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The Prince of Frogtown by Rick Bragg By Melissa J Wantuck  |
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Deciphering the ins and outs of one’s parents is difficult for any child, but it’s a near impossibility when they’ve been absent most of your life. Writer Rick Bragg never planned on being a father but when love brought him a ready-made family, he found fatherhood suited him. The irony was he didn’t know how it could when he’d had a bad example set for him by his own father.
The paperback release of The Prince of Frogtown by Rick Bragg (Vintage, 2009) completes his trilogy of Southern life for the mid-twentieth century poor working class through the lives of his family. In Frogtown, Bragg makes a heart-wrenching journey to understand the man he only knew as his drunkard father.
Bragg had already spent much of his writing career dissecting his family and the circumstances that influenced them. His first book, All Over but the Shoutin’, chronicled the struggles of his mother to raise her three boys in poverty without help from their father. Her family played a big part in their lives so naturally the topic flowed into Bragg’s next book Ava’s Man. Both books were rooted in the deep South and Bragg carries over the same themes into Frogtown through his poignant imagery of the hot dusty streets, slamming screen doors, cotton flecked air, and baying dogs of a bygone era.
Bragg was born in the same town as his parents and spent most of his childhood there as well, but his mother worked hard to raise her boys differently. His family knew hard times, but they were offered a future many of their predecessors only dreamed about.
When Bragg returned to find the town of his father Charles’ youth, he conjured with his words the ramshackle housing of a mill town. The pre-union workers were rough and tumble who worked endless hours for endless days. Prohibition reigned and it turned many men into brewers of hard liquor tempting even more into destruction.
The men of Charles’ family drank hard. Most only did so on the weekends to avoid interfering with their job at the mill. One mistake and a man could lose his life in a machine, his job for bad behavior, or both from injury.
Bragg brings out in startling detail this hard life many people lived from laborious research he conducted. His painstaking research opened the floodgate of memories and emotions for those involved and while he learned more about the man who was his father, he contrasts his father’s story with his own story as a stepdad. There are times Bragg sees his father in him, in the way he has responded to his stepson. He doesn’t see what his father did to his family and he has worked hard to make sure those painful behaviors are not recreated.
The Prince of Frogtown is as much a work of historical nonfiction as it is a memoir about a father and the influence he had on his family. Bragg richly captures both a town and the complicated dynamics of a man whose life cost so much more than he may ever have realized.
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