Rick Bragg’s memoir, All over but the Shoutin’, is a detailed
look into the poverty of Alabama in the 50s.
Bragg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996. He is a national correspondent for The New York Times. He lives in Atlanta Georgia. As the jacket accurately points out, this story
is a “haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the
American margin.” Lots of times I ignore
these blurbs before I read a book, but this one completely and concisely sums
up the sad story of poverty in America.
This memoir is
heart-wrenching to say the list. The
poverty of people in Alabama—as bad as it was—was still not as bad as the
African-Americans in the same time and place.
Rick Bragg’s story is of his long-suffering mother, Margaret, and his
brothers Sam and Mark. Charles, the
father, was an alcoholic, who appeared in and out of the lives of his
family. He never offered any help to the
wife and children, and only occasionally saw his sons. Bragg writes, “Anyone could tell it who had a
momma who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have
school clothes, who picked cotton in other people’s fields and ironed other
people’s clothes and cleaned the mess in other people’s houses, so that her
children didn’t have to live on welfare alone so that one of them could limb up
her backbone and escape the poverty and hopelessness that ringed them, free and
clean” (xii). Bragg claims, “This is no
sob story. While you will read words
laced with bitterness and killing anger and vicious envy, words of violence and
sadness and, hopefully, dark humor, you will not read much whining. Not on her part, certainly, because she does
not know how” (xiii). This is a portrait
of one of the strongest women I have ever read about much less encountered.
Bragg also mentions the
plight of African-Americans as well. He
writes, “White people had it hard, and black people had it harder than that,
because what are the table scraps to nothing?
This was not the genteel and parochial South, where monied whites felt
they owed some generations-old debt to their black neighbors because their
great-great-grandfather owned their great-great-grandfather. No one I new ever had a mammy. This was two separate states, both wanting
and desperate, kept separate by hard men who hid their faces under hoods and
their deeds under some twisted interpretation of the Bible, and kicked the
living [crap] out of anyone who
thought it should be different. Even
into my own youth, the orange fires of shacks and crosses lit up the evening
sky. It seems a cliché now, to see it on
movie screens. At the time. It burned my
eyes” (4-5). As I read this passage, I
recalled the all too recent image of white supremacists marching with torches,
shouting racial epithets.
Rick Bragg’s bitter portrayal
of poverty in the deep south is heart-wrenching and difficult to turn
away. It proves the axiom that when some
people are oppressed, many others are likewise.
Racism is a cancer we must eradicate.
All over but the Shoutin’ is a
story only the most hard-hearted can ignore.
We will never have justice or peace, until everyone knows justice and
peace. 5 stars.
--Chiron, 1/15/18
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