All Over but the Shoutin'

by Rick Bragg

  38

  Validation

  On the eleventh floor of the building at West 43rd Street in New York, there is a long hallway lined with the faces of winners of the Pulitzer Prize. The black-and-white photographs peer down from the walls, framed beside prizewinning stories of wars and upheavals and great tragedies, datelined Berlin, Bejing, Johannesburg, Moscow, any place news has been committed. I remember one day in winter or early spring, 1994, I drummed up the courage to walk between the pictures of the educated, dignified ladies and gentlemen. As I browsed, dreaming, I heard people approaching around the dogleg in the hall. For a silly moment, I wondered if I had the right to be there. For a moment, I was that little boy in the dime store again, just before the old woman behind the counter told me I didn’t have enough money to buy what I was looking for.

  It was Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, and Max Frankel, the retiring executive editor. Of all people, to catch me dreaming. But Frankel smiled, warm, not mocking. He knew why I’d come there. I wonder how many others he had seen there just like me. Hundreds?

  “Next year,” he said, “it will be you.” He was being nice, to the new boy.

  It was a good moment, the kind you would like to press between the pages of a book, or hide in your sock drawer, so you could touch it again.

  I will never forget the first journalism award I ever won. It was for sports writing, in the category of stock car racing, and when they announced my name in that banquet hall in Pell City—the same city where they make the discount dentures—I was proud, so proud. That, as near as I can figure, was about sixteen years ago. I hung it on a bedroom wall, so I could see it when I woke up in the mornings. It was a simple certificate mounted under Plexiglas on fake wood, but it was pure gold to me. I won some more, as the years went by, better ones, until finally that first one just didn’t matter to me anymore, and I grew tired of lugging it and others like it around. But throwing it away was unthinkable. I put it in a box with my baseball glove—my knees were shot by now—and some other pieces of my pleasant, obsolete past, and gave them to my momma for safekeeping. I expected it to collect dust and spiders in one of her closets.

  I went home one weekend to find it on the wall in my bedroom, along with a few other plaques, a few other distant milestones. I didn’t ask her why she put it on the wall, because I believe I understood. It was proof that outsiders believed that her boy had done good. It did not matter that it was the Alabama Sportswriters Association or the Alabama Associated Press. They had my name on them, and the words, “First Place.”

  The house fire ruined them in 1993, along with her GED diploma and my high school graduation picture. The fire, which started in the little room that had been my bedroom, blackened the certificates and warped the Plexiglas frames. The scrapbook of yellowed newspaper clippings—a lifetime of them—vanished in ashes, but it was the awards that she hated losing most, because they represented praise, validation.

  “I don’t tell you a lot,” she told me one day, sitting in the living room that still smelled of smoke, “but I am very proud of you. I look at you and know I didn’t do no bad job, not altogether.”

  No, not altogether.

  When I was a baby, it was common for men in my part of Alabama to leave home for jobs in the automobile assembly plants in Detroit, a lonely crusade away from their kin and sweethearts. They cooked on hot plates and dreamed of their momma’s kitchen, and lived in rented rooms that looked out on smokestacks and black snow. They could stand it only because it was temporary. They saved their greenbacks in the company’s credit union, not for retirement but for that sweet day when they went back home for good.

  It was expected of them, after they made enough money to buy a few acres of land and build a two-bedroom house. Sometimes, of course, they came home as changed men. They learned to drink and they learned to take the Lord’s name in vain, some of them. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard some old woman say: “He never did cuss none, before he went to Michigan.” But it didn’t matter, just so long as you came on home. Only the most selfish young men made their fortune and stayed away, leaving their daddies and—worse—their mommas, to grow old alone.

  I used to believe my momma sat in sadness, waiting for me to come home for good. I used to believe that if my mother had had her way, I would live in a little house next to her, with children chasing lightning bugs through the dark, with a wife at my side, to chase the loneliness away.

  I was wrong. “I’m glad you got out,” she has told me, a dozen times.

  She worries that I will die old and alone, and she disapproves of my running around and acting a fool, a man my age. She wishes I was closer to Jesus, and I see the clouds collect in her mind when I say I can take care of myself, that I am living life as I want to live it, free and loose, that I have no regrets. But she never nags. I sat down with her once, a long time ago, and told her that this job is who I am, what I have instead of a wife and children, in place of a garden and a house with a porch swing. She understood that.

  When kinfolks and others tell her, “Rick don’t come home much, does he,” she always defends me. She tells them how busy I am, and relays my latest promise to get home as soon as I can. “The only way Ricky can eat at your house,” she told one aunt, “is if it’s cooked and ready when he pulls up in the driveway. That, or you throw it in his mouth as he drives by.” She tells them I have an important job, that I fly in airplanes near every week, that I have a special card that lets me rent a different-colored Pontiac in every city I go to. And sometimes, a Cadillac.

  “One day,” she told me, “maybe you can come home.” Maybe someday, she said, when I have what I want, when the car I am chasing like some mutt just stops, and I have to decide: “Fine. I’ve caught it. Now what?”

