All Over but the Shoutin'

by Rick Bragg

  How big was it? How many people rode on it? Where did they sit? How many pilots did it take to fly it? Did I reckon they was any good at what they did? Were we moving yet? Could we feel it move? Did we get to sit in the front row because we won the Pulitzer? Had I ever flown this plane before and did I reckon it was a pretty good one, because she had seen on the TV that some of them wasn’t? Would we see a movie—she had heard they had movies sometimes—and would it have cussing in it? Would we be flying over water, which she certainly hoped we would not be, and was there a raft?

  That was before the plane had moved. When we finally pushed back from the gate and the plane gave that little, reassuring lurch that tells you that, indeed, you might actually be flying somewhere today, Momma’s eyes got big.

  Then the questions poured. Was it supposed to make so much racket just rolling on the ground? If they brought you food, did you have to eat it? How did the man flying the plane know where to go? How did he keep from getting lost above the clouds? How high would we fly? How fast would we go? Did the flight attendants (she called them “them ladies”) ever get to sit down or did they fly the whole time standing up? Did I think anyone would mind if she prayed?

  Finally, the plane taxied down the runway and, with a shudder that was less than reassuring, slipped into the sky. My momma watched it for a second or two out the window, until we got about as high as a barn loft, then refused to look out the window the rest of the trip.

  She did not whimper, even though she was scared to death, and I patted her like an idiot and told her everything was fine. She nodded her head, swallowed, and fixed me with one of those hard looks that she hadn’t used on me since I was a little boy.

  “Ricky,” she said, “what keeps us in the air?”

  I truly did not know. But considering the situation, I thought it best to lie. I told her that the plane was held aloft by the air being forced through the whirling turbine engines, which did something, which did something else, which resulted in “thrust.” Yeah, thrust. That’s it. “Thrust,” I said gravely, knowingly, “keeps it aloft.”

  They served us a meal on a white tablecloth, which she marveled at, and she admired the tiny little salt and pepper shakers, saying, “Why, I never have seen such a purty thing.” She didn’t think much of the food, the stringy chicken. But the meal took her mind off the fact we were soaring so high above the ground, so it was a blessing.

  We talked the whole time, saying nothing, and she made it just fine until we started to come down, and she prayed again.

  I thought we were home free when we landed with just a mild bump and walked safely off the plane, and I had forgotten about the escalator. Momma had never seen one, and I had to keep an arm around her, to guide her down. She would come to refer to it as “that thang that eats your toes.”

  But it was the taxi ride that damn near killed us. I had warned her that the taxi drivers blistered through bumper-to-bumper traffic like they had stole something and were trying to get away, but it was still the wildest ride of her life. Ma, Cousin Jackie and I were wedged tight in the backseat—Momma, the precious cargo, in the middle—and my greatest fear was that one of the doors would pop open from the strain of three bodies slammed against it at every twist and turn. Momma seemed to be out of questions, or maybe she was just too terrified to speak. By the time the taxi made it to the hotel in Times Square, she was pale and rubber-legged.

  But there was still one man-made hurdle left to leap. Momma had never been in an elevator either, and this was a glass-enclosed one that shot you heavenward like a crystal bullet. This was a woman who had never, until that day, been higher than a rooftop, when she used to help her daddy nail down shingles. I was treating her like a human yo-yo.

  Over the next three days, she had her first room service, had someone make her bed the first time in her adult life, and watched a television with more than three channels, 6, 13, and 40.

  I loved that time, seeing her experience those big city things. But what I will always treasure are the walks we took in midtown Manhattan, through the sea of people. It is true, the cliché, about people being in such a hurry. Not her. The sea parted around her, and she took her time down Broadway, across 45th Street, down to the Empire State Building. She did not want me to hold her hand because she said it made her look helpless, so I just tried to stay close to her, with Jackie’s help. If I lost my momma in midtown Manhattan I could not have returned home. They would have killed me.

