Prince of Frogtown

This is Pulitzer Prize winning Rick Bragg’s third memoir. The first, All Over But the Shoutin’, was written in praise of his mother who mostly raised Bragg and his two brothers on her own, and espe­cially during the dif­ficult and painful times his father chose to be a part of their lives. His second memoir, Ava’s Man, was written as a paean to his father’s mother. Prince of Frogtown is not a book in praise of his father. How do you praise a mostly absent, often violent, and basi­cally alco­holic father? What Bragg has written is a book in search of his father and, in the end, in search of fatherhood, itself.

In his pro­logue, Bragg asks one question and answers another:“I don’t know what kind of man I turned out to be, but I was good at being a boy.” As it turns out, Bragg remained a boy right into his adulthood, right up to the time (in his mid-​​forties) when he met a woman who turned his life upside down. She was a keeper and came with one young son still at home. Bragg began his journey to reclaim his father when he “got a boy of my own.”

Every chapter in the book has a section entitled, “The Boy.” It’s like a seed that gets watered with each chapter until Rick Bragg, his father, Charles Bragg, and his own “boy” are full-​​grown. The reader my wonder why Bragg never gave his stepson’s name as the title for these sec­tions. The answer comes with a second look at the book’s pro­logue. Bragg’s own father never called him by name, or even, “son.” He was called, “boy.” Bragg explains: “It’s one of those words that bind you to someone strong as nylon cord, if you say it right.”  The reader knows, even then, that Bragg’s father said it right.

Bragg, like his father before him, grew up in Jack­sonville, a mill town in northeast Alabama. By the end of the book, we know the layout of this small southern town, on both sides of the tracks. We know its heroes, its vil­lains, and its scoundrels. Charles Bragg was a bit of all of them and it is the telling of his story that cap­tures the reader’s heart and attention. As Rick Bragg inter­views his father’s friends, rel­a­tives and acquain­tances, it reads like folk­tales come alive. He also brings to life the history of Alabamans who came down from the foothills of Appalachia to the mill towns that offered work under con­di­tions just short of slavery. This is sto­ry­telling at its intimate and haunting best.

As Bragg opens himself to the presence of his stepson, he also opens himself to a more com­plete presence of his father. The worst of parents don’t need our for­giveness, but they need our under­standing if we are to under­stand our­selves. Bragg comes to under­stand that his stepson wants only to be his son, just as he, himself, wanted to be his father’s son. His under­standing unlocks the door to a pow­erful and enduring love.