  I was in Washington, D.C., the day before the Pulitzers were announced, to interview the new president of the National Rifle Association, an ornery woman who was a champion black powder shooter and cheerleader sponsor. I had known I was a finalist for the prize, but I had come close before. The thought of sitting by the phone in our bureau office in Atlanta was abhorrent to me, so I planned a day-trip to Washington to fill my mind until the awards had been announced and my disappointment had faded. I didn’t even pack a bag; I just needed to be in motion.

  Later, when I called in to check my messages, Susan Taylor, the office manager and one of the best people I know, told me that my big boss, Joe Lelyveld, was looking for me. I knew right then that I had either won the thing, or I was fired. I called him from the bathroom phone of a strip mall restaurant called Ruby Tuesday’s.

  “Can you be in New York tomorrow, and have lunch with me?” he asked, and I told him yes, sir. “I can’t tell you why,” he said, “but I will demystify you, tomorrow.”

  I called Susan back and told her, “We might have won.”

  I didn’t have a toothbrush or a change of clothes. I got to New York too late to buy anything except the toothbrush. The night before the second-greatest day of my life, I washed my underwear in the sink with fruit-scented shampoo, and hung them on a lamp to dry. I was careful not to let the cloth droop down and actually touch the bulb. I had started a small fire in the Medallion Hotel in Oklahoma City doing that, once.

  I was supposed to meet him at the Café des Artists—I truly didn’t know that this was a pretty swank place—and I got there much too early, my suit wrinkled, my shirt a day old, my underwear smelling of peaches. I had not brought a coat, and, of course, it started to snow. But I needed to walk. I walked up to Broadway, the snow and sleet stinging my cheeks and sticking in my hair, but if I was cold I can’t remember it. I was numb, but it had nothing to do with the temperature, just that odd feeling of walking outside yourself, of distance.

  I had plenty of time to think. I knew that I had had a good career, that editors had trusted me with important stories, that I had survived the people who tried to block my way, that I had made the people who had helped me proud of me. But I barely thought
of them, as the yellow taxis flowed and honked and the lunchtime crowds poured down the sidewalks through the last snow of the year. I thought instead of a woman in Alabama, who was probably soaking beans and flipping through the King James Bible, a woman who didn’t even know what the Pulitzer was.

  This glorious thing, this prize, was validation of my mother’s sacrifice. It was payment—not in full, but a payment nonetheless—for her sweat, and her blood. “Now, people will speak to her when they see her on the street,” explained one editor, a Southern man who knows something of snobbery, of class.

  I will not lie and say that I was not thrilled to get it. Maybe I didn’t even deserve it, but by some miracle it had happened, and several times since that day I have felt like pumping my fist in the air and letting out a howl. Even though she was oblivious to all this—I had not called her because I was afraid it might not come true—she was with me then, on that sidewalk, in that big city, just as sure as if she had been walking beside me. I wasn’t even sure, though, how I would tell her. I would have to explain it first, give shape to it, before it would matter to her what we now held, both of us.

  What I felt mostly was relief. I knew that this would bring her attention, respect. It would be a chance for me to spread the word of what she had done for me, and the words would have real weight, because of the prize itself.

  Later, at the table, over honest-to-God champagne that did not come from the Piggly Wiggly, Lelyveld told me that I had won the prize for feature writing, along with Robert D. McFadden, for spot news reporting, and Robert B. Semple Jr., for editorials. (Now that I have a Pulitzer, I may also get a middle initial.) The glasses clinked and people smiled but I don’t remember smiling, just that relief, that sweet relief.

  One of the men had the beginnings of tears in his eyes, and he got up from the table to call his wife. Lelyveld looked at me and asked me, “What now?” and I truthfully didn’t know. It was like the fights in the playground when I was a boy, when you take one last blind swing, wipe the dirt out of your eyes, and realize that the other boys you were fighting, biting and gouging have left the field of honor to you, and run for the teacher.

  But instead there was Lelyveld, and Gene Roberts, and Howell Raines, the legends, raising glasses to me. I don’t give a damn how corny it sounds, it was nice.

  Later that afternoon, we walked into the newsroom of the New York Times to applause.

  People who have lived a long time have called this day the best day of their lives. Lelyveld stood on a desk and said nice things about us, about me, and I tried to say something that made sense. For the first time in my life, I really had nothing to say. I felt stupid, as if, by whittling down the chip on my shoulder, I had nicked away part of my brain.

  Then I went looking for a phone, to call my momma. It had been more than an hour since the announcement, plenty of time to discover a miscount in votes or a mistake in the order of finish. It was safe now, I figured.

  I know how silly and paranoid that sounds, especially coming from a man who gets a perverse thrill from taking chances. But it is a common condition of being poor white trash: you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

  But this thing was ours now. No one could take it away from us.

  The phone was busy. It was probably my aunt Jo, I figured. It usually was, when the phone was busy. I finally got her, on the fifth try.

  “Momma, you remember that big award I told you about, the one I said I probably wouldn’t win? Well, I won it.”

  “Well,” she said.

  “It’s the Pulitzer Prize, Momma. It’s the highest honor you can win in our business.

  “Well,” she said, “thank God.” One reporter had already called her, and she truly had not known what he was talking about.

