by Rick Bragg
And, though it is far too late, I must say how sorry I am for letting my feelings for my father keep me for so long from his people, from my grandmother, especially. I am told she loved without condition, loved my mother, and loved us boys. I never gave her reason. It was just the kind of person she was.
It is a cliché, to say it will be impossible to thank all the people who made this endeavor possible, but it is nonetheless true.
First, I must thank the storytellers who were generous enough to put a more human, complicated face on my father. Jack, Carlos, Shirley, Billy, Bill Joe, so many others…I would never have known him, if not for you.
Others built the stage that my family’s story is played on. Jimmy Hamilton told me the best story I ever heard of my grandfather. Homer Barnwell made the Jacksonville of his boyhood come alive. Ruby England, my father’s sister, told me how pretty my mother looked on her wedding day. Wayne Glass told me one of the finest whiskey-running tales I ever heard.
And as with every book I write about home, I must thank my aunts Juanita, Jo, and Edna, and my uncles Ed and John, for once again lending color, drama, and substance to the past. Your stories have filled the very air around me with pictures, all my life.
Before I could begin piecing together their remembrances, I needed more distant history. This book, like so much of what I have tried to write in my lifetime, attempts to peer into the pasts of blue-collar Americans, specifically the mill and mountain people of the foothills of the Appalachians. Chapter two, the story of where we come from, would not have been possible without the genuine historians who have already chronicled that history.
I must begin with Wayne Flynt. In Poor but Proud and other works on the poor, rural people of my state, he educated me on my own soil, and revealed the sweat and blood spilled into it by generations. By reading his works, I began to better understand the gut-tearing contradictions in my people in the years before, during and after the Civil War. His exhaustive research into the deprivations of the postwar period—from dejection-filled letters to damning statistics—put flesh and blood on dim history. I had heard that Alabama soldiers marched into battle without shoes, had known that women back home cried for bread, but never really saw it, in my mind’s eye, until I read it in his books.
I found more historical gems in the most unusual places. A history of Jacksonville compiled in my youth by the First National Bank provided a glimpse into what was done and said as young men of the town marched off to war.
Hardy Jackson’s works took me even deeper into my state’s history, back to the time of the Creeks. I know more than ever about my people thanks to him and to so many other historians whose works gave voice to the men and women who were here before.
This history of the Jacksonville cotton mill alone is upheld by more sources than I can count. The memoirs of Knox Ide gave me entrée to the people who shaped the future here. Peter Howell, who tried to save the mill from the wrecking ball, provided, literally, a trunkful of information. The most official history of the mill and its founders, written in an application for historic status by David B. Schneider (compiling information from local historians such as Jack Boozer and others), showed me its origins, its founders, more. Dozens of first-person accounts of life in the village, from Donald Garmon, Odell Knight and others, provided beautiful insights into life there in the first half of the twentieth century.
I also have to thank the reporters, most of them long gone, of the Anniston Star and the Jacksonville News, who chronicled our history one faded page at a time, and took me—with the help of flesh-and-blood sources—inside the tragic killing of Chief Whiteside.
And I have to thank the people who loaned me their legs, and minds, in gathering first-person remembrances and press and historical accounts of the cotton mill village and the surrounding town—most of which will find a home in a book yet to come, but a small part of which helped me in these pages: Jerry “Boo” Mitchell, Greg Garrison, Lori Solomon, Megan Nichols, Jen Allen, James King, Taylor Hill, Ryan Clark, Beth Linder and Cori Bolger.
As with every book I write, I must thank my editor, Jordan Pavlin, for taking this imperfect work and turning it into something I am proud of. I have never minded a good editor. In this book, I would have drowned without one. And again, I want to thank my agent, Amanda Urban, for giving me a book life to begin with, at a level I never even dreamed.
I have never been the kind of writer who needed a perfect place to write, a willow tree, a seaside cottage. I could write just as well—or just as poorly—on an upside-down oil drum. But the University of Alabama gave me a place to write that looks out over massive oaks and green lawns, within earshot of the chimes. I am now spoiled.
Perhaps most of all I thank the readers who have found value in the stories of my people, and—more important—found value in their time on this earth.
Finally, I must thank the boy, for forgiving me for all that I have fumbled, broken and lost, and the simple fact that, sometimes, I just don’t have good sense.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rick Bragg is the author of two best-selling books, Ava’s Man and All Over but the Shoutin’. He lives in Alabama with his wife, Dianne, and stepson Jake.
ALSO BY RICK BRAGG
All Over but the Shoutin’
Ava’s Man
Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg
I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story
This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright © 2008 by Rick Bragg
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this work originally appeared in Best Life magazine.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bragg, Rick.
The prince of Frogtown / Rick Bragg.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Borzoi Book.”
1. Bragg, Rick. 2. Fathers and sons. 3. Stepfathers. 4. Journalists—United States—Biography. 5. Working class whites—Alabama—Biography. 6. Alabama—Biography. I. Title.
CT275.B5946A3 2008
976.1'063092—DC22
[B] 2007038884
eISBN: 978-0-307-26932-4
v3.0