From The Piney Woods To The Pulitzer -- It's Rick Bragg's Story - And His Mom's

In an upholstered downtown hotel room, his feet up on a coffee table next to his briskly selling new book, Rick Bragg scratches at the sunburn from his recent African vacation and reckons that, no, he's never run short on luck.

Consider the evidence: Millions each week read the dispatches of Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. His name is recognized in newsrooms across the nation, his descriptions coveted, pasted next to computer terminals for inspiration.

Last month, Pantheon published Bragg's first book, "All Over But the Shoutin' " - his well-received effort to enshrine a saint (his mother), exorcise a demon (his father) and tell his own Horatio Alger tale as well.

Not bad for a son of the piney woods around Possum Trot, Ala.

Though he'll readily admit to great pride in his accomplishments, Bragg doesn't seem to have let his good fortune go completely to his head. The 38-year-old arrives for an interview wearing a day's worth of beard, blue jeans and a white oxford shirt that doesn't look like it's ever met an iron. He even grimaces when he catches himself use a fancy word like `memoir' to talk about the book.

" `Memoir' is the kind of word used for people who have marshaled troops through Europe. I just wrote a story," said Bragg yesterday.

"All Over but the Shoutin' " is a story about many things: pain, sacrifice, validation, a son's belated attempt to do right by his mother. Bragg's father, an occasional presence at best, was a Korea-rattled man who lived out of a bottle and died seeing a dark angel at the foot his bed. When home, Bragg writes, Daddy kept his family in "unpainted houses that leaned like a drunk on a Saturday night," and he treated their mother with both kindness and horrific abuse. Margaret Marie Bragg absorbed it all. She was the firewall between the drunk and his children.

One day in the fall of 1965, Daddy came home with a load of aged moonshine, drank some and got rowdy. The next day, Bragg walked in from school to find his mother tipping the brown bottles down the drain:

"I was six years old. I was still trying to figure out what nine plus nine was, still trying to color between the lines," he writes. "But as I watched her, I distinctly remember thinking, `He's gonna kill you, Momma. He's gonna kill you for that.'

"That night, when he came home, (brother) Sam and I, pitiful in our inability to help her, to protect her, stood in the door of the kitchen and watched as he opened the cupboard and reached for his home brew. `Not all of it?' he asked, and she nodded. My momma did not run, did not hide. She stood there like a statue. Then, slowly she took off her glasses.

" `Don't hurt my teeth,' she said."

His father didn't, that time. One day when he had passed out, Bragg's mother scooped up her three boys (a fourth died after childbirth, due likely to poverty) and they ran for good.

She raised her children on poke salad and the kindness of relatives, picking cotton and tomatoes to buy the boys school shoes. She gave them chicken meat while she gnawed the bones, telling them it was because she liked that part the best. She went 18 years without a new dress.

Her middle son, a jug-eared boy named for "I Love Lucy's" Ricky Ricardo, inherited what little luck the family genes could muster. Though a `C' student in high school, Bragg joined the ranks of paid reporters after six months of college, when the editor's first choice decided to keep his job at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Over the next several years he hopscotched to larger and larger newspapers, along the way writing his share of only-in-the-South stories: stock-car races, alligator hunts, a chicken that survived a bobcat mauling. (When the god of Alabama football, coach Bear Bryant, died, Bragg was sent to interview the gravedigger.)

He covered the carnage in Haiti and the Miami riots for The St. Petersburg Times, and he attended Harvard for a year, on a Nieman Fellowship.

When a 1993 job at The Los Angeles Times didn't pan out, luck intervened again, in the form of The New York Times. Bragg soon became the paper's South-roving correspondent - the "job I was born to do," he writes. In that post, he covered headline-grabbing cases like that of Susan Smith in South Carolina, and went to Haiti again, this time with U.S. troops. The Pulitzer Prize for feature writing came in 1996, for coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing.

With the advance for "All Over but the Shoutin,' " Bragg accomplished a dream that years of scrimping had not fulfilled: buying his mother her own house - one that will never lean one way or the other. The rest of the book's profits, he said, will go toward her retirement.

"The house was not a perfect victory," he said in retrospect. "It did not get rid of all those years when we were near the bottom of the social ladder." Nonetheless, "The cost of it, in the resurrection of sadness (as a result of Bragg's poking into the past), was not nearly as steep as the good things that have come from it - and I don't mean just a house." What was most important, he said, was "telling the story of a courageous, selfless person.

"There's great peace in knowing that, if I don't do one more decent thing in my life, I will have done one good thing for my Momma," Bragg said.

Make that two good things: Bragg bought the house in cash, so no streak of bad luck will ever be able to take away the place she deserved for so long.