“My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South”
Author: Rick Bragg
Publisher: Oxmoor House, Time Inc. Books
Pages: 251
Price: $27.95 (Hardcover)
Rick Bragg’s last book, his best-selling biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, was an exhausting enterprise. Bragg spent two summers interviewing Lewis, researched widely, and in the writing—476 pages—had the struggle of presenting Lewis’ drinking, drug use, multiple marriages and generally violent nature in a text that was accurate and fair and still readable and pleasing in the Rick Bragg style.
Bragg deserves a break and he gives himself one in “My Southern Journey.” In fact he says as much in his Afterword: “this book…is a kind of love story to the South…I have loved writing about our food, our ways, our proclivities.”
Bragg writes of the many aspects of Southern life he loves, an impressive variety of topics: the football mania, religious fervor, politicians, carnival floats, pork cracklins, cutting down your own Christmas tree—off the highway right of way!—old men in a Huddle House showing off their pocket knives, oyster po’boys, Hank Williams, deer hunting, armadillos, NASCAR, all of it. The region is not perfect, he knows, but it suits him “I am an imperfect citizen of an imperfect, odd, beautiful, dysfunctional, delicious place.” “I am home.”
Of the 70 short pieces in this collection the majority are from “Southern Living,” the back page “Southern Journal” Bragg has been writing for the past several years. Fans will be glad to have them here collected. But he has added pieces originally printed in “Garden & Gun,” “ESPN The Magazine,” “Sports Illustrated,” “Bon Appétit,” “GQ,” even “Smithsonian Magazine,” and written about eight more, new for this book.
Bragg knows his audience, his readership, and gives the audience what it likes. Natives of Fairhope like to hear that Fairhope is beautiful and all Southerners seem to have a nostalgia for a boyhood spent swimming and fishing, listening to aunts tell stories and watching the men garden and the women can vegetables whether they actually experienced these activities or not. In fact, if the readers of “Southern Living” are as solidly middle class I as I believe them to be, they are enjoying reading about a childhood they never actually had.
Many of the pieces are, loosely, about “home.” In time, the culture he writes about may not exist for anyone. This is in fact part of Bragg’s motivation. In his writing he is capturing a place and a people that, for better or worse, are disappearing. Bragg explains: “I write about home so I can be certain that someone will…”
That writing comes from a prince of the language. One can only stand in awe of his descriptive powers, his ability to generate the fresh metaphor. “The joys of this Southern life,” he writes “we polish like old silver.” He is charmingly self-deprecating. Hating shopping, he would prefer to wear the same comfortable clothes for the rest of his life. The urge to be stylish, to diet, to be slender with supermodels on his arm is not in him. Of bagels he writes, “a bagel is a fine thing, for some people, but it is a biscuit without sin or indulgence. It is a biscuit that has been saved.”
Biscuits are only one of the dozens of foods Bragg rhapsodizes over. A writer of many seemingly contradictory talents, Bragg—although to the best of my knowledge does not cook at all, and never claims to be a gourmand—is a prize-winning food writer: he has the James Beard Award. Bragg is an appreciator and as with many other subjects, an enthusiastic describer.
We have essays here, of course, on pork, especially BBQ. He discusses an array of Cajun dishes—crawfish, shrimp—but tends to shy away from the reptiles and amphibians, those dishes reputed to taste “like chicken.” He would rather have chicken.
His relationship to oysters on the half shell is a work in progress. He writes :“ The first one I ate tasted like river mud…like what a tadpole would taste like if you sucked it right out of the ditch, or a wet hoofprint.” Bragg has evolved on oysters and now eats them raw, in stews, roasted, baked and grilled.
Not all the pieces are humorous.
“What Stands in a Storm,” written after the tornado, will move any reader. The community came together with neighbor generously helping neighbor.
Using his magazine pieces for social protest is usually anathema for Bragg. He does not write for “The Nation.” His pieces rarely express outrage or urge action or social or legal change. But his article on the BP oil spill is vibrant with anger. Corporate greed damaged, how much we still don’t know, the Gulf we all love.
The race question, also, is not his usual territory, but the “Sports Illustrated” article on Sylvester Croom, the first black SEC head coach, at Mississippi State, not Alabama, pulls no punches.
Generally, Bragg pleases his Southern readers and pokes gentle fun at Yankees and their shortcomings. It’s true, it’s really cold up there—not for the weak, in fact, and people do talk fast. But the idea that the fast-talking Yankees “might even run out of stories someday” is going to be real news to Garrison Keillor and the citizens of Lake Wobegon.
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”
