Rick Bragg

Birmingham was the first city Bragg ever saw. Working for the Birmingham News was the choicest newspaper job in the state. Howell Raines, then best known as a Pulitzer Prize winner, had started his career there.

After his tour of duty at the News, Bragg worked at the St. Petersburg Times, and then, like Raines, the New York Times. Early in life, Bragg had served an apprenticeship at the Jacksonville Times where journalists spent their after hours at Dee Ford's, a local nightspot where patrons were checked for knives at the door. If you didn't have one, the local joke went, they'd issue you one.

He covered sports for the Jacksonville paper, and then moved on to covering city politics for the Anniston Star. He credits Randy Henderson, then an editor for the Star (who later hired Bragg at the Birmingham News) with recognizing his strong suit. Since then his job of writing features about real people has pretty much stayed the same, but he's gained vastly more readers.

I didn't grow up knowing Bragg's world, but I knew of it. I was raised 20 miles away from him in Hokes Bluff, Ala., a suburb of Gadsden. Bragg's county was next door, but his upbringing might as well have been on a different planet. My world included swim lessons, church three times a week and the understanding that I would graduate from college. It was easy to spot the children in my class who hadn't been raised with what my mother tactfully referred to as "advantages." I saw the ones who were taken aside by the teachers and given medicine for head lice; I knew about the kids who had worms because they went barefoot all the time.

Bragg is to our time what James Agee was to Southerners of the post-Depression era. Both were of Huguenot ancestry, but as Bragg points out, his forebears would have been the ones who held the horses of Agee's ancestors. Agee's father died, Bragg's father disappeared; both Agee and Bragg grew up in the South, Agee in Tennessee and Bragg in Alabama. Both spent time at Harvard, and both had a deep sense of isolation and loss from their family and society at large. They expressed their despair in lyrical ways and both received a Pulitzer for their efforts. The essential difference between them -- and what gives Bragg an advantage in praising these non-famous men -- is that he saw their lives from the inside.

Bragg knew what it was like to be on welfare, to walk into a Jack's Hamburger smelling like fertilizer and to be on the free lunch program at Roy Webb Elementary.

"Ava's Man" explains why the mother Bragg described so touchingly in "All Over but the Shoutin'" had a spine of steel. "The pivotal figure in my mother's life ... walked large and tall and proud in my mother's memory." Bragg asked his mother and her sisters to describe their father, and they all began crying or left the room. He writes: "What kind of man was this, I wondered, who is so beloved, so missed, that the mere mention of his death would make them cry 42 years after he was preached into the sky? A man like that, I thought to myself, probably deserves a book."

Bragg recalled the people of "Ava's Man" while he was living on the road in nameless, colorless Florida hotel rooms when he was covering Elian Gonzalez and the presidential election of 2000. After a hard day of fact-gathering, he would come back to his anonymous room and "bust out laughing" as he looked over his notes about people who died before he was born.

After the miraculous feat of raising his grandfather from the dead, it took superhuman effort to kill him back off for the final chapters. Still, Bragg even managed to find a little humor as Bundrum was laid to rest. Two preachers were remembering his grandfather in the best possible light and Bragg writes of their efforts: "They praised him as a fine father, which was the gospel, unbending truth, and as a fine husband, which was true mostly and anyway it was a funeral."

If Charlie Bundrum could see his grandson as he is now, he might have agreed with James Agee in "A Death in the Family": "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves."

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