Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg

Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg

by Rick Bragg
Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg

Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg

by Rick Bragg

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Overview

With his bestselling All Over but the Shoutin', Rick Bragg gave us memorable stories of his own childhood. Here he offers the best of his work as a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist writing the remarkable stories of others.

For twenty years, Bragg has focused his efforts on the common man. So while some of these stories are about people whose names we know—such as Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who drowned her two sons—most are people whose names we've never heard, people who have survived tornadoes and swamps, racism and bombs. In incisive, unadorned prose that is nonetheless strikingly beautiful, these pieces rise above journalism to become literature and show the triumph of the human spirit.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780375725524
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 08/28/2001
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 288
Sales rank: 691,849
Product dimensions: 5.25(w) x 8.04(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

About The Author
Rick Bragg's memoir Ava's Man will be published by Knopf in August 2001. He lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, and just outside Jacksonville, Alabama.

Hometown:

New Orleans, Louisiana

Date of Birth:

July 26, 1959

Place of Birth:

Possum Trot, Alabama

Education:

Attended Jacksonville State University for six months in 1970; attended Harvard University, 1992-1993

Read an Excerpt




Chapter One


Survivors


At first I wanted to call this chapter "Victims," but that cheapened the people I wrote about. I decided on "Survivors" because so many of the people herein were seized by an outside force, terrified or damaged, and let loose to try and live again. I like these people because of their backbone. I do not mind that some of them became haters. Some of them had a right.


* * *


Tried by Deadly Tornado, An Anchor of Faith Holds

New York Times, April 3, 1994

DATELINE: Piedmont, Ala., April 2


This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven. This is a place where the song "Jesus Loves Me" has rocked generations to sleep, and heaven is not a concept, but a destination.

    Yet in this place where many things, even storms, are viewed as God's will, people strong in their faith and their children have died in, of all places, a church.

    "We are trained from birth not to question God," said 23-year-old Robyn Tucker King of Piedmont, where 20 people, including six children, were killed when a tornado tore through the Goshen United Methodist Church on Palm Sunday.

    "But why?" she said. "Why a church? Why those little children? Why? Why? Why?"

    The destruction of this little countrychurch and the deaths, including the pastor's vivacious 4-year-old daughter, have shaken the faith of many people who live in this deeply religious corner of Alabama, about 80 miles northeast of Birmingham.

    It is not that it has turned them against God. But it has hurt them in a place usually safe from hurt, like a bruise on the soul.

    They saw friends and family crushed in what they believed to be the safest place on earth, then carried away on makeshift stretchers of splintered church pews. They saw two other nearby churches destroyed, those congregations somehow spared while funerals for Goshen went on all week and the obituaries filled an entire page in the local paper.

    But more troubling than anything, said the people who lost friends and family in the Goshen church, were the tiny patent-leather children's shoes scattered in the ruin. They were new Easter shoes, bought especially for church.

    "If that don't shake your faith," said Michael Spears, who works at Lively's Food Market in downtown Piedmont, "nothing will."

    The minister of the Goshen church, the Rev. Kelly Clem, her face covered with bruises from the fallen roof, buried her daughter Hannah on Wednesday. Of all people, she understands how hurtful it is to have the walls of the church broken down.

    "This might shake people's faith for a long time," said Mrs. Clem, who led a congregation of 140 on the day of the storm. "I think that is normal. But having your faith shaken is not the same as losing it."

    Ministers here believe that the churches will be more crowded than usual on Easter Sunday. Some will come for blessings, but others expect an answer.


    Mrs. Clem and her husband, Dale, who is also a minister, do not believe God sent the storm that killed their daughter and 40 other people across the Southeast in a few short hours that day. The Clems make a distinction between God's laws and the laws of nature, something theologians have debated for years: what does God control, and not control?

    The people here know only that they have always trusted in the kindness and mercy of God and that their neighbors died in His house while praising His name. It only strengthens the faith in some people, who believe that those who die inside any church will find the gates of heaven open wide.

    Others are confused. Beyond the sadness and pain is a feeling of something lost, maybe forever.

    "It was church," said Jerri Kernes, delivering flowers to a funeral home where the dead and their families filled every room.

    "It isn't supposed to happen in church."


    The blooming dogwood trees stand out like lace in the dark pine barrens in the hills around Piedmont. The landscape is pastoral, mountain ridges and rolling hills divided by pastures of fat cows and red-clay fields that will soon be high cotton and sweet corn.

    The people, the children of farmers, mill workers, carpenters and steelworkers, now make tires at the Goodyear plant in Gadsden, spin yarn at the cotton mill and process poultry for Tyson Foods Inc., which is known here as just the chicken plant.

    Yet, Piedmont, population 5,200, depending on who is home, exists in the failed economic promise of the New South. The roof on the empty brickyard has rusted through, and the pretty little train station on the Selma, Rome & Dalton line is just for show. The cotton mill just had a new round of layoffs.