  We did lose her, once. I was lost in thought about something, musing along, staring at the ground, for a whole block. I noticed I was missing someone. I panicked. I hurried back, searching the mass of faces, and found her standing in the center of the sidewalk, her head tilted back, just looking at the skyscrapers, wondrous.

  “I never would have believed it,” she said, and I nodded my head. It wasn’t that she couldn’t believe how tall the buildings are, only that she was here to see them.

  For dinner, because she was tired, we went to the buffet at the hotel. She liked the roasted peppers, although they were hard to gum. But I noticed she had her eye on the dessert buffet, this dazzling array of sweets that was unlike anything she had ever seen. I walked her to the cakes, pies and puddings and she said, “Okay, I can do it from here.” When she came back to the table my timid momma had a fruit torte, a wedge of chocolate mousse cake, a plate of strawberries, a slice of what looked like mango cheesecake and a parfait tucked under her arm.

  My momma is not a heavy woman—she eats desserts on Thanksgiving, Christmas and Halloween, if there is candy the trick-or-treaters don’t eat—but she had never seen temptation like this. If I had done it, she would have told me I would be sick as a dog. But how do you scold your momma for digging deep into the first dessert buffet she ever saw.

  After dark I led her out into Times Square again, into the colors that actually seemed to throb through the canyons of buildings, and we just stood and looked and looked and looked.

  “Well,” she said, “I wouldn’t want to pay their light bill.”

  That night I made sure she and Jackie were locked safe in their room, and I took a walk alone through Times Square. It was warm, too warm for the season—seems that all my time in New York is spent either sweating or freezing—and I wound up back at the Times, back in the gloom of the Pulitzer walk.

  I couldn’t help but wonder again how I would ever fit in here, among these people. I told myself that I had reached the same place, I had only started from a different direction, and, truthfully, had to travel a good part of the way by pickup. I told myself I belonged on that wall, after all, with the pipe-smoking foreign correspondents and elegant writers and crusading reporters. Among so many holy men and women, I guess there is room for one Elmer Gantry.

  She was already dressed pretty as a picture when I knocked on her door that next morning, for the Pulitzer lunch. I had not seen her dressed up like that since my wedding, a million years ago.

  She was scared again, so very scared. I told she looked good, that there was no reason to be afraid of these people. She didn’t say anything. She just looked stricken. I chattered on the way to Columbia, showing her my Upper West Side apartment building, where I had lived for almost a week before Haiti, but she just sat quiet.

  The reception was full when we got there, so we stood just inside the door. When I touched her shoulder, it was shaking.

  Then, one by one, the editors of the New York Times came by to pay my mother homage, to tell her what a fine son she had raised, and how proud they were of me, and for her. Joe Lelyveld just said, “I know who this is,” and smiled. Gene Roberts came up and talked Southern to her, and others came up to say kind things, welcoming things.

  For the first time in her life, the people she knew only as “the rich folks”—wealth is a relative thing—were being nice to her, by the dozen.

  We sat a table with the president of the university, the publisher of the New York Times and other dignified folks. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. switche
d the nametags so that she could sit between him and me, and he treated her like a queen. All the way through the lunch, he chatted with her, kept her at ease when other people dragged my attention away from her.

  I had seen my mother cry from pain and grief and misery, when I was a child. I had never seen her cry from happiness until they called out my name and I walked up to get that prize, then handed it to her. She did not sob, she would never do that, but there were tears there.

  We shared a taxi with Lelyveld back to the New York Times, where a photographer, Chester Higgins, flung his arms around my mother’s neck and gave her a big hug, just for being my momma. Roberts invited her into his office to sit a spell and catch her breath, and gave her a copy of the full-page ad the Times had run after the awards were announced, and a New York Times carry bag with a tape of the interview I had done with Charlie Rose.

