'All Over but the Shoutin'' readers find commonalities

Some people think Rick Bragg's mother is the central figure in "All Over but the Shoutin'," his memoir about growing up poor in the Deep South and becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. She certainly is the hero, a woman who insisted on eating after her children had finished to make sure they had had enough. But Dr. Mike Cowan points out that Bragg's father, a mean and abusive drunk who repeatedly abandoned his family, is the source of Bragg's struggles, the reason this work of literature exists.

"That's what haunts him," Cowan says.

Catfish pate and sweet tea were among the Southern delicacies awaiting the 16 people who came to the Central High School library Thursday afternoon to discuss the book with Cowan, the principal at Central High School. It is one of several discussions of the book being held during February. Students at Blanchard Elementary School also are discussing a children's book this month, "The War with Grandpa."

Cowan is a former English teacher, so he was a natural choice to lead one of the discussion groups for United We Read, the program that began a year ago to promote the citywide reading and discussion of a single book.

The first thing he wanted to talk about is, What does "All Over but the Shoutin'" mean? Al McFerron, the school's assistant principal, knows it as something people say at sporting events when you know you're going to win.

But when Bragg is invited to visit the father he has despised and long been estranged from, he is confronted not by the "man and monster of my childhood" but an apparition ferociously wasted away. Bragg's father uses the words in the title to describe his own doomed plight.

"He made a halfhearted try to shake my hand but had a coughing fit again that lasted a minute, coughing up his life, his lungs, and after that I did not want to touch him," Bragg writes.

Many of the women in the discussion responded to Bragg's descriptions of the sacrifices his mother made. She took in ironing, picked cotton and went without clothes and even food herself to make sure her three sons had them.

"My mother ate the back of the chicken," said Alma Bradshaw. "I did the same thing."

Julia Jorgensen, the Central High School librarian who founded United We Read, said the book was "a way for me to know my mother better." Her mother, Louise Howes, participated in the discussion.

Helen Gibbar, who works in instructional technology at the Cape Girardeau Public Schools office, derived from the book an understanding that Bragg's childhood, as corrosive as it was, "had just as much worth as our childhood. That's what molded him."

Katie Porter was the only high school student at the discussion. The Central High School junior has been assigned to read the book for a class and was there to get a head start. Identifying with Bragg's childhood and his feelings toward his father will be difficult, she said.

"I have a dad I really adore."

As a reporter for the New York Times, Bragg has specialized in reporting death and violence. In the passage that affected Cowan most deeply Bragg writes, "After all the dying I have seen, I finally understand what death is: Simple wanting."

Cowan told of his own great-grandmother, whose husband, Tom, had died. On her front porch swing she told Cowan, "I can't feel at home in this world anymore ... Mikey, I can't wait to see my Tom again."

sblackwell@semissourian.com

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