Rick Bragg Book Signing - July 31, 2008

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Bragg will talk about his latest book, "The Prince of Frogtown" at the Museum of Mobile on Thursday, July 31st at 6pm.

5:30pm Excelsior Band will play and light refreshments will be served.

Not able to join us? Call 208-7653 to reserve a book, specify how you would like it signed and arrange for a pick-up date.

The Museum of Mobile is located in historic downtown at 111 South Royal Street.

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Read an excerpt from "The Prince of Frogtown"

TOUGHY GRIFFIN was Bobby’s friend. He was not the meanest man in Jacksonville, but he could absorb pain and whiskey in a volume few have ever seen. Being kicked by a grown, neck-high mule is comparable to being run over by a small car, and he had been kicked, butted and bit. “But there was not a mule or a horse he couldn’t shoe,” said Jimmy Hamilton. “He was usually so drunk he couldn’t walk, but he could flat out shoe. He’d get about half lit, and before it was over…well, I’ve seen him bleedin’ and the mule, too.”
He and Homer would go sit under the Indian cigar tree in front of Toughy’s barn, for the same reason they went to the theater. If you sat there long enough, some kind of entertainment would occur. It was even better than the poker game of violence, cussing, drinking and all the manly arts. “ I never knew if Toughy ever took a bath, because he always looked the same,” Jimmy said. He was covered in snuff, mud, blood, manure and smut, from his bellows, but never whiskey, because Toughy never let a drop go awry. He was on of the legendary figures in Jacksonville’s history, though his name appears on no documents except maybe a few old police reports. Bob like to visit Toughy in the cool of the late afternoon, especially if he had a bottle to share.
This day, Toughy had just used the nose twisters to bring a large mule down to the ground, so it could be trussed up and shod. The nose twisters worked just like the name implies—the smithy attached them, like a big set of pliers, to the nose, and twisted them around until the animal buckled. Mules do not like this, none of it, and they lie quivering in pain and terror on the ground, until the ropes are undone and it can explode up, kicking insanely at anything close. Toughy had just tied the mule down, straddled the leg, and was driving nails into the hoof when Bobby walked up.
“Bobby had some whiskey,” Jimmy said. “That was out of the ordinary.”
He told Toughy to quit what he was doing and have a little drink of liquor.
“Toughy would have dropped his hammer in mid-swing,” Jimmy said, “if someone came up with a bottle…”
“So there they are, Toughy and Bobby, sitting on a rock drinking whiskey,” Jimmy said.
The mule’s owner, a big farmer, stared in disbelief.
His prize mule lay kicking, one leg sticking straight up in the air, as Toughy took several long pulls on the whiskey.
He walked over to the two men and ordered Toughy to get up and finish his job.
“Toughy had to kind of wall his eye around on the man, till he could focus good,” Jimmy said.
He nodded, staggered up, reeled over to the mule, sighted unsteadily on his next nail and, missing the bony part of the hoof altogether, drove the nail straight into the fleshy quick of the animal’s foot. Blood flew, the mule screamed and the farmer stood in disbelief. He was a respected man, a landowner, and these drunk men, these white-trash hooligans, had crippled his animal.
He decided to blame Bob, who did not have a hammer in his hand. He walked over and started cussing him. Bob dropped his bottle in the dirt—it was empty, of course—balled his fists and raised them in front of his face as if he as planning to box the big farmer by Marquis of Queensberry rules. Then, as a bell sounded that only he could hear, he pranced toward the man, swung twice, missed twice, and fell face-down in the gravel.

IN A VILLAGE where so many people just broke themselves against the machines and disappeared, there are more stories than there are people left to tell them. Homer Barnwell and Jimmy Hamilton have known each other since they were boys in a time between wars, when a passing car, any car, would make them stop and stare. Bob would be more than a hundrend now, if he had lived , so the only witnesses to his misadventures are old men who were boys then, who peeked into every condemned corner of the village, which was their universe, to watch men drink, lie, scratch and roar. The meek and well-behaved always seem to fade, which has always made me doubt that "inherit the earth" part. It is the Bobs who live forever.
I am proud to have Bob's blood in me. In it is at least part of the reason for what decency there is in me, in any sense of responsibility to my people. But in it, too, is the answer to every time I argued from spite, all those times I fought dirty when I was in the dead, pure-positive wrong. Rules? Who ever had any damn fun with those shackles on your feet? Meekness? Who wants to inherit the earth, in such company? Once, as a boy, I repeatedly slapped a boy on a baseball field, trying to goad him into swinging at me. He wanted to hit me back but he didn't do it, maybe becasue he was afraid, maybe because he didn't want to hurt me. Either way, he stood there and took it. I slapped him till my arm got tired, till I finally just walked off in defeat. But I know what Bob would have done. Bob would have switched hands.

