Rick Bragg - Wher I Come From: Stories from the Deep South

I AM HER SISTERS BOY, so she read every word I ever wrote.

And every word was perfect, even the clumsy or purple ones, the double negatives and dangling participles and run-on sentences that galloped, comma after comma, across the page. But still perfect. I know because Aunt Jo called, after every story, after every chapter in every book, to tell me so.

I knew, with her, I had a ringer, at least one reader who would tell me it was good, and she was proud of me. Everybody needs a ringer, in this racket, and I will miss her so.

She passed away in the fall. I forget, sometimes, that she is gone, and when the phone rings I still wonder, for a moment, if it is her.

I do not really believe in ghosts, not the way some writers do, down here. Still, if you read these stories and you have something bad to say, I would keep it to myself.

The stories in this collection are of the Souths gentler, easier nature. It is a litany of great talkers, blue-green waters, deep casseroles, kitchen-sink permanents, lying fishermen, haunted mansions, and dogs that never die, things that make this place more than a dotted line on a map or a long-ago failed rebellion, even if only in some cold-weather dream.

It is the best of us, I believe. My Aunt Jo was the best of it, too, and so belongs at its very beginning. She was the South, in so many ways. In an age when the South seems full of posers, she was bona fide.

She won her first turkey roasting pan in a raffle run by a guy named Popcorn at a filling station on Alabama 21, in a time when WALLACE stickers were still turning from an angry blue and pink to a sad, faded gray.

She made peanut butter sheet cakes for fifty years, to celebrate our birthdays. If you lined them up they would stretch all the way to Montgomery. Every July 26, she put a twenty-dollar bill in a birthday card, and sent it to me in the mail. I got one for my sixtieth birthday.

I added it up. Over a lifetime, I could have bought a used car.

In this time of clichs, she was a revival, a Tupperware party, as genuine as dinner on the ground. She loved Elvis, and Jesus, and Uncle John, but could be iron-headed and lock-jawed if you made her mad, though sometimes it was hard to figure out what you did or said to make her that way. It was just her prerogative, as a Southern lady.

She was not the veranda South, the cotillion South, only the South I write about most, the one a person can love without qualification or reservation, without having to explain your damn self. She was not the South of meanness and small-mindedness, not the political South that yearns to turn back time. She was uninterested in waving anyones battle flag, in being part of anyones club or society, though she did work for the U.S. Postal Service while her husband was up in South Carolina as a young PFC.

In her obit photo, she poses against a 1955 Chevrolet in a pair of what we used to call pedal pushers, framed by a field of cotton, a tall pine, and a red-dirt hill. It was taken in 59, the year she married, the year I was born.

She is smiling, and why not? Uncle John raced that car at the Green Valley Dragway, and blew their doors off. They were paying on a little wood-frame Jim Walter Home, and dined on good foot-long chili dogs at Pee Wee Johnsons place on the Fridays he got paid. As she got older she wore cats-eye glasses, and took my momma to buy groceries on Friday at the A&P. They always got Green Stamps.

Like most Southerners in old age, she was perhaps most comfortable in the past, but not in a search for some doomed ideal. She opened her photo albums and drifted back in time, touching on the people she loved like a child tapping a picket fence with a stick. She talked to my momma every night at nine, and over the years it became the official end of the day; everything after that was leaning toward tomorrow. She and my uncle never had children of their own, and never had a day without them.

You probably had one just like her. She was that woman you see in the grocery store or the Walmart or restaurants, the one that people my age say of, as they go by: You know, she helped raise me.

And they all but bow their heads when they say it. It might be a grandmother, or a godmother, or just the old woman down the road, who watched over them, one eye on As the World Turns as they pushed a toy truck across her linoleum floor, one shoe off, apple sauce on their jumper, and crackers in their hair.

Their names became shorthand for an unsecured loan on date night, or a last-minute haircut in the kitchen, so we would not go out into the world looking like a Philistine.

Blood was everything. She forgave us, my brothers and me, almost every stupid thing we ever did, yet would not have cable TV in her house, because of the wickedness therein.

She died with me owing her about two thousand dollars, in hamburger money alone.

I saw my Uncle John the other day. He had yet to move her slippers from their place in front of the sofa. A few days later, he passed away in his sleep. Theirs being a Southern story, it could not have happened any other way.

The house is filled with their history, and mine. There is a thin layer of dust on the books and magazines that hold my work, piled in front of the television. And I wonder sometimes if they will just come tumbling down, someday, an avalanche of words, every one of them approved, or blessed, by my Aunt Jo.