All Over but the Shoutin'

by Rick Bragg

  From the stoop in my apartment in midtown Atlanta, I can hear the distant roar of high school football games on Friday nights. It is not a real football state, this Georgia, not like Alabama, but it beats nothing. For lunch, sometimes, we walk down to Thelma’s on Luckie Street and get some collards with pepper sauce and sweet potato soufflé, or drive out toward the federal prison to Harold’s, for barbecue and cracklin’ corn-bread. Because it is Atlanta they charge you twice what it’s worth, but it is mighty good barbecue.

  I live precisely two blocks from the Krispy Kreme doughnut factory, and I can smell them from my front yard. Trying to explain how good they are to someone who has never had one is like telling a celibate priest about young love. Four blocks away is the Kentucky Fried Chicken. I have all I need to sustain life, well, almost. Love flies in for the weekends, sometimes, on Valujet.

  My neighborhood is a potluck supper of a place: white, black, straight, gay, rich, poor, peaceful, violent, nuts, punks, homeless and some just a paycheck or two away from it. Over on Ponce de Leon, a dysfunctional parade of crack dealers, emaciated prostitutes and transvestite party boys remind you that you live in a big city, but there are crickets at night in the summertime. I like to go to sleep listening to them, unless it is Saturday night, when their fiddling is often interrupted by young men in leather chaps and no shirts engaged in a slap fight. Some nights you are serenaded by nature, some nights you are jolted awake by cries of “Bitch.” But that’s life in the big city, isn’t it.

  I am seldom here. I ride the whirlwind of my newspaper’s travel budget, doing things and seeing places I could never afford on my own, living a life I could never afford. I live for sweet, long days—weeks, if I can swing it—in the elegant old Pontchartrain Hotel in New Orleans, where the sound of the rattling old streetcar rocks you to sleep and, if you are good, they put pralines on your pillow at night. I write late into the night at the Tutweiler in downtown Birmingham, and try hard to turn down that second cheeseburger at Milo’s over by UAB, which has the best one in the whole wide world. In Baton Rouge, in Jackson, in Nashville, in Charlotte, in Columbia and Spartanburg and Macon and a hundred smaller places at the side of the road, I have learned how to feel at ease in a borrowed bed. On the Gulf Coast, I sit by myself on the beach until well after dark, until the sunset is just a memory over Mobile. You learn not to mind being by yourself, doing things by yourself, when you are on the road as much as I am. It is loneliness, maybe, but it is a warm and fuzzy kind. I used to not mind it at all. I mind it a little more, the older I get. But just a little.

  There is a sense of urgency in me, a sense that time is running out, but it has to do with the life I left behind, not the one I would begin, if I was so inclined. I am running out of time to keep my promise, to buy her the house, to try and rewrite history so late in the volume of our lives. I have saved forty thousand dollars, which is enough to buy or build a small house in Alabama, but not nearly enough to buy her the nice house I want, a house she would be proud of. I am too ignorant to realize that she would be proud of anything. I decide to save some more, at least enough for a decent two-bedroom cottage, and in the meantime my momma just gets a little older. I kick myself, mentally, for not saving more, sooner, for realizing so late what I should do. I soothe myself the same way I always do, by telling myself I was just young and stupid. I still refuse to buy it on time, because I am so unsure that this dream will last. I am older now, and the conformist in me tells me I should start building a real life of some kind, any kind, but that cannot happen yet, if ever. It has to wait, until my debt to the old life, however ridiculous it might sound, is paid.

  Meanwhile, the casualties grow. Another girlfriend, a beautiful young woman named Kelley who rides horses, wins journalism awards and has a rich daddy, is giving up on me. “Will you ever have time for me?” she asked, and I should have lied and said yes. I told her I didn’t know.

  So, another good, loving, decent woman slips away, and I don’t even try to keep her. If it happens to you once or twice in your life, you are a tragic figure. If it happens to you thirty times, you are a womanizer. I don’t know what I am. I just know I have never been lonely for too long, that I never spent as much time as I should have, grieving. I don’t have time to worry about it, much. I have a plane to catch, always a plane to catch.

  Lost in the stories, in the telling, I find my satisfaction, contentment, peace, even in the most tragic ones. Only one thing is missing, really, in that part of my life. Like most reporters, I want the big award, the one that forever alters your obituary. I have some trophies, but there is no Pulitzer Prize in my living room. So, no matter how good life gets, I stare at a blank space on the wall that only I can see. I know it is a sad state for a man to be in, but it would be a lie to say it didn’t matter to me. I want it so bad I dream of it. I want it for me, selfishly, and for her, because of what it would bring her, at least what I hope it would bring. I am simple-minded, of course, to look for such magic elixirs, such cure-alls, but I search for them, anyway.

  The move makes it easy for me to go home when I want, on any weekend, but the nice, warm feeling of being in close touch again in my family is short-lived. It is blown away by the ranting of a drunk man, by the sound of screeching tires, by the smell of old beer.