THE LAST CHILD of Bob and Velma came into the world on Jaunary 10, 1935. the boy, named Charles Samuel after his grandfather, was allergic to some types of mild, so Velma mixed a formula from sweet canned milk even as, in the hills around town, babies perished from simple dehydration. Born into that cycle of breadlines, layoffs and lockouts, he was wrapped in soft blankets, and raised in a house of love and whiskey.
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For the July 20th New York Times review
www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20books/review/dickey-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

This One’s for Daddy
By CHRISTOPHER DICKEY
The dirt-poor man of the South — the much-caricatured hillbilly, the redneck, the malicious drinker of mean moonshine, proud to the point of self-destruction, brave to the verge of madness, who’d fight you as soon as look at you but cherishes an atavistic sense of decency and fairness, even chivalry — that man has long been a puzzlement to much of the rest of America and, often as not, to himself. And one man like that, whose people were like that, was Rick Bragg’s father, Charles. “The Prince of Frogtown” is his story, and theirs.
Bragg has been looking for his old man for a long time, although he didn’t always know that. In his best-selling 1997 memoir, “All Over but the Shoutin’,” he told the story of his mother and her love and courage raising three kids on welfare and the wages she could get picking cotton or cleaning houses in east Alabama. In “Ava’s Man,” the next book Bragg wrote about his family, he told of his mother’s father but not of his own. “I sawed my family tree off at the fork,” Bragg writes here, “and made myself a man with half a history.”
Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, couldn’t begin to get his daddy into focus and thought that he didn’t want to try after all he’d seen his momma endure: “Against his darkness her light was even brighter, as she just absorbed his cruelties till she could not take them into herself anymore.” So like many reporters who know how to use a pen as a sword and a notebook as a shield, he reduced his father to a literary device in the book about his momma. “He became nothing more than the sledge I used to pound out her story of unconditional love.” And by the time Bragg was in his 40s he’d convinced himself that his father had become “no more than a question I answered at book signings in nice-sounding clichés.”
But Bragg was still hunting for his father, and the memories of the man who drank himself to death with a vengeance in 1975 hunted him, too, as such memories do. “My boy,” Willie Morris told him, “there is no place you can go he will not be.”
As Bragg tells the story here, what made him open up his mind to his father was the sudden appearance in his own life of a 10-year-old stepson. The kid seemed to Bragg to have been coddled and cuddled too much, and in the early pages of the book “the boy,” as he is called, looks suspiciously like another literary device. He is the antithesis of the boy Bragg remembers himself being in a world that for better or worse, mainly worse, was dominated by the ways of Bragg’s reckless daddy.
Compared with the hardscrabble mountain and mill-town tale of the father, the soft-edged suburban narrative of the stepson and Bragg’s relationship with him feels gooey and romanticized. But eventually it balances the account of Charles Bragg’s life, leavens it and lightens it. There are some very funny passages about Rick and the boy, especially toward the end of the book when Charles’s ineluctable decline and death become almost too painful to contemplate. “My father was already waking with the shakes when I was born,” Bragg writes at one point. And then several pages later: “His death was so certain it was like it already happened.”
The deadly fatalism not just of his father, but of his people and of the whole pre-Sun-Belt South is deeply familiar to Bragg and beautifully evoked by his musical prose. He writes of ancestors who, at night, “beat Irish drums, tooted tin whistles and plucked dulcimers as they danced across dirt floors, and sang in lilting, tragic voice of lost homes, lost love and lost wars,” setting the scene for the story of a man whose great lost cause was himself. Bragg has an unflinching eye for the telling details of rural poverty and the terrible mixing of social monotony and industrial danger that marked those living in the company houses of a Southern mill town. Looked down on by everybody around them, they lived in “Frogtown,” near a creek crawling with snakes and flowing with pestilence.
“They absorbed degradation at work, and took it out on each other when the hated whistle blew,” Bragg writes. “But in this community of violence and suffering were some of the finest people who have ever lived, who scraped a few handfuls of flour into a brown paper bag, house by house, until a full bag could be delivered to a family whose provider was sick, shot, cut or hurt in the machines. The choking dust took a lot of them, and some just never got over the fact that they left their mist-shrouded mountains for this, and died sorry. But they met their quotas and punched their time cards and went home to sleep under quilts dyed with roots and berries, a people neither town nor country, but something in between.”
Charles Bragg’s tragedy was that he had the sense to want out, and even to get out, but he couldn’t stay away. He was a marine during the Korean War but came back to be at home, to show off, to fall in love. And then the drinking got real bad. And worse. Charles tried to get away one more time, taking his wife and boys to Dallas, where he found a good job, steady pay and a nice house. But Rick’s mother would not trust her husband to make good. She wanted the security, such as it was, of the welfare check she’d gotten used to in his long absences. She went back home to the mill town and to her mother and took the kids.
Eventually Charles followed, too. But he was broken by then, and it seemed as if every encounter with his family was a spectacle of crazy-drunk cruelty: “One night he staggered into the house and greeted my mother with a big smile. He was missing his front teeth. The thing she had loved about him most was his white, perfect teeth, and he had gotten them pulled, for meanness.” And there was the time he brought his sons a fine dog, then brought it back days later mangled and dying from fighting in a pit. Bragg’s hatred burned so intense that for the longest time, for almost 40 years, he would not remember what happened one night when his father saved his life.
There are moments when you think Bragg will tell you that despite everything he loved his father, but he never does say it quite. He is even surprised when his mother, after all these years, says she really did love the man. What Bragg tells us is something he inferred from a pair of loaded dice among the few possessions his father left him, a message of sorts: “Rig the game if you can, ’cause luck is a bitch for a poor man; and don’t worry what people think, because once it’s all over the people who love you will make you what they want you to be, and the people who don’t love you will, too.”
Charles Bragg will remain a puzzlement. But Rick Bragg has made of the dark shadow in his life a figure of flesh and blood, passion and tragedy, and a father, at last, whose memory he can live with. And that is no small thing for any man to do.
Christopher Dickey, Newsweek magazine’s Paris bureau chief, is the author of “Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son.”