    As economic uncertainty grows, the people go to the altar for hope, said Vera Stewart, Piedmont's 70-year-old Mayor. Piedmont, after all, has two doctors' offices but 20 churches.

    "As long as we have our faith, we are as strong as our faith," Mrs. Stewart said. "Because no matter how dark it is, if I have faith, I have a song in the night."

    But in the long days since last Sunday, when the sky opened, she, too, has felt that belief tremble. What all the troubles of the everyday failed to do, one sudden, violent moment did.

    Tornadoes snapped 200-year-old trees and ruined houses and lives in five states. Goshen was the centerpiece of an agony shared by Spring Garden, Rock Run, Possum Trot, Bennefield's Gap, Knighten's Crossroad and Webster's Chapel. At Mount Gilead Church, about 10 miles from Goshen, the wind pulled tombstones from the earth and smashed them.

    People here are accustomed to the damage that the winds do, but what happened at the Goshen church last Sunday was off the scale of their experience. Rescue workers found neighbors limp and broken on the ground, and strong men sobbed like babies in the arms of other men when the last of the living and dead had been dug from the rubble.

    In a makeshift morgue in the National Guard Armory, one volunteer wiped the faces of the dead children before zipping up the body bags. The bags were too long, and had to be rolled up from the bottom.

    But in the days after, the shock started to wear off, and the pride took hold again. So, when the truckloads of donated food and clothes arrived, some of the needy refused aid because they did not earn it with their own sweat.


    Sam Goss runs a filling station, and believes in heaven the same way he believes that walking in the Coosa River will get him wet.

    Mr. Goss, 49, stood in a line 50 yards long to pay respects to the dead at the town's largest funeral home. He smoked a cigarette, cried and talked of going to Glory.

    He was a friend of Derek Watson, who died with his wife, Glenda Kay, and their 18-year-old daughter, Jessica. Mr. Goss said Derek, who worked at the Super Valu, had not planned to go to church that day but changed his mind.

    "Maybe that's what people mean when they say God works in mysterious ways," Mr. Goss said. "I know the boy. He could not have lived if his wife and child were gone."

    It is the same reason, he said, that God took both Ruth Peek, 64, and Cicero Peek, 72.

    "It's hard not to question God in this," he said. "But they say there ain't no tears in heaven. We're the ones left to hurt. You see, God took them because he knew they were ready to go. He's just giving all the rest of us a second chance."


    The first step toward healing might have been in a funeral processional for a child.

    In life, 4-year-old Hannah Clem had been a dancer and painter and singer.

    In death she has become a focus of the question why.

    For three days Kelly and Dale Clem worked for their friends and parishioners and swallowed their own pain, gracious and strong. They did not shake their fist at heaven, but told Vice President Al Gore that a better storm warning system might have saved lives.

    It was wind and not God, they said, that killed their daughter.

    "My God is a God of hope," Mr. Clem said. "It is never his will for anyone to die."

    It is a departure from the Christian mainstream belief that God controls all. But then so is Mrs. Clem herself, a female minister with a growing congregation in a small town in the Deep South.

    On Wednesday, she followed Hannah's tiny white and pink casket up the aisle at the First United Methodist Church in Anniston, 20 miles from Goshen. Members of her congregation and old friends filled the church.

    "People have asked, why did it happen in a church," said the Rev. Bobby Green, in his service. "There is no reason. Our faith is not determined by reason. Our faith is undergirded by belief, when there is no reason."

    In the Bible, Palm Sunday is a day of destruction, not hope, he said. Hope comes later, on Easter Sunday.

    The 400 mourners stood and said the Lord's Prayer. Then, Hannah's coffin was moved slowly back down the aisle to the hearse. The organist played "Jesus Loves Me."


* * *


On Walls, Memories of the Slain Are Kept

New York Times, January 28, 1994


Somewhere, between one more killing in the inner city and the obscurity of the grave, is a wall in Brooklyn.

    Khem Hubbard recorded her brother's name there last week, in big silver letters. Now Kyle Rasheim Hubbard, 19, shot to death on Jan. 6, 1990, will be remembered in a New York neighborhood where the dead disappear in the crowd.

    The memorial wall at the corner of Crown Street and Bedford Avenue in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn is like the ones in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the ones in the South Bronx, the ones in Harlem. They hold the names of dead children, innocent bystanders, stone-cold killers, untrue lovers and fallen angels.

    They are remembered with elaborate murals that plead for a stop to the senseless killing, or just a few thin lines scrawled by a friend with a felt-tip pen and a broken heart. They tell us that PAPA RESTS IN PEACE, and that Kiki has found God.

    No one is sure how many walls there are in New York, or how many inner-city victims have taken their place on the lists of the dead that decorate the sides of dry cleaners, clinics and corner stores. People who live beside the walls guess that there are hundreds scattered around the city, embroidered with thousands of names. Around the nation are thousands more, from Atlanta to Los Angeles.

    The dead have been carried off to cemeteries outside the inner city, but people here like to believe their spirit is still in the neighborhood and

(Continues...)