  I am still helpless to do anything to protect my momma from the torture of worry that my little brother inflicts with his drinking and fighting and life on the teetering edge. Some mothers would have given up, banished him. Not mine. He is more than just a son to a woman who has already lost one. He is her baby. And he is still my little brother, who disarms me with a grin, who tells me, naw, he ain’t in no trouble, but he could sure use a carton of cigarettes.

  So I just keep moving, from hotel to hotel and plane to plane and story to story, getting lost in that never-ending journey. The job, this perfect job, has brought me back within the orbit of my family, but going home is such a mix of sweetness and sadness that I let weeks, sometimes even months go by between visits. My momma calls every week, and can’t figure out why I make it home so seldom, being so close.

  Once, I even tried to run away, again.

  The New York Times job in east Africa came open, after I had been in the South less than a year, and I told the foreign editor I thought I could handle it. He seemed to agree. But Joe Lelyveld and Gene Roberts, the legendary Philadelphia editor, and now our managing editor, told me the story was here, in this country, as the whole nation seemed to grow meaner, less patient. Lelyveld, that supposedly frosty man who had always been warm to me, seemed troubled by my desire to chase something else. Why would I leave, when they gave me exactly what I wanted?

  I told myself it was my own nervous feet. I have always been a little afraid of being left behind. To be a real foreign correspondent—Haiti had been only temporary—was one more thing to try, to prove I could do, even though I had not proven myself where I was, not really. In the end, it didn’t matter. Roberts, especially, seemed to want me to stay, and arguing with him is like staring at a rock and waiting for it to hop up in the air and twirl. A rock is a rock.

  They were right of course, anyway.

  The story was here.

  35

  Abigail

  Some days, sadness is all there is. In the fall of 1994 I went to New Orleans to write about the people held hostage by violence in a New Orleans housing project. I captured the stories of dead innocents and other great sadnesses in my notebook, like butterflies pressed between the pages of a science project. Then I went back to hide in the frayed opulence of the old Pontchartrain Hotel on St. Charles. But the sadness spilled out there, too, as if the notebook had fluttered open, letting it out. I knew a reporter once who stretched rubber bands around her notebooks, I thought, at the time, to mark her place. But maybe that wasn’t it at all.

  The phone rang and it was my sister-in-law, Teresa, calling on behalf of the family. Miss Ab was dead, she told me, of the pneumonia.

  I packed my bag for home,
rode the jet plane to Atlanta, and told my grandmother good-bye. It would be nice to believe that she knew it was me just one more time.

  I took my place among the other young men in the parking lot of K. L. Brown’s funeral home, not far from the football stadium. The older men eased on inside, their thin, bony fingers on the elbows of their wives. It is always that way: the old men and women and young women go inside, but the young men linger outside, not talking much, just smoking, standing, waiting as long as they can. We don’t do death well, us young men.

  I found Sam and Mark there, just standing, quiet. Sam’s eyes were red-rimmed and bleak. It was just like him, to have done his crying in private. Most likely it was in his shop, the door closed, maybe even locked. “Hey, son,” he said, and shook my hand. “We wondered if they would find you.”

  I had stopped in Atlanta to put on my one suit, a blue wool suit I wore in my interview to fool the New York Times into thinking I might be respectable. I knew, as I looked around the parking lot at the people who actually worked for a living, that I was overdressed.

  Sam does not own a suit. There has seldom been any need for one. He borrowed our cousin-by-marriage Tony’s leisure suit to get married in, the same suit I borrowed to go to the homecoming dance. One suit would do us all, when we were young. At the funeral he wore a dress-up pair of blue jeans and clean work boots, like about everybody else there. Grandma wouldn’t have known us, if we had all had on ties.

  Mark said, “Hey,” quietly, and just stared at the ground. When he did look up, his face was nothing short of stricken. He was stone-cold sober. I knew he would be. A bad man, a man bad clean through, doesn’t grieve, not really. Mark grieves. I reached out and squeezed his arm, hard, at the muscle.

  I looked them over closely, as if, so close to death, it forces you to take careful inventory of the other lives that are close to you, important to you. Sam does everything except sleep in his hat, the one with Fruit of the Loom on it, so it always strikes me as odd when I see him with it off, and that is only at funerals. He was nearing forty, and as he had gotten older he had come to look more and more like my grandfather. He still looked solid, still seemed indestructible. His handshake was still like iron, and as I squeezed back he had looked me in the eye and smiled, briefly, to say: “Is that all you got?”

  Mark was thin and pale, all long muscles and bone, and looked older than he should have. Indestructible, too, in his own way.

  All my male cousins, close and distant, were there, people I had not seen in decades, but that is the way of it, with funerals. I shook hands, asked them how their mommas was, told them I was over in Atlanta now, to come and see me. They nodded politely. Atlanta is only a couple of hours away, but it is light-years from this. There is nothing in Atlanta these folks want.

  The funeral director stuck his head out and said we might want to mosey inside. I said hello to the old women and shook hands with the men, and one after another they said they were proud of me.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. You hear it all the time, how gracious and strong salt-of-the-earth people can be. I know it to be true, for dead certain.

  I looked for Momma, but she wasn’t there. She couldn’t come, my aunts told me. She didn’t think she could stand it. So she did as she has always done. She hunkered down in that little house, and waited for the sadness to pass.

