowledge. Reemergence of genre criticism and theory results from the need for feminist and African American and sympathetic critics to demonstrate the prejudices hidden or obvious in received texts. Such critics undermine the assumptions of objectivity of received critical and theoretical genres. Moreover, writings that deal with interrelations between literary and nonliterary genres or between genres of different disciplines – literary history and art history, literary criticism and psychoanalytical criticism and practice – have led critics and theorists to a reconsideration of genre as a unified kind (90). Cohen suggests that a generic history of past writings allows one to study which constituents have been included and which have been left out in creating genre classifications. Cohen writes: “A generic history both stresses the need for Jennifer N. Sias Page 92 classification and the need to realize the limits of any monolithic classification. Classifications are multidimensional; thus every text within a genre can also be a member of another genre” (90). Cohen’s argument helps to explain the difficulty in affixing one label or genre to Bragg’s Ava’s Man. If the New Journalists paved the way for Bragg to inject storytelling and his narrative style into the genre of newspaper writing, who or what paved the way for him to push the boundaries of the genre of memoir? Has his success as a journalist and then the commercial and critical success of All Over But the Shoutin’ allowed him to blend genres on his own or to create an entirely new one? Critics might argue that Southerners like Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner have used storytelling in literature before and that Bragg’s style is not new or groundbreaking. However, writers like Welty, O’Connor and Faulkner wrote fiction – short stories and novels – unlike Bragg’s creative nonfiction. Though debates rage about truth in nonfiction, particularly in the genre of memoir, Bragg offers the story of his grandfather not as a novel, not as a work of fiction, but as an essentially “true” account of the life of a man living in the foothills of Appalachia and representing a time, place and individuals who transcended seemingly insurmountable odds. As his mother might say, Rick Bragg told “God’s sanction” in Ava’s Man. Some reviewers of the work do take issue with the element of truth in Ava’s Man, and theirs represents a larger debate about the role of truth in the genre of memoir. Jennifer N. Sias Page 95 work; one has to really search to find reviewers who criticize the work. I managed to find two. One review that takes the writer to task is by Elizabeth Bennett, a free-lance writer. Writing for the online edition of the Pittsburgh Post- Gazette, Bennett praises Bragg’s ability to write about working-class people in a “sad, funny, moving and poetic” manner, but she criticizes the writer for repeating a conversation his grandfather had with “another long-dead person” and for appropriating feelings and thoughts on a grandfather who died before he was born (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette online). Bennett writes: “Rumor has it that Bragg, too, takes liberties with the facts, sometimes doctoring his quotes in his New York Times stories to make more colorful copy” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette online). Bennett goes on to tell readers what “irritated” her most, which she describes as “Bragg’s intentional bad grammar – phrases like ‘to live decent,’ ‘if he had drank,’ and ‘a real whole lot.’” Calling it a quibble, she nonetheless complains: He did the same thing in “Shoutin’” using – in his own telling of the story and not in quotes – such expressions as “anywheres close” and “it ain’t noways true.” They upset the narrative flow, and make Bragg come across as wearing his background “like a bull – badge of honor,” as he has admitted doing (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette online). Jennifer N. Sias Page 96 Writers write for an audience. Astute writers and storytellers vary their tone and style to fit their purpose, to match their genre. The examples Bennett criticizes are not from newspaper pieces for The New York Times; they are from the story of his grandfather pieced together from multiple stories his family told him – family that live in the pines of northeastern Alabama, where Rick Bragg was born and raised and from which he developed his own, unique dialect. Although it is true that he never met his maternal grandfather, he also is not some unrelated, distant, entirely objective writer attempting to pen a biography. With Ava’s Man, Bragg is not just writing about his grandfather, he is telling the story of his grandfather and family to which he is very much connected. Would it be fair, “truthful” for him to write about his family in a style that seems “unnatural,” “cleansed” of any words or phrasings that do not strictly adhere to formal English, which does not accurately represent the way he and his family speak, tell stories? In Storytellers: Folktales & Legends from the South, John Burrison counters: Regional differences in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation (the latter being what we most often associate with an accent and the most difficult aspect to represent on paper) are what give our speech its character and rootedness and reflect the diverse cultural backgrounds that make up our nation. The expressive power of dialect has not been lost on our finest creative writers whose use of it in dialogue infuses their work with a sense of place. And Jennifer N. Sias Page 97 nowhere in the United States is dialect a stronger identity-marker (among both insiders and outsiders) than in the South (11). Given that Bragg was clear in the prologue to Ava’s Man that he constructed the story from the stories of his family members and set out to spin the tale himself on paper, he should be able to write this creative nonfiction piece using the language that is natural to him and his people, their true language to make a speakerly text, as Gates might say. Nevertheless, not all reviewers are convinced and seem to expect him to use grammatical constructions that fit their sense of standard English even if it is not true to the subject of his work. In “Hardscrabble,” a review of Ava’s Man for The Washington Post, Fred Chappell notes that the work relies on oral history and interviews and suggests: “He seems to believe that the use of oral sources gives him leeway to enter into a folkloric mode of narrative – and he lays it on with a snow shovel” (4). One is compelled to ask Chappell why in his estimation Bragg does not have the right to use a folkloric mode of narrative, a storyteller’s approach? Chappell goes on to level: “Ava’s Man is a mixture of adulation, rumor, hyperbole, hot air and execrable writing” (4). Conceding that Charlie Bundrum and the men he represents had admirable qualities, Chappell nonetheless argues that he and “his type” were in no way unique and that his grandson has misrepresented him and memorialized him with bad writing. He then launches into a list of what he calls Bragg’s “transgressions” and points out what he considers “horrendous grammar,” clichés, cruel caricature, faulty logic,