Thank you, Rick Bragg
I have carefully turned through hundreds of pages of Sandra Cisneros’s novels, eager to absorb every word that dripped in references to Mexican culture. I have watched night turn into day outside my dorm room’s window as I tested The New Yorker’s paywall, one Junot Diaz short story at a time. Their words, perfectly strung together to chronicle what it means to be Hispanic, made me laugh, wonder, cry, sigh and hope. They’re fictional, but sure hold a lot of truth in them. The reality carefully weaved within each of their sentences reminded me that I was not alone. These same feelings of solidarity came to me while reading Rick Bragg’s memoir, All Over but the Shoutin’, but this time around, they were a whole lot stronger. Comparing a white, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who grew up dirt poor in northeastern Alabama to a 20-year-old Mexican girl from Los Angeles, who’s currently studying journalism at the University of Southern California sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. It would be too impossible. They are too many worlds away. However, a shared understanding of poverty and the salvation journalism provides certainly has a way of uniting two unlikely souls.
I’d like to thank Rick Bragg for reopening him and his family’s wounds in order to write this memoir. In the prologue, he states, “This is not an important book,” but instead, “only a story of a handful of lives” (xi,xxi). While Bragg may know better than anyone I know of the complexities of how newsroom politics dictate the essence of what makes an important story, a relevant story, he makes it clear that all stories need to be told. In memoir and journalism, the author has a certain responsibility to the story because they must get it right. Relatability may seem like a far fetched concept, especially when speaking of the dehumanizing truths that poverty holds onto people and never lets them forget, but he uses authenticity and inclusion in his language so others can and will understand where he comes from. By accounting for what he does know and admitting what he does not, readers can trust him to tell the stories that not everyone has the language for.
In the journalism program at USC, aspiring reporters are constantly told that the best of the best are objective. They get both sides of the story. They ask the tough questions. I am glad that I am also double majoring in Narrative Studies because Bragg’s text opened my eyes to how storytelling can be objective to a certain degree. I strongly believe that his memoir is as powerful as it is because he is an outstanding reporter who uses his journalistic skills to tell the story of his own life. By allowing readers to peer into bits of his life, he shows that in order to create a memoir, you must tell stories you are ashamed of. You must recognize your imperfections and limitations. You must realize when and when not to ask questions. What matters is what happened. The truth will ooze its way out of the details. After all, Bragg does not have to tell the reader that it is not fair that his brother Sam had to “clean the bathrooms and shovel coal into the school’s furnace to earn his free lunch” (104). He just tells it how it is.
I saw my mother come to life in fictional female characters written in texts by authors with last names like Cisneros and Diaz. I would have never guessed that the true, incredible woman who gave birth to the great journalist Rick Bragg would parallel my own in ways I had never been able to relate to before. Bragg’s memoir is full of recollections of the sacrifices his momma made for him and his family in order to repay her for the suffering she absorbed for them. In Margaret Marie Bundrum Bragg, I see Guadalupe Fernandez. Both are from the south — one from the foothills of the Appalachians on the Alabama-Georgia line and the other from the dry farmlands of El Durazno, Mexico, and only knew a life of “rich poverty” (33). Both of their families, full of quirky characters, left school and turned to fields on land they did not own to work for survival. Like Momma Bragg, mi madre also had bad luck. While my own selfishness caused me to believe that living in poverty was also my own bad luck for so long, All Over but the Shoutin’ opened my eyes to how much I have to be grateful for because of my mother. “Everybody loves their momma — there is nothing even remotely unique in that even in this dysfunctional world we live in. But not everybody owes their momma so much as us” (162). Although Bragg is referring to him and his siblings when he says “us,” I feel like I am a part of it too.
Poverty is not noble. It is dehumanizing. It is not about living without excess, but about living without necessity. While I would not wish it upon my worst enemy, I cannot help but be thankful for survivors like Bragg who can speak about the painful parts of his past to show how it impacted him throughout his life. After all, there are some things you can never forget. Some of those things involve watching your mother take on so much more than any human should ever have to. Bragg saw it in his momma that “the only thing poverty does is grind down your nerve endings to a point that you can work harder and stoop lower than most people are willing to” (25). I saw it my own, too. My mom has spent her whole life working for other people. For as long as I can remember, she has exited the gates of the Section 8 owned, two-bedroom, seven person apartment we call home at dawn to make the journey to scrub the floors of what seem like mansions for two with ocean views. Her evenings were spent wiping the fingerprints off the glass at the Maritime Museum and baking cakes for extra cash to make rent. Like Bragg’s mother, she never thought of herself as poor. And just like Bragg’s mother, I am positive that she saw “the rest of the world, the better world, spinning around her, out of reach” (25). Supporting five children and their never-ending needs must have been exhausting and “she did what she could to support us with her own work, her own sweat, but sometimes it was just too hard” (41). I know it embarrassed her to stand in line at the WIC offices. I know she wished she could give us brand-name Chex instead of the boxes of Crispy Hexagons they passed out at the local food pantry. My mami never told me why she never came to any of mine and my siblings’ PTA meetings, Halloween Carnivals, Christmas parades or awards ceremonies like all the other parents did. In speaking of why his own mother rarely went out, Bragg said, “It was a long time before I realized that she stayed home because she was afraid we might be ashamed of her, ashamed of the woman with rough hands like a man and donated clothes that a well-off lady might recognize as something she threw away” (74). Without reading Bragg’s “unimportant book” about the stories of a “handful of lives,” it might have taken me a lot longer than him to realize what haunted my own mother.