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Read a review by John Sledge
May 18, 2008
Rick Bragg's latest book, "The Prince of Frogtown" is hot off the presses and in bookstores now. Bragg's many devoted fans will be pleased to know that he has lost none of his extraordinary power, and, indeed, word for word, this latest book is as fine as anything he's produced since "All Over But the Shoutin'."

"The Prince of Frogtown" is in actuality two books one an attempted reconstruction of his wayward and hard-drinking father's life, and the other, inspired by Bragg's recent marriage and inheritance of a 10-year-old stepson, a running meditation on fatherhood in the contemporary South.

As he beautifully demonstrated in "Ava's Man," Bragg is adroit at piecing a fractured past into a coherent narrative, and he does so again in telling his father's life story. Even so, it's a significant challenge. As Bragg's readers know from "Shoutin'," his father was a difficult figure in the family's life erratic, harsh and mostly gone. After he died in 1975 when Bragg was only 16, there was precious little affection left. Bragg's mother gave him a small box with his father's last possessions, "a crumbling, empty wallet, a clip-on tie, and a pair of yellowed, mismatched dice." Contemplating this poverty, Bragg reveals, "I do not know what I expected to feel, but I did not feel anything good."

But as middle age with its painful joints and increased responsibilities encroaches, Bragg has visibly softened in his attitude toward his father and strives to understand the world that formed him. To that end, ever the keen-eyed reporter, Bragg tracks down his father's childhood friends and probes them about the rough-and-tumble mill village where they came of age the Frogtown of the title. It was a harsh and unforgiving blue-collar milieu, and Bragg's nonjudgmental evocation positively shines. One example will suffice. In describing the people's fervent religiosity, Bragg characteristically soars: "It was a church of lintheads, pulpwooders and sharecroppers, shoutin' people, who said amen like they were throwing a mule shoe. Biblical scholars turned their noses up, calling it hysteria, theatrics, a faith of the illiterate. But in a place where machines ate people alive, faith had to pour even hotter than blood."

Bragg intersperses these chapters with short essays on his stepson, called simply "the boy." Each of these is a lovely little set piece, profoundly moving, incomparably sweet and guaranteed to bring tears to the reader's eyes again and again. Bragg is painfully honest about how alien he thought his stepson was pampered by his mother, ignorant of the hard edges Bragg had cut his teeth on from the cradle. The lad dwelled in an electronic wonderland television, video games and all the rest and seemed woefully lacking in boyish rambunctiousness. "He yelled for his mother to come stomp a spider. He wept from a boo-boo, or if he was tired." Bragg admits, "I did not recognize this kind of boy." Once, while contemplating the child ride around the end of a cul-de-sac on his bicycle, helmeted and forbidden to range out of eyesight, Bragg was reminded "of a hamster on a wheel. I believed that being a boy was about getting away with things, just short of murder, and if you got lucky, you could still be a boy when they lowered you into the red clay. What troubled me most was not that he was bound, but that he did not seem to mind it."

Yet there is more to the picture than meets the eye, and confronted with the boy's unconditional love, greatness of spirit, nobility and, yes, courage (often manifested in unexpected ways), Bragg is repeatedly shaken to his knees. Each of these warm-hearted chapters amounts to a study in epiphany, and if Southern boyhoods are no longer filled with swimming holes, chert rocks and homemade fun, they are clearly still producing fine young men.

So run, don't walk, to your favorite bookstore, buy a copy of "The Prince of Frogtown," and prepare to laugh, shake your head, and cry in equal measure.

John Sledge is Books editor for the Mobile Press-Register. He may be reached at the Press-Register, P.O. Box 2488, Mobile, AL 36652.