  My uncle John told me it would be okay, if I wanted, to go and sit with her, after I saw my grandma. I noticed for the first time that his hair was completely, purely white.

  The funeral chapel is built on a sloping floor, toward the casket. You hear it said, too, how natural someone looks. Well, Grandma really did look like she was just asleep, like she was just taking one of those afternoon naps that old people take. And for reasons I cannot explain, that clawed at my guts.

  I felt lonely then. This is the time when you need somebody. This is the time when it is good to have a wife, and children, to absorb your grief, to hold on to you. This is when you pay, and pay and pay, for pretending that you don’t need anybody.

  I didn’t hear the words the preacher said over her, but I know exactly how it went. The preacher would assure those left behind that she was in a better place. There would be no doubt of that. Rejoice.

  Well, she is. A woman who pretends to forget to eat so that her children will have more, like she had, like my own mother had, doesn’t have to worry about getting in.

  I left before the first song was sung. I went and sat with Momma. She asked me, her eyes miserable, if people would think badly of her, not going. I told her no.

  We talked about her mother for an hour, until the kinfolks started to trickle in. The next day was Thanksgiving.

  I don’t think a lot about where or how I want to be buried. I think sometimes it would be nice to be laid to rest under an oak tree, but that probably won’t happen. They’ve cut all the oak trees down in the Jacksonville cemetery. And that is where I belong, I guess.

  I know I do not want to be buried during football season. In Jacksonville, during football season, the marching band practices not far from the cemetery, so that the dignity of the sermon is lost sometimes, with tubas in the background.

  I had to come back to the same funeral home, the same cemetery, less than a year later. One of the best, most generous men I have ever known, Tony Estes, the one who married my cousin Jackie and loaned us his suit, died in a car wreck.

  It was hot, so I guess it was still summer. I remember it rained but the sun still shone on us. It happens a lot, in the late afternoon here.

  A lot of people came, because Tony had a lot of friends. I guess that’s about the best thing you can say about a man.

  As the minister said his words, I could hear the band tuning up, in the distance. It is almost always football season, down here.

  36

  Mrs. Smith, and family

  It is one of the first things you learn about writing a story. Mrs. Edna Baggs taught it to me in the tenth grade at Jacksonville High School, and I paid attention, mostly. They call it “The Five W’s and H” rule. Every news story has to have the Who, the What, the When, the Where, the Why, and the How. It is an old-fashioned concept, maybe, in the new media, like describing a hammer to someone who has only used a nail gun, but leave out one of those elements of story, and there is no satisfaction in the telling or the reading.

  The murder of two little boys in the fall of 1994 in the rural textile mill country of northern South Carolina haunted this whole country, as we answered those questions, or tried to answer them, one by one. The Why of it, the only one left unanswered, haunts me still.

  Why.

  The satellite trucks stretched for two blocks on the little town’s Main Street, and even more television crews filled a parking lot across from the stately old county courthouse. The circus is definitely in town, I thought, as I drove into Union, South Carolina, to cover what an editor had described as “that horrific abduction down in South Carolina.” I headed over to a semicircle of television reporters, all scrambling for twelve perfect seconds of breaking news, until I could glimpse the object of their desire behind a battery of microphones.

  I got there just in time to see the pale young woman blink into the eye of the electronic nation, Live, and beg the heartless kidnapper and carjacker to look into his own heart, and return her stolen babies.

  “Whoever has my children … please, please bring them home where they belong. They are missed and loved more than any children in the world.”

  Then, apparently on the chance that her two young sons were watching, she sobbed: “I feel in my heart you’re OK. And your momma and daddy will be waiting for you when you get home. I put my faith in the Lord that He will bring them home to us.”

  I believed her. I wrote a story about that awful abduction on October 25, 1994, when a black man in a stocking cap jumped into her car at a dark crossroads, ordered her out at gunpoint, and sped away with her sons, Michael, four, and Alex, fourte
en months, as the young mother fell to her knees in the road and screamed in rage and terror at those fading taillights.

  I wrote of the increasingly frantic search, of the grim determination of the stoic Southern law officers, of the united community, praying as only we down here can pray, for miracles. And, as the days slipped by, I was slow to believe in anything except the young mother’s grief, which she reminded us continuously about, every time a television flickered on.

  People in Union and surrounding towns started wearing yellow ribbons. They packed churches, believing that their condensed prayer might do more than individual ones. The young mother, her tears dry, went on TV again. “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to do such a thing,” she said. She guessed that it could only be the work of a “sick and unstable person.”

  The would-be rescuers turned to bloodhounds, horses and helicopters. On October 26, a film of a convenience store robbery in North Carolina showed a man matching her description of the kidnapper; witnesses described a car resembling her Mazda, and the search shifted there. Law officers and volunteers searched a North Carolina national forest after two hunters reported seeing a car matching the Mazda’s description, and hope shifted there. On the 28th, officers searched a wooded area outside Union after a twelve-year-old girl reported seeing a man matching the suspect’s description, and the satellite trucks rumbled back into Union.