A man who buys books because they're pretty (part 1)

I absolutely adore Rick Braggs writing style. Perhaps it is because I can relate all too well with his subject matter. His passage from "All Over But The Shouting" was a nice break from the rather dry, yet interesting, material from last week. Within the first few lines I was overwhelmed with emotions of excitement and anxiety for I knew what Bragg was going to say...and I knew the romance would be sickeningly interrupted. Sometimes I don't want to be reminded about the dark side of my roots (and I'm not talking about my "white trash" blond hair with weedish dark roots!) The author is a talented writer who taps deep into imagery and the senses to drive his piece home. The first paragraph lays out an undeniable country setting: hounds, the color green, possums, overalls, domestic women, peaches, biscuits, religion, piano, Buicks, whiskey, clay roads, hog hunting, panthers, violent children, cotton, and wagons. In the second paragraph he does something typical of someone from a small Southern town by listing how many miles the town was from the nearest better-known urban communities with an airport (120 miles west of Atlanta, 100 miles east of Birmingham). He uses phrases in the Southern lexicon such as "mean as a damn snake." He transitions into a darker story by stating that this town was a million miles away from the Old South known for images and smells of jasmine-scented verandas (an exaggeration obviously, but what's more important is that he listed exact distances to the nearest cities but wanted the reader to know he was nowhere near what we think of as the romantic Old South.) Catholics are given Christian names, but ironically Bragg's ancestors drank to the point of forgetting those names. Here things begin to get interesting. The third paragraph is a stark contrast to the first. Life is gloomy, full of hardship, and lacking laughter. People work for pennies, lose limbs doing dangerous jobs, grow crops in unsatisfactory soil, tornados splinter homes, women work themselves to death, children die...but every Sunday they are reminded that the soul of man never dies. In the fourth paragraph he mentions something that I still encounter every day of my life. My family and others brought up in what I consider a liberal Southern family feel like they owe some generations-old debt to their black neighbors because their great-great-grandfather owned their great-great-grandfather. What is even more upsetting is that I still find people of color who feel as if they are owed. Afterwards, Bragg alludes to the KKK and how they had some twisted interpretation of the Bible, and kicked the living shit out of anyone who thought it should be different. As a Southerner, I am not proud of this.