  That night, I heard her talking to one of my aunts on the phone. “We had codfish, I think it was, and dessert but I didn’t get to eat it because that was when Ricky was going up to get his prize, and I met all the people and they was real nice and seemed to think a lot of Ricky, and a man named Chester hugged my neck.”

  I went to a dinner party in my honor that night. Momma was passed out in the bed, dead tired. People at the party said they were sorry she didn’t come. My momma, I thought: The toast of the Apple. When I got home I found her awake again. She and cousin Jackie had ordered room service, and got a cheeseburger big as God, one apiece. They couldn’t eat it all, and my momma was ashamed to put it out in the hall for the waiters to pick up. “I don’t want nobody to think I’m wasteful,” she said. I told her not to worry.

  I asked her what she thought of her day, and she said she never would have believed it, the place, the people.

  “I’m glad I come,” she said.

  It was late and I left them then to go to bed, left the Prize tucked in my momma’s purse.

  Friends of mine had said that she would really only enjoy the trip after it was done, after she was home and could replay it in her mind.

  They were right. She enthralled the kinfolks with tales of the city, of flight, of the ceremony in the library rotunda that looked like a castle. But mostly she talked of the people she met. “It’s the nicest I’ve been treated in a long time.”

  A week or two later, she came to Atlanta with Sam, his wife, Teresa, and their daughter Meredith to have fried chicken and potato salad with me, her second big trip in less than a month. “Your momma’s become a world traveler,” Teresa said.

  We took a walk down Peachtree Street. At one point Momma stared up at the skyscrapers and made a dismissive grunt.

  “Ain’t nothin’ like New York,” she said. “Now, them’s some buildin’s.”

  It wouldn’t have been the same, that award, if she had not been there to share it, to share the honor, the pure joy of it.

  I have not always been a nice man in my life. In a selfish way that had nothing to do with my momma’s sacrifice, I wanted that prize and even dreamed of winning it. I wanted it to shove down the throats of the people who questioned my sophistication, my very existence among them. The honor it brings to others, hell, to anyone, came to me and I embraced it.

  Maybe there is nothing special at all about us. Maybe there is validation in it for every mother and father.

  Maybe the only thing that makes it seem so special to me, where my mother is concerned, is a simple matter of distance, of space between two points.

  On one end is the tall woman dragging that cotton sack with a tow-headed little boy on back. On the other end is Times Square at night, and a room service cheeseburger, and the Pulitzer Prize.

  We had to get on a jet plane, Momma, to fly so far.

  39

  1.3 acres

  The squirrels have been raiding the old hickory nut tree in the neat, green front yard, leaving a carpet of dark hulls on the lawn. It is a way to tell the character of a person. Show them a squirrel with a jaw full of hickory nuts, and if they don’t smile, there is something bad wrong with them. I thought it was a good sign, that tree. It is hard to be lonely with a yard full of gray squirrels. The old, ugly dog, Gizzard, can chase them if he’s able.

  I believe my momma will be happy here.

  The four-bedroom house, made of beige brick with dark green shutters, sits on top of a hill—she had always wanted to live on a hill—but it is not so steep that she will have a hard time walking down to the mail box every afternoon. It has a porch on the front, and in the summertime she can sit there in the cool of the evening and snap beans, or peel taters, or just wave at the cars. In the back, behind the backyard, are more hills, and in the fall the hardwoods and pines form a backdrop of red and gold and green. In the summer, the honeysuckle runs from tree to tree, smelling so good. “I would spend all my time here,” she told me when we first walked the little piece of land behind the house.

  I kept my promise to my mother on November 2, 1996. I took every dollar I had and bought her a house, a good house, the first thing of any real value she has ever owned. She never had a wedding ring, or a decent car, or even a set of furniture that matched. Or teeth that fit. But she had a home now, a home of her own. I was happy and sad at the same time as I handed the realtor the money, happy that it had finally come true, sad that it had taken so long to accomplish.