Almost Family

By Roy Hoffman

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 1983 Roy Hoffman. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Introduction,1
SURVIVORS
Tried by Deadly Tornado, An Anchor of Faith Holds,4
On Walls, Memories of the Slain Are Kept,8
Still Haunted, Families See Justice in Shape of a
Killer's Grave,13
The Valley of Broken Hearts,16
FOUR WALLS TO HOLD ME
Where Alabama Inmates Fade into Old Age,23
Inmates Find Brief Escape in Rodeo Ring,28
A Thief Dines Out, Hoping Later to Eat In,33
Man Imprisoned for 30 Years Is Rid of Bars but Not Fears,37
Prisoner's Pittance Is Meant As Reminder of a Great Loss,43
HURTFUL THINGS
New York's Bodegas Become Islands under Siege,47
"I Never Seen Nothing Like That,"53
Living in Another World,61
Where a Child on the Stoop Can Strike Fear,67
The Story of Dirty Red,74
SECRETS
Town Secret Is Uncovered in Birth Quest,82
Woman, Sold as Infant in '65, Grasps at Clues to Her
Roots,87
New Development Stirs Old Case,92
Autism No Handicap, By Defies Swamp,100
SILVER HAIR, GOLDEN YEARS
All She Has, $150,000, Is Going to a University,105
Band PlaysOn for Class of '39109
Woman Clings to Her Paradise,116
Little Women Look Back on a Lost World,119
Country Club Meets Enemy: Country Music and Pigs,123
ICONS
The King Is Long Dead, but Long Live the King,126
Savoring a Sweet Taste of Southern Summers,130
A Delicacy of the Past Is a Winner at Drive-In,133
A Sugar Bowl Lacking a Certain Sweetness,135
GEORGE CORLEY WALLACE
Emotional March Gains a Repentant Wallace,140
A Symbol of Alabama's Past, Indelible to Black and White,143
Wallace Remembered, for Who He Was and Who He Became,147
MONUMENTS
In New Orleans, a Day for Visiting the Dead,151
A Coach's Shrine, the Fátima of Alabama Football,154
A Balladeer of Bluegrass Is Now Gone Yet Lives On,156
BOURBON AND BAYOUS
French Quarter's Black Tapping Feet,160
In a Louisiana Bayou Town, "Uncle Pal" Is the
Law,164
In Louisiana, Card Game Reveals the Cajun Spirit,166
Cajun Christmas Tradition Refuses to Die Down,169
COLORS
To Bind Up a Nation's Wound with Celluloid,174
Just a Grave for a Baby, but Anguish for a Town,180
Racism Wins in Small Town in Texas,183
Fort Bragg Area Is Haunted by Ghost and Two New Deaths,189
Unfathomable Crime, Unlikely Figure,193
For Jasper, Just What It Didn't Want,196
BOMBS
In Shock, Loathing Denial: "This Doesn't Happen
Here,"200
Tender Memories of Day-Care Center Are All That Remain
after the Bomb,202
Oklahoma Toll Is No Longer in Deaths, but in Shattered
Lives,206
In Oklahoma City, Recovery a House at a Time,212
Altered by Bombing, but Not Bowed,215
SUSAN
An Agonizing Search for Two Boys,219
Mother of "Carjacked" Boys Held in Their Deaths,222
Sheriff Says Prayer and a Lie Led Susan Smith to Confess,225
Psychiatrist for Smith's Defense Tells of a Woman
Desperate to Be Liked,228
Father Testifies in Penalty Part of Smith Trial,231
Carolina Jury Rejects Executioner Woman Who Drowned Sons,234
A Killers Only Confidant. The Man Who Caught Susan Smith,238
SCHOOLYARDS
Arkansas Boys Held as Prosecutors Weigh Options,242
Determined to Find Healing in a Good and Decent Place,246
Past Victims Relive Pain As Tragedy Is Repeated,250
Jonesboro Dazed by Its Darkest Day,254
Murder Trial Opens for First School Shooting Defendant,259
Arkansas Boys Who Killed Five Are Sentenced,261
LIVING AND DYING
Living with a Grief That Will Never Die,266
On Florida Bridge, Troopers Are Also Suicide Counselors,270
Jazzy Final Sendoff for Chicken Man,274

What People are Saying About This

Mark Childress

Morris' newspaper stories are as perishable as the paper they're printed on, but the collected articles of Rick Bragg are a notable exception. The same passion and compassion that informed his best-selling All Over But the Shoutin' are clearly inevident from this wide-ranging compendium of life in our times. Wonderfully observed, beautifully written - this book is a treasure.

Willie Morris

Rick Bragg's newspaper work is quite simply magic. He's one of the vital voices in contemporary American writing. Although the pieces in this splendid anthology are rooted in journalism, their rueful and profoundly felt insights elevate them to literature. His prose is clean, flexible, incisive and his words and hard-earned reportage lead the reader time and again to elemental truths. These pieces along with his classic memoir, All Over But the Shoutin' , help tell us who we are as Southerners and Americans.

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