Bragg’s accounts of his brother Sam brought the distance between Alabama and California even closer for me. I do not believe I would be sitting in the comfort of my university owned apartment that is even larger than the one my mother lives in, typing this essay, if it were not for my older brother Antonio, who absorbed a lot of my mother’s own suffering. Like Sam, he “had caught the worst of it; I guess the oldest, by nature always do” (103). I think of Antonio as my hero as much as Rick ascribes Sam to be his. I, too, used to believe my brother was indestructible. He has always been whip smart, capable of fixing anything, able to make anyone laugh until tears roll down their eyes and by far, the most generous person I have ever met. When he was sixteen years old, he dropped out of high school to work at a variety of minimum wage jobs. I do not know many other teenagers who would give up more than half of the paychecks they earned dealing with sassy customers in back to back graveyard shifts to see that their mother could rest for an evening. It is a damn shame that hard work does not always produce the good luck we wish it would. However, he mirrors Sam in the way that “he is not ashamed of work. If he is bitter about it, about any of it, he has never said” (170). Comparing my own brother to Sam forced me to acknowledge how difficult it must be to truly make a “decent life from absolute nothing” (170). Antonio did not have anyone to elevate him from his lower class status. His ambition was fueled by a life he did not want his mother and younger siblings to endure. “He watches over my mother, giving me opportunities to roam, to discover things” (171). After this line in All Over but the Shoutin’, Bragg describes how in exchange, Sam just wants him to to tell him about where he has been and what he seen. To this day, I have never seen anyone happier to hear about the day to day life of a college student: friendships, internship offers, midterm stress and all. “Those are good problems,” he says.
Before reading Bragg’s memoir, I had no words to describe the feelings of embarrassment and shame that go hand in hand with being part of the lower class. The self awareness that comes over you like a tidal wave when you come to recognize your place as the “other” never really leaves you. It proves that everything that is healed is just scabbed over. Bragg mentions that when he was younger, he had not given much thought to being poor because it was the only world he knew. I agree with him. I did not know that seven people were probably not meant to live in a two-bedroom apartment. I sincerely believed that people only had swimming pools in movies until I was about seven years old. Pizza delivery was a rare luxury reserved for birthdays. Like Bragg so beautifully illustrates, ignorance is bliss until you realize how great class divides are. He describes times where he felt embarrassed by girlfriends, school teachers and classmates. I think anyone who understands what it is like to have nothing at all has a handful of those defining moments. For me, it was shamefully walking to put groceries back in their place when there wasn’t enough cash in my mom’s wallet to pay for them. It was having to make up lies for not being able to go to the movie theater after school with my friends. It was asking my mom to drop me off two blocks away from campus so no one would see that I was getting out of an old scratched up Buick with the side-view mirrors duct-taped to it. It was giving someone my address and being told, “Aren’t those the projects? My parents would never take me there.” Every one of these instances tends to build on you and like Bragg mentions throughout his texts, it causes a chip on your shoulder to grow.
While I could never imagine what it would be like to get a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard and work alongside Ivy League-ers, reading about Bragg’s experiences felt very similar to my time at USC and in different newsrooms. Reading the lines where Bragg described how his mom was proud of him for going back to school even though she did not really know what a fellowship was warmed my heart. I felt it turn up a few degrees when I read “that she told everybody who would listen that her son was going to Harvard” (222). I remember telling my mom that I was accepted to USC on an almost full tuition scholarship and she just smiled. When I wasn’t around, Antonio explained to her how it is one of the best journalism schools in the country. Now, I hear friends of hers I have never met before want to know about what I am up to. Even the owners of the homes whose floors she scrubs are eager to hear about my whereabouts. I am glad I could do that for her. I love how Bragg mentions that going to Harvard did not solve all of his problems, but it expanded his worldview and shrunk the chip on his shoulder just a little bit. “They [The fellows], especially, taught me that you can’t go through life not liking people because they didn’t have to work as hard or come as far as you did” (227). I find his acknowledgment of his preconceptions to be refreshing. After all, the people who “couldn’t help it that the worst day of their lives had involved wilted arugula” could not have possibly controlled what they were born into (226). I am sure my own mother would have wanted wilted arugula to be the worst of my troubles.
I can only hope and work every single day of my life to be half of the writer Rick Bragg is. It is both humbling and inspiring to know that someone who has been at their lowest still realizes their privilege when reporting in places unimaginable to the average person. Bragg ultimately taught me that to be a good journalist, “you have to feel for the people you write about or the words don’t amount to much” (289). For the past few years that I have been studying journalism, feelings of self consciousness bubbled up within me. I am so appreciative to know that reporters like Bragg have been completely influenced by the world around them to prove that not all lessons can be learned in a classroom. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I turned the pages to where he described what it was like to win the Pulitzer Prize. “I couldn’t help but wonder again how I would ever fit in here, among these people. I told myself that I had reached the same place, I had only started from a different direction, and truthfully, had to travel a good part of the way by pickup” (304). Bragg’s journey has driven me to realize that the start line does not matter as long as you are willing to work hard, especially for the people you feel that you owe. I am not a city, state, world, but a universe away from a Pulitzer and the chance to buy my mom a home, but now I know that it is possible. There are special advantages to being brought up in a world with no special advantages. I thank Rick Bragg again for revisiting some of the darkest parts of his life in his memoir. By doing so, he revealed how the power of timeless storytelling can heal, give thanks and unite two of the most unlikely people — a Southern boy of the ’60s and a west coast girl just shy of 21 years old in 2017.
In the end of his memoir, Bragg describes speaking to a woman who told him she could relate to him. “She will make it, because what drives her is meaner that what drives most people. She will make it because, as someone told me once, people like you and me, we can’t fail. I strongly suspect there are a lot of us” (327–328). Shivers went down my spine because I felt as if he was speaking to me. I still do.