  Like I said earlier, I could have bought her one on credit, a long time ago, and I guess I should have. But if I had bought her a house on the installment plan, and something had happened to me, if I had lost my job and the dream had died and my world had turned to shit the way I have always feared it might, she would have lost it. The only thing worse than doing without is to be given something and then have it snatched away, and I could not take that chance. It is a sad thing, maybe, to go through life with an outlook like that, but that’s the way it is. Maybe someday that will change. I hope it does.

  But this way, no one can take it away from her no matter what happens to me. The thing is done: 1.3 acres, with room for squirrels and ugly dogs and family. If it had been up to me, I would have bought her a white Victorian house in town, one of those homes where she used to scrub floors, where the people wore the clothes she ironed. I would have done it for the pure poetic justice of it, to strike back at the past. But she wanted nothing to do with those houses, nothing to do with town. She wanted to walk in the pines and smell the wood smoke and plant rose of Sharon on the chert-rock banks. She wanted her dog, the remarkably unattractive Gizzard, to live out his last, limping days in the country, not in some pen, the neighbors complaining every time he felt like baying at the moon. She wanted to live as she had always lived, in the pines, with room for a small garden and space to pace away your troubles, only on her own ground.

  She was afraid to want it, really, afraid because it cost so much, afraid because she thought it was a hardship on me, afraid because it seemed all wrong, a son buying her a house when he should have been buying one for himself, and beginning a family. “It ought to be the other way,” she told me once. “It ought to be me, doing for you, not you doing for me.”

  I don’t think I have ever quite made it clear to her that I would never, ever be able to start building that part of my life as long as this part, this promise, was unfinished. It would be like building on sand.

  She picked the house out herself, after months of riding the back-roads in Calhoun County, because she thought it was pretty, because it was close to my brother Sam’s house and my other kinfolks, because the hill always seemed to have a good breeze on it, other reasons, some silly, some not. We must have looked at a hundred houses before this one caught her eye and her heart. We went to look at it on a hot day in the early fall, scuffed along the wall-to-wall carpet, opened the oven in the nice, roomy kitchen where she will can her jellies and peppers and green tomatoes. We flushed the toilets in all three bathrooms, walked down into the full basement and the downstairs “family room,” twisted the dial on the thermostat to hear the heat pump click
on like a Trojan. I saw her reach up to feel the cool air rush in, like magic, and saw her smile.

  “I won’t run it, ’cept on the real hot days,” she told me, and I told her she should run it any damn time she wanted. In the basement–family room, there is a fancy new wood heater with a rock fireplace, which she said she will use sometimes. I made it plain to her that the reason for buying it was so she could grow old in some comfort, that she doesn’t have to tote in wood anymore—or trip over the extension cords to the dangerous electric space heaters—to stay warm. She pretended not to hear me—I know she heard me but there is no arguing with my momma’s back—and went on talking about how the wood heater would heat that whole house, if she blocked off the space she didn’t need.

  She gave the living room, dining room, den and upstairs bedrooms just a passing glance, but kept wandering back to the kitchen, with so many cabinets, so much space, such nice, clean space. I knew she was deciding where the flour tins would go. I knew she was placing, in her mind’s eye, green tomatoes on the windowsills, so they could ripen. I knew she was searching for a place to plug in her coffee pot—she had never had anything to drink in her whole life except coffee and water and buttermilk—and I knew the house would not be complete until that warm, rich smell of strong coffee filled the rooms.

  “It’s a lot of house for one woman,” the realtor said, but I told him no, it was just right.

  Then he told me what he was asking for it, and saw my momma’s eyes drop and her dream snap closed, because to a woman who had lived with next to nothing, that very reasonable price seemed impossible. She walked outside then and stood in the yard, and wouldn’t talk about it much, after that. Now and then she would slip in conversation with my brothers and other kinfolks, and call it “my house.” She drew pictures of it. But she never asked for it again.