Books

The Prince of Frogtown
By Rick Bragg, Knopf, 2008, 251 pp.

Rick Bragg has mellowed.

It's been a decade since he began recounting his life in and around Jacksonville. All Over but the Shoutin' paid loving tribute to his mother Margaret, who, despite poverty and a bad marriage, made a life for her three sons. Ava's Man pays much the same tribute to Margaret's family.

Hovering over both of those books is the specter of Rick Bragg's father Charles, the man who swept Margaret off her feet back in the 1950s and then found solace for his unrealized dreams in the white whiskey he began bootlegging as a youth.

Those books present Charles as a man more interested in the bottle than in his boys and as a man Bragg himself seems to find difficult to modulate his resentment towards.

Ten years later, however, Rick Bragg's life is different and his response to his father is as well. The Prince of Frogtown is the best of Bragg's memoirs, for it is a son's balanced, mature assessment of a man he only thought he knew.

Relying primarily on accounts from Rick Bragg's family and acquaintances, the book takes its title from the name Charles gave himself as a young man chasing adventure in an Alabama mill village.

It is particularly that time to which Rick Bragg gives special life through his ability to find poetry in the poverty of his family's life, in a woman about whom one son can say "Everywhere Momma walks is flowers" and in a father about whom another son can say, recounting the time his father saved that son's life, "I know that if he had been any other kind of man, a gentler man, I would most certainly be dead."

That kind of honesty doesn't come easily, but it is helped along by the fact that Rick Bragg now has a stepson whose father he is learning to be. That young man, called only The Boy, is nothing like Bragg. He's never really experienced the stinging poverty his stepfather grew up with; he doesn't know how to fish; he doesn't know how to throw a punch.

But he knows how to be a boy.

Memories about The Boy poignantly alternate with memories about Charles in separate chapters — grandfather and grandson never knew each other — as Rick Bragg simultaneously learns to be both father and son.

It is an honest and very moving portrait painted with full charity toward a father who is no longer here by a son who is himself embarking on fatherhood for the first time and in middle age.

The Prince of Frogtown will probably be praised, as its predecessors were, for its truthful delineation of a Southern small-town life. Maybe that won't overshadow the book's true power: its depiction of one man's journey toward a generosity of spirit he never thought himself capable of experiencing.

Steven Whitton is a professor of English at Jacksonville State University.