  She truthfully had never heard of the Pulitzer. But as soon as she hung up her phone, it started to ring. It seemed like every newspaper in Alabama called her, over the next twenty-four hours. The Anniston Star took a picture of her and ran it on the front page, in color. The Jacksonville News interviewed her, and the Birmingham News, and the Mobile Press Register. Story after story ran, saying nice things about her son, about her. Instead of talking about the prize—she could not pronounce it, she was so afraid of saying it wrong—she just said she was proud of me, that she always had been, and that she sure hoped I had brought a coat to New York, because I wasn’t good at remembering things like that, and it was supposed to get cold.

  She had not been to a beauty shop in twenty years, and she was ashamed of her hair, and her mouth, because it still didn’t have any teeth in it. When the Star photographer called, she called me, in a panic. “They want to take my picture,” she said. “They want to come in the house.” I told her she didn’t have to let them, not if she didn’t want to, but she thought somehow she would be letting me down if she refused.

  I have the paper folded in my desk. The photographer had her hold a framed picture of me, one of those that had survived the fire, more or less.

  At first glance, the newspaper photo looks like one of those pictures you see in the paper when a teenager is killed in a car wreck, just a grim-faced momma staring down at the likeness of a fresh-faced boy. She told me she would have liked to have smiled, to appear happy, but she was afraid that if she grinned people could see her gums.

  I did not really notice, not for a long time, that in the photograph she is sitting in the yard.

  I told her that day that we would have to travel to New York to accept the prize, but she just said, no, she couldn’t do that, she could never do anything like that. It was not the plane ride that frightened her: she had never been on a plane or even near one, unless you count the one they stuck up on a big pedestal near a rest stop down between Montgomery and Troy. It was the people she couldn’t face, all those fancy people.

  I told her how silly she was acting, that she had to go, that we were as good as anybody, that we could dress up and hold our heads high and pass ourselves off as the gentry, and if they caught on, we wouldn’t give a damn. I told her it was easy, but no matter how much I coaxed her and reassured her she just said no in a tiny voice. The program called for a short cocktail party-reception, which she equated with people dripping in diamonds, and a lunch, where she would not know which fork to use, and would not be able to chew the food because she didn’t have any teeth. I told her we would get her some damn teeth, I told her we would get her some nice clothes, I promised that I would not leave her side for even a second. She just apologized, over and over, for letting me down, for not being there with me.

  I gave up after a while. I had to make myself understand, had to tell myself that all my momma’s experiences with people in suits had been bad. She had always been on her knees to them, cleaning their floors. She did not think she belonged, even for just a little while. I think she was afraid just as I have always been afraid, that they would spot the imposter in their midst, that they would ask her to clear the table.

  I could have called one of the ex-girlfriends, but somehow that seemed wrong. This was not a date, it was something precious, and I called my momma one last time to beg her to go.

  “I been thinking about it,” she said, “and I reckon I can do it.” I almost dropped the phone.

  The phone had rung steady for days and days. Kinfolks we had not heard from in years suddenly called her, to say how proud they were. Teachers from elementary school called to tell her that they always knew I was something special. Perfect strangers had called, to say how proud they were that someone in our town had won something so grand. They stopped their cars when they saw her in the yard. People did speak to her on the street, people who had never spoken to her before.

  Finally, she had just swallowed down her fear and hitched up her man’s britches, and decided that if this thing was so important to them, then it must be ever so important to me.

  We onl
y had a week or two to get ready, and the kinfolks, God bless them, mobilized. My momma didn’t own a suitcase because there was no place she had ever really wanted to go—we used to pack our clothes in paper sacks when we went to Pensacola to play in the water—and didn’t have any dress-up clothes. Within a week, she had five suitcases and three hanging bags and more dresses than she needed. My cousin gave her a permanent and she practiced smiling in front of the mirror, so that she could seem friendly and still not reveal that she didn’t have a tooth in her head. She still refused to get new dentures. There wasn’t time, she said, to get them made at Pell City, and all my arguments to have someone else make them were ignored. “Costs too much,” she said, and went back to practicing.

  The kinfolks had little faith that I could care for her in the big city—I think they were afraid I would lose her or let her get hit by a taxi—and they recruited my cousin Jackie, who was the only one who had flown before, to accompany her.

  The Times offered to fly us up for free, but I told my momma we could take a car or a bus or drive, if she would feel better that way. She just said no, that wasn’t what she was afraid of, and on an unseasonably hot day in May, we worked our way through Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta, on our great adventure.

  She made it fine through the X-ray machine, but when it came time to get on the plane, we had a little confusion. My momma had never been to an airport, and she believed that you had to walk out on the tarmac to get on the plane, like Elvis in Blue Hawaii. When I took her in tow and led her down the ramp at the loading gate, she said she didn’t think she’d go into that confining place, she’d just wait and get on the plane, thank you very much. I told her, Ma, this is how you get on the plane, and she didn’t like that one damn bit, because she couldn’t see the thing she was getting on.

  We sat in first class, in the front row. That was when my momma asked me the first of what I estimate to be one million questions.