Rick Bragg's World of Boys

In Rick Bragg's third memoir, The Prince of Frogtown, he returns to the Alabama town of his youth to learn about his father, a legendary drunk who abandoned the family early but was mythologized by the locals. We also learn about Rick’s grandfather and Rick’s own testosterone-laden boyhood, as well as the very different twenty-first century childhood of the stepson he is struggling to relate to.

Listening to the audio version, narrated by Bragg with his, well, hillbilly accent and colorful dialect  enhances the vivid writing. I had to get the Kindle version as well so I could grab the great sentences (almost every one). Herewith a few for your enjoyment:

This was our place. From a running start, I could leap clear across it, heart like a piston, arms flailing for distance, legs like shock absorbers as I finally, finally touched down. This is where I learned to take a punch and not cry, how to dodge a rock, sharpen a knife, cuss, and spit. Here, with decrepit cowboy hats and oil-stained BAMA caps on our burr heads and the gravel of the streambed sifting through our toes, we daydreamed about Corvettes we would drive, wondered if we would all die in Vietnam and where that was, and solemnly divined why you should never, ever pee on an electric fence.

It took something as powerful as that, as girls, to tug me away from this tribe of sunburned little boys, to scatter us from this place of double-dog dares, Blow Pops, Cherry Bombs, Indian burns, chicken fights, and giggling, half-wit choruses of “Bald-Headed Man from China.” Maybe we should have nailed up a sign—NO GIRLS ALLOWED—and lived out our lives here, to fight mean bulls from the safe side of a barbed-wire fence with a cape cut from a red tank top, and duel to the death with swords sliced off a weeping willow tree. I don’t know what kind of man I turned out to be, but I was good at being a boy.

There would have been hangover in his eyes and in the tremble of his hands around his cigarette, but it wasn’t anything a little taste of liquor wouldn’t heal, once he had shaken free of his wife and kids like a man slipping out of a set of too-tight Sunday clothes.

It was a good world for drunks then, and a bad world for everybody else. A man could rise up in his drunkard’s raiment at night, dripping poison, and pull it off in the day like dirty clothes.

My attention span, in romance, was that of a tick on a hot rock.

Bragg’s vivid, grass-roots imagery and poet’s sense of rhythm remind me of Woody Guthrie's autobiography, Bound for Glory. Early in my career teaching high school English, I was ordered to teach literary style to my sixteen-year-olds. It was the first time I had been asked to articulate the principles of style, and I was stymied at first. Somehow I happened to open Bound for Glory, a book of such stylistic and story-telling power that I immediately ordered it for my classes and had a wonderful time teaching it. Time to go back and enjoy it again.