Read Online All Over but the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg - Free Book Online

family ever got anywheres close to Tupelo. The Hamiltons were quick-tempered and sometimes hard-hearted people, but the Presleys were gifted, could play anything and sing like angels. All my grandma’s people picked banjo, guitar, mandolin, blew the harmonica—which we called the French harp—and played the piano, fiercely. Miss Ab never had a music lesson in her life, but could play anything. I have no doubt that if she had ever heard it she could have played Beethoven. She knew all the words to all the songs on the radio and in the hymnal, and made her children laugh with verses like:
Where the steak it is cooked rare
and the biscuits have gray hair
at that hungry hotel where I dine
    Miss Ab picked cotton for Walter Rollins, a good-humored fat man who pretended not to notice that her children and grandchildren were stealing his watermelons by the wheelbarrow load. In the hot summer she wore a bonnet and in the cold she wore a man’s knit cap, which we called, for reasons I will never understand, a “bogan.” Indoors she wrapped her long gray hair up in a bun and covered it with a rag or scarf twisted tight around her head, like the black people of that time. I reckon it was to keep the gray hair out of the biscuits.
    Like a lot of women in that time, she walked in the shadow of her man even as she kept him upright. But like a lot of creative people, she was prone to periods of brief … well, she could go a little peculiar. When she got mad she could cuss paint off the wall, cuss crows from the trees, cuss the lame straight and the wicked pure. She could cuss Hootie and he would drop what he was doing and run for the woods. When she got really wound up she could talk loud for ten, twelve hours straight. My granddaddy would just bow his head and let it rain over him like hail, or flee.
    It was this world, of rich poverty, that shaped my mother. Her older sisters helped raise her and her older brothers tormented her, especially William. Instead of throwing a rock in the creek to scare off the snakes, “he just throwed one of us,” my momma said. When little Emma Mae died of fever when my momma was just four or five, he told her that she was still alive and one day they would go dig her up. “I dragged a hoe around with me everywhere I went, for weeks, because I believed we was goin’ to get Emma Mae.”
    Her two brothers escaped jail, though no one is really sure how. They stole chickens, and worse, because they got hungry. When they got thirsty, they crawled under the plank floor of their Uncle Newt’s house to the spot where they guessed he stored his whiskey barrels. They took a brace and bit, and drilled a hole through the floor and the barrels and drained it into jugs.
    My uncle Bill used to wait until my grandma would leave the house and then cut my momma’s hair. He would cut one side of her head short and leave one side long, and even though Grandma would whup him he would laugh and laugh and laugh. “I was sixteen years old before I knowed people wasn’t supposed to have hair like that,” my momma said.
    The girls were better behaved, but they were not delicate flowers. They learned how to use a hammer and saw and level, and even now, as most of my granddaddy’s girls near or have passed sixty, you still see them toting two-by-fours around the yards of their houses. My aunt Gracie Juanita could build Tara if you gave her a year and a key to the Home Depot. They dropped out of school, all of them, to go to work, to help the family live. Some of them even climbed the roofs of houses and worked beside my grandfather, others picked cotton beside my grandmother.
    Sit long enough with the people in my family and the talk always turns to the fields, because all of them did their time there. They were the center of the family’s life, even though they never owned land, never made more than a few dollars a day. When carpentry and whiskey making failed to put food on the table, there was always cotton. The