All Over but the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg Read Free Book Online Page A

back over her shoulder to smile at the three-year-old boy whose hair is almost as purely white as the bolls she picks, who rides the back of the six-foot-long sack like a magic carpet.
    It is my first memory, and the best. It is sweeter than the recollection I have of the time she sat me down in the middle of a wild strawberry patch and let me eat my way out again, richer than all the times she took me swimming in jade-colored streams and threw a big rock in the water to run off the water moccasins. It is even stronger than the time she scraped together money for my high school class ring, even though her toes poked out of her old sneakers and she was wearing clothes from the Salvation Army bin in the parking lot of the A&P. It was not real gold, that ring, just some kind of fake, shiny metal crowned with a lump of red glass, but I was proud of it. I was the first member of my family to have one, and if the sunlight caught it just right, it looked almost real.
    But it is the memory of that woman, that boy and that vast field that continues to ride and ride in my mind, not only because it is a warm, safe and proud thing I carry with me like a talisman into cold, dangerous and spirit-numbing places, but because it so perfectly sums up the way she carried us, with such dignity. We would have survived on the fifty-dollar welfare check the government decided our lives were worth. The family could have lived on the charity of our kin and the kindness of strangers. Pride pushed her out into the cotton field, in the same way that old terror, old pain squeezed my daddy into a prison of empty whiskey bottles.
    I asked her, many years later, if the strap of the sack cut deeper into her back and shoulders because I was there. “You wasn’t heavy,” she said. Having a baby with her made the long rows shorter, somehow, because when she felt like quitting, when she felt like her legs were going to buckle or her back would break in two, all she had to do was look behind her. It gave her a reason to keep pulling.
    Like I said, it is a perfect memory, but too perfect. It would have been easy for me to just accept the façade of blind sacrifice that has always cloaked her, to believe my momma never minded the backbreaking work and the physical pain as she dragged me up and down a thousand miles of clay. I wish I could just accept the myth that she never went to see me or my brothers play basketball or baseball because she was too tired, and not because she was ashamed of her clothes. I would like to believe she didn’t even notice how her own life was running through her hands like water. But the truth is she did know, and she did think about it in the nighttime when her children were put to bed and there was no one left to keep her company except her blind faith in God and her own regret.
    There is a notion, a badly mistaken one among comfortable people, that you do not miss what you never had. I have written that line myself, which is shameful to me now. I, of all people, should know better, should know that being poor does not make you blind to the riches around you; that living in other folks’ houses for a lifetime does not mean a person does not dream of a house of his or her own, even if it is just a little one. My mother ached for a house, for a patch of ground, for something. When I was a young man and we would take drives through town, she stared at the homes of others with a longing so strong you could feel it. She stared and she hoped and she dreamed until she finally just got too tired of wanting.
    The only thing poverty does is grind down your nerve endings to a point that you can work harder and stoop lower than most people are willing to. It chips away a person’s dreams to the point that the hopelessness shows through, and the dreamer accepts that hard work and borrowed houses are all this life will ever be. While my mother will stare you dead in the eye and say she never thought of herself as poor, do not believe for one