redbirds - memories from the south

Rick Bragg

Harvill, #12

RICK BRAGG is his momma's boy. A hulk-sized Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote this scorching brew of autobiography meets social commentary for and about his momma. The beautiful blonde woman on the back cover is the inspiration for this poignant memoir of a financially dirt-poor life in the Alabama hills. The son done good tells the cruel tale of the mother's life. The mother repeatedly abandoned by an alcoholic husband haunted by his own Korean War nightmares. The mother who raised three sons amid the abject poverty of 1960s Alabama. The mother of a white-trash family who scrubbed and ironed for dimes, who picked cotton and cleaned toilets to retain some kind of pride and keep food on the table.

The tale of the widow's might could tip over into melodrama given the down-home vernacular style Bragg employs and the indisputable sadness inherent to this book. Cast-iron talent, passion, and a seemingly lifelong burning embitterment veers it away from anything so maudlin. For the 38-year-old is still an angry, eloquent man. There is so much to fuel the fire of this self-confessed boulder-on-the-shoulder writer: the rich drawl of cosseted Suthanas who blithely write of those

po' white trash like Bragg's kinfolks, the ignorant

trust-funders whose life is sugar sweet, the bitter racial and social divides within

the South.

Bragg succeeds because he moves on. His mother's life and sacrifice are the invisible hands relentlessly driving him on. The second part of the book tracks his tussle between a driven professional desire to win awards and live the life his momma gave him. ''The boy who climbed up her backbone and made it out of that ring of poverty and ignorance.'' Yet, despite the front page stories of war-torn Haiti, Miami, and New York, Bragg has the rusty hook of childhood memory stuck stubbornly in his belly. The happy ending of buying his mother the ideal home is temporarily grazed by an ugly family incident that makes Bragg realise ''no amount of brick and mortar will wall up the past''. Nevertheless, you cannot but sit in awe of both writer and his momma. To understand the South read Bragg alongside Cather and Faulkner. He's that good.