Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T21:43:11.588Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Memorialization of Southern Poor White Men's Labor in Rick Bragg's Memoir Trilogy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2012

Abstract

This article explores the ways that Rick Bragg memorializes poor white men's labor across his memoir trilogy, examining the tensions that arise as he attempts to bring poor whites into the center of the southern community. I consider the neo-Agrarian strains within his work, as well as Bragg's responses to the globalization of the region. The work addresses the absences within the South's memorial landscape, and questions the extent to which Bragg's work addresses those gaps.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Bragg, Rick, All Over but the Shoutin' (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 12Google Scholar.

2 Byrd, William, Histories of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (New York: Dover Publications, 1967), 54Google Scholar.

3 Weston, George M., The Poor Whites of the South (Washington: Buell and Blanchard, 1856), 5Google Scholar.

4 Erskine, Caldwell, Tobacco Road (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1995; first published 1932)Google Scholar.

5 James, Agee and Walker, Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978; first published 1941)Google Scholar.

6 Agee and Evans, 289, 92.

7 Cook, Sylvia Jenkins, From Tobacco Road to Route 66: The Southern Poor White in Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976), 188Google Scholar.

8 Hobson, Fred, ed., South to the Future: An American Region in the Twenty-First Century (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2002), 6, original emphasisGoogle Scholar.

9 Fitzhugh Brundage, W., ed., Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hil: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 3Google Scholar.

10 Romine, Scott, The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 16, 15, 9Google Scholar.

11 Crews, Harry, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1995; first published 1978)Google Scholar.

12 James H. Watkins, “‘The Use of I, Lovely and Terrifying Word’: Autobiographical Authority and the Representation of ‘Redneck’ Masculinity in A Childhood,” in Erik Bledsoe, ed., Perspectives on Harry Crews (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2001), 15–28, 28.

13 Crews, 17.

14 Romine, 15.

15 Bragg, Ava's Man, 33.

16 Ibid., 34.

17 Ibid., 34.

18 Cash, W. J., The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage Books, 1991; first published 1941), 24Google Scholar.

19 Yaeger, Patricia, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930–1990 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Wray, Matt, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Bragg, Rick, The Prince of Frogtown (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). 128Google Scholar.

22 Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin', 23.

23 Laura Marcus, “The Face of Autobiography,” in Julia Swindells, ed., The Uses of Autobiography (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995), 13–24, 14.

24 de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1984), 87Google Scholar.

25 Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin', 24.

26 Stewart, Kathleen, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4.Google Scholar

27 Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin', 66.

28 The hunger experienced by Bragg's family during this period is a common marker of poor southern lives, both white and black, long after the end of the depression. For an interesting article on the political nature of food in the South see Ferris, Marcie Cohen, “The Edible South,” Southern Cultures, 15, 4 (Winter 2009), 327CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Godden, Richard, Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South's Long Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 124CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin', 66.

31 Ibid., 61.

32 For a thorough consideration of the changes to the cotton industry see Fite, Gilbert C., Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865–1980 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984)Google Scholar.

33 Godden, 126.

34 Bragg, The Prince of Frogtown, 254.

35 Ibid., 40.

36 Rick Bragg, Ava's Man (New York: Vintage, 2002), 8.

37 Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin', 27.

38 Bragg, The Prince of Frogtown, 247.

39 Romine, The Real South, 17.

40 Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin', 327.

41 Ibid., 46.

42 Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997; first published 1990), 229–30Google Scholar.

43 Bragg, Rick, The Most They Ever Had (San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2009), 6Google Scholar.

44 Ibid., 13.

45 Ibid., 13.

46 Ibid., 249.

47 Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin’, 171.

48 Attfield, Judy, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 234CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin', 27.

50 Attfield, 215.

51 Weldon, Amy E., “‘When Fantasy Meant Survival’: Writing, Class, and the Oral Tradition in the Autobiographies of Rick Bragg and Harry Crews,” Mississippi Quarterly, 53, 1 (Winter 1999–2000), 89110, 92Google Scholar.

52 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 292.

53 Bragg is currently a returned native, now living and working back in the South as a Writing Professor at the University of Alabama.

54 Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin', 214.

55 Harvey, 302.

56 Bragg, Ava's Man, 7.

57 Zandy, Janet, Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), xiGoogle Scholar.

58 Bragg, The Most They Ever Had, 7.

59 Bragg, Ava's Man, 233.

60 Daisy Hernández, “My Father's Hands,” in Michelle Tea, ed., Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class (Emeryville: Seal, 2003), 49–57, 50.

61 Zandy, 2.

62 Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin', 27.

63 Alderman, Derek H., “New Memorial Landscapes in the American South: An Introduction,” Professional Geographer, 52, 4 (2000), 658–60, 658CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Bragg, Ava's Man, 95.

65 Brundage, W., The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 303.

67 Horwitz, Tony, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 242Google Scholar.

68 Brundage, Where These Memories Grow, 18.

69 Moore, Toby, “Emerging Memorial Landscapes of Labor Conflict in the Cotton Textile South,” Professional Geographer, 52 (2000), 684–96, 684Google Scholar.

70 Bragg, Ava's Man, 12.

71 Ibid., 196.

72 Nora, Pierre, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, 26 (Spring 1989), 725, 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 Ibid., 7, 24. A timely consideration of the recent market interest in memoirs and autobiographies can be found in James Atlas, “Confessing for Voyeurs: The Age of the Literary Memoir Is Now,” New York Times Magazine, 12 May 1996.

74 Zinsser, William, ed., Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 3Google Scholar.

75 Brundage, Where These Memories Grow, 18.

76 David W. Blight, “Epilogue: Southerners Don't Lie; They Just Remember Big,” in Brundage, Where These Memories Grow, 347–53, 350.

77 Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin', 67.

78 Bone, Martyn, The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 51Google Scholar.

79 Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic, 12, 16.

80 Ibid., 16.

81 Bragg, Ava's Man, 249.

82 Ibid., 10.

83 Moore, “Emerging Memorial Landscapes,” 685.

84 C. Vann Woodward, The Future of the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), viii.

85 Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin', 5, 6.

86 Bone 245.

87 Bragg, Ava's Man, 195.

88 Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1999).

89 Bragg, Ava's Man, 13.

90 Ibid., 12.

91 Ibid., 196.

92 Bragg, Ava's Man, 245.

93 Brundage, The Southern Past, 342–43.