There is something special about a Southern Mama.  I used to explain it by saying I moved to Alabama because, “I married a Southern Boy.  And Southern Boys don’t get too far away from their mamas.”  That usually got a laugh because, on one level, it’s true.  Southern mothers are strong women and their children respond to that strength.  These women have raised generations of kids who know Mama is stronger than anyone except Grandma or God Almighty.  Dads are dads and everyone should have a good one but no one’s more certain than Mom.  That standard was true of my southern mother-in-law and it is certainly true about Rick Bragg’s mother.  In All Over But the Shoutin‘,  his mom is the heroine of the story and the center of his life.

To hear Rick tell it, life should have been nicer to Margaret Marie Bundrum.  Although she was born into a large family in one of the poorer areas of the United States, the country was beautiful, her family was loving and her father provided for them all by building houses and making moonshine.  It was a reasonable childhood for that area and at seventeen, Margaret Marie had the looks southern girls use to change their luck.   Instead she married a man who made her life twice as hard.

All Over But the Shoutin‘ is the account of how Rick’s mama came back from that marriage and how her sons grew up in the shadow of their strong, loving mother.  Margaret Bragg didn’t have the vocational skills or education to make her life or her sons’ lives easy but she worked hard so they could go further in the world.   Margaret took every hard-labor job and government program available to keep her boys healthy and fed and they took their own roads in time.  Sam, the eldest, followed his mother into a lifetime of physical labor but Rick, through a combination of talent and luck, became a reporter, studied at Harvard and earned a Pulitzer Prize.  The reporter made mistakes and was hypersensitive about his antecedents but he was a good boy to his mama: she was there when he got the Pulitzer and, with the prize money, he bought her a house.

A house is something extra special to folks like Rick, his mom and my mother-in-law.   After years of rented trailers and space heaters a legitimate, solid home that you own “free-and-clear” is saying goodbye to an ache.  My mother-in-law did it, through entrepreneurship (she’d fuss at me for using such a ridiculous word) and thrift and Rick’s family did it with talent and drive.  I sit comfortably in my own home now and marvel at their work.   Whatever I accomplish in this world comes from those who did much more.

There’s a book about Alabama sharecroppers called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men .  The title is ironic since most sharecroppers aren’t well known.  But that book and All Over But the Shoutin’ make one thing abundantly clear.   These are the people that should be celebrated, especially the Southern Mamas.