Although I’m not saying that it’s totally peculiar to my kind, an almost instinctive distrust of good fortune has always struck me as a very pronounced trait among southern poor whites. It runs through the fiction of writers like Dorothy Allison and Larry Brown, but it’s nothing short of a formative flesh-and-blood reality in the trilogy of remarkable memoirs crafted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/bragg/ ">Rick Bragg, and based on his poor-white boyhood and family and class heritage in hardscrabble Calhoun County, Alabama, just north of Anniston.
Bragg wrote from personal experience about his poor white childhood, which was marked by long stretches of tragedy and trauma so unrelenting that anything else seemed abnormal. In The Prince of Frogtown Bragg told of his long-suffering mother’s reaction to an apparent turn-around in the family’s utterly dismal fortunes. In 1963, after years of abusing and neglecting his family, Bragg’s drunken, irresponsible father had found a steady job in Dallas, Texas, at a body shop and taken his wife and sons out of Calhoun County and what seemed like a million miles away from the hand-to-mouth existence that was all Rick and his brother had ever known. Suddenly there was plenty of food, money for decent clothes, ice cream, trips to the zoo, and other such “extras” that had been beyond their reach in Alabama. “I thought I had stepped in through some magic window,” Rick recalled. “One day she was dragging me on a cotton sack, pulling all day for a dollar and change, and the next day, we were sitting on a porch step eating ice cream.”
Although Charles Bragg appeared to have his drinking under control and had given his wife no indication that he would slip back into his old self- and family-destructive ways, his previous behavior gave her reason to doubt the longevity of their dramatically elevated circumstances. Then, after a couple of months that had seemed like a dream to Rick and his brother, word came from back home that the monthly $54 welfare check his mother had been receiving for her and her two boys was about to be cut off. At that point, wracked by doubt about the husband’s staying power and conditioned to see all good fortune as fleeting at best, Margaret Bragg told her devastated husband and children that she was taking the boys and going home. Finding his insistent, emotional pleadings to no avail, Charles Bragg remained in Texas for a while before tumbling back into his old ways, and he wandered back to Calhoun County, where he resolutely drank himself to death while making what was an already tenuous existence for his wife and children even more difficult and painful.
Though he had been too young to process what had happened at that time, as he recounted in All Over But the Shoutin’, an adult Rick Bragg would experience the same knee-jerk suspicion of apparent good news when he received word in 1999 that he had won a Pulitzer Prize for his feature writing work at the New York Times. Fearful that there might have been a mistake, Bragg waited an hour before calling his mother because, he explained, “it is a common condition of being poor white trash: you are always afraid that the good things in your life and temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your brute strength to stop them.”
Although my family was more stable if not a whole lot better off economically than Bragg’s, such revelations help to explain why his writing resonates so strongly with me. I’ll never forget telling my Mama excitedly about several good things that had come my way recently. Having come up the really hard way, with seventy years of immersion in Southern Baptist fatalism on top of that, she responded gravely, “That’s nice, Jimmy, but I can’t help but worry when things get to going too well.”
As the Missus and I celebrate forty years of wedded bliss this week, the Ol’ Bloviator can hardly even begin to count his blessings, and it’s not just because an aptitude for math ain’t one of them. Not only do I enjoy the love of a wonderful wife and have a wonderful son, but we live in a wonderful town on a wonderful street inhabited by wonderful people. Not only that, but I make my living doing something that I’d probably do for nothing if you could buy Sam Adams with food stamps. In sum, I have every reason to wake up every morning yellin’ “Wahoo!” and, naturally, that just worries the hell out of me.
The Missus would like to report that she wakes up every morning thankful to be married to the Ol' Bloviator and thankful for their wonderful son. [No, the Ol' Bloviator did no bribe me to comment.]
Thanks, Jim. I have noticed the same thing about myself. My "socioeconomic background" was lower middle-class, not poor, but my parents came into their adulthood in the Great Depression. (My father once worked in the CCC, and my mother's father lost the grocery store he owned. My father couldn't go back for a second year of college because he couldn't afford the $50-a-quarter tuition; my mother couldn't afford even a first year.) So I was imprinted with the idea that good luck was unusual and not likely to last.
Yet, like yours, my luck has been very good and has lasted a long time. (Forty-four years of marriage to the same woman, in my case.) And superstitiously, I worry that I shouldn't even be saying this--that such gloating is always punished, and, hell, SHOULD be punished.
It's hard to overcome your raisin', when you grow up with people who spend most of their time waiting for the other shoe to drop.
On rare occasions when something good happened, my old granny would say, "Enjoy it while you can, it ain't gonna last."
And Granny was the most positive thinker in my famiily.
This resonated with me too.
My dad grew up on welfare with 6 brothers and sisters, minus a father, plus an alcoholic mother.
He is an incredibly bright man and if he had himself for a father, it is hard to tell what he could have done.
Nevertheless, he was lucky enough to find employment where there was a strong union and today he is rather well off. But he suffers for it.
Every time something good happens, every time he even reflects on something good, he has too "knock on wood." Unfortunately, this isn't a quaint folk habit. It is an obsession. Since his last name is Wood, he completes the ritual by knocking on his own head.
There have been days when I watched him knock on his head 50 times in a matter of hours. He is tortured by success.