Although I’m not saying that it’s totally peculiar to my kind, an almost instinctive distrust of good fortune has always struck me as a very pronounced trait among southern poor whites. It runs through the fiction of writers like Dorothy Allison and Larry Brown, but it’s nothing short of a formative flesh-and-blood reality in the trilogy of remarkable memoirs crafted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/bragg/ ">Rick Bragg, and based on his poor-white boyhood and family and class heritage in hardscrabble Calhoun County, Alabama, just north of Anniston.
Bragg wrote from personal experience about his poor white childhood, which was marked by long stretches of tragedy and trauma so unrelenting that anything else seemed abnormal. In The Prince of Frogtown Bragg told of his long-suffering mother’s reaction to an apparent turn-around in the family’s utterly dismal fortunes. In 1963, after years of abusing and neglecting his family, Bragg’s drunken, irresponsible father had found a steady job in Dallas, Texas, at a body shop and taken his wife and sons out of Calhoun County and what seemed like a million miles away from the hand-to-mouth existence that was all Rick and his brother had ever known. Suddenly there was plenty of food, money for decent clothes, ice cream, trips to the zoo, and other such “extras” that had been beyond their reach in Alabama. “I thought I had stepped in through some magic window,” Rick recalled. “One day she was dragging me on a cotton sack, pulling all day for a dollar and change, and the next day, we were sitting on a porch step eating ice cream.”
Although Charles Bragg appeared to have his drinking under control and had given his wife no indication that he would slip back into his old self- and family-destructive ways, his previous behavior gave her reason to doubt the longevity of their dramatically elevated circumstances. Then, after a couple of months that had seemed like a dream to Rick and his brother, word came from back home that the monthly $54 welfare check his mother had been receiving for her and her two boys was about to be cut off. At that point, wracked by doubt about the husband’s staying power and conditioned to see all good fortune as fleeting at best, Margaret Bragg told her devastated husband and children that she was taking the boys and going home. Finding his insistent, emotional pleadings to no avail, Charles Bragg remained in Texas for a while before tumbling back into his old ways, and he wandered back to Calhoun County, where he resolutely drank himself to death while making what was an already tenuous existence for his wife and children even more difficult and painful.
Though he had been too young to process what had happened at that time, as he recounted in All Over But the Shoutin’, an adult Rick Bragg would experience the same knee-jerk suspicion of apparent good news when he received word in 1999 that he had won a Pulitzer Prize for his feature writing work at the New York Times. Fearful that there might have been a mistake, Bragg waited an hour before calling his mother because, he explained, “it is a common condition of being poor white trash: you are always afraid that the good things in your life and temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your brute strength to stop them.”
Although my family was more stable if not a whole lot better off economically than Bragg’s, such revelations help to explain why his writing resonates so strongly with me. I’ll never forget telling my Mama excitedly about several good things that had come my way recently. Having come up the really hard way, with seventy years of immersion in Southern Baptist fatalism on top of that, she responded gravely, “That’s nice, Jimmy, but I can’t help but worry when things get to going too well.”
As the Missus and I celebrate forty years of wedded bliss this week, the Ol’ Bloviator can hardly even begin to count his blessings, and it’s not just because an aptitude for math ain’t one of them. Not only do I enjoy the love of a wonderful wife and have a wonderful son, but we live in a wonderful town on a wonderful street inhabited by wonderful people. Not only that, but I make my living doing something that I’d probably do for nothing if you could buy Sam Adams with food stamps. In sum, I have every reason to wake up every morning yellin’ “Wahoo!” and, naturally, that just worries the hell out of me.
