The first time I spoke with the writer Rick Bragg, he was driving his truck in Calhoun County, where he grew up, a rural area fifty miles east of Birmingham, Alabama, surrounded by what he once called “the endless, beautiful, hateful rows of cotton.” As he recounts in his 1997 memoir, “All Over but the Shoutin’,” his mother, Margaret, picked that cotton while his father, Charles, was off getting drunk. These days, Bragg lives with Margaret nearby, in a red-cedar cabin on forty acres of pastureland grazed upon by two miniature donkeys. The day before we first spoke, over the phone in July, Bragg had brought Margaret home from the hospital, where she’d been recovering from pneumonia. At eighty-nine, she has also survived colon cancer and congestive heart failure. “More than that, she survived my daddy and my little brother, Mark,” Bragg told me. Mark died last year, at sixty-two, from cancer; Bragg’s older brother, Sam, had also succumbed to the disease a few years earlier, at sixty-four. Charles died of complications from alcoholism in 1975. “I’m the last one left,” Bragg said.
When Bragg takes calls from his truck, he tends to finish them there. He parked beside a stand of old pine trees where he remained for most of an hour. “There aren’t that many people to talk writing with,” he said, sounding lonesome. Since the mid-nineteen-nineties, Bragg has been among the most popular Southern writers of nonfiction and memoir. He recited a favorite line from “Land O’Goshen,” a book by another Alabamian, the novelist Charles McNair: “If the biggest, fanciest chandelier in the whole world fell off the back of a pickup truck doing ninety miles an hour, the blacktop road would look like the sky that night over The Secret Place.” “That’s pretty damn good, right?” Bragg said.
Bragg was born near Possum Trot, Alabama, in 1959. He and his brothers spent their summers stacking pulpwood for minimum wage, and each of them tried, in his own way, to protect their mother from the rages of their father, a veteran of the Korean War. But they did not grow up to be close. “The only thing we ever really had to talk about was this truck,” Bragg told me, referring to the red 1986 Ford Bronco that he’d bought in 1993. “Trucks mean something to us.” Bragg purchased the Bronco when he was a reporter at the St. Petersburg Times, in Florida. He’d spotted an ad for it in the newspaper. He was thirty-four, at his first big paper, a decade into a career that had emerged from his realization that he loved writing in an all-consuming way—“like some men love women.” At the St. Petersburg Times, he was a feature writer, free to roam. The truck ferried him from story to story. “I buried it in mud and cottonmouths,” he said. “I drove it through a hurricane, a wildfire, a Mardi Gras. I did things with it that you need a tank for.” Then he headed west, to the Los Angeles Times, before turning around and joining the New York Times, in 1994, where he became a national correspondent and eventually won a Pulitzer.
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When Bragg got back to the East Coast from L.A., he gave the truck to his brother Sam, who worked in a cotton mill and volunteered in search and rescue. “He drove it over every mountain in northeast Alabama,” Bragg said. “He drove it for a decade, to do the things that good men do.” When Bragg returned again to Alabama, in 2003, to write books, Sam gave the truck back to him. Bragg had it for the next several years. “Then my little brother, Mark, went to Holman prison,” he said. “He did two years down there, essentially for having more D.U.I.s than any other human being in the history of the state of Alabama.” When Mark was released, Bragg gave him the keys to the Bronco. “And that’s the way that truck’s history developed: it passed not from the oldest to the youngest but to the one who needed it most.”
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Now the Bronco is a story vehicle: Bragg is writing about the thirty years and three hundred thousand miles that he and his brothers shared in that truck. He began reciting what he’d got down so far. “The first line in the book is—and I’m cursed with this kind of memory about writing—‘My little brother,’ comma, ‘too drunk to know better and running from the law,’ comma, ‘missed his turn at Reads Mill and sank our truck in Ohatchee Creek.’ Period. And the next line is ‘It was only three feet deep,’ comma, ‘but he was too hammered to tell.’ Period. ‘So he climbed up on the hood and kind of posed there,’ comma, ‘kind of listing and wobbling,’ comma, ‘but proud.’ ”
Bragg told me other stories that he planned to include in the book, some of which seemed to seek gallows humor in alcoholism: the time, for instance, that Mark got so drunk on homemade liquor that he “hallucinated a road through a forest.” “He made it a half mile, knocking down little trees. Then he hit a giant elm just head on,” Bragg said. “And so I guess—in journalism, we call it the ‘kicker’ to that graf—the kicker is ‘God’s own drunk,’ in quotes, ‘my mama called him.’ Period. And then my big brother said, ‘More likely Ford just made one mean damn truck.’ And so, once I wrote that paragraph, I thought, Yeah, I think we got a book.” Bragg went on, “The point of the book is that no matter what we did to the truck it always started right back up again. Idling in that kind of . . . you know how old Fords have that thumping sound? That thumping idle? The graf ends with ‘Idling in that thumping sound like it was immortal. And as long as we were behind the wheel, so were we.’ ”
“Bronco Boys,” as Bragg is calling the work in progress, will be his thirteenth and, probably, final book. Bragg is sixty-seven, and his kidneys are not in good shape. He told me, “I wake up in the morning and I go sit in my chair like the old guy that I am. I look at that array of medicine, and then I mix it all together like a chemist. I get it all down. And I’m grateful, quite frankly, because I still have a lot to do.”