Rick Bragg's new book

(This story appeared in The Summerville News on Dec. 31.)

By JIMMY ESPY
Staff Writer

Rick Bragg’s slender new book “The Most They Ever Had,” is a less-than-fond remembrance of the Old Industrial South, an era not so long ago when every country crossroads town seemed to have one or more local mills making products people used in their everyday lives.
Yarn. Carpet. Gloves. Cloth.
Summerville is such a town, as are Lyerly, Menlo and Trion.
Bragg’s book is set in the Jacksonville, Ala. area. That’s where members of his family joined other poor southerners in their flight from farm life to the promise of something better in the factories of a rapidly industrializing south.
For many, their lives did improve, but not without cost.
Mill workers toiled long, hours for meager pay. Often, what they made wound up back in the company’s coffers, by way of rent on a small, company-owned house or the cost of groceries bought at “the company store.” The labor could be back breaking. Worst of all, work conditions were often abysmal.
Bragg writes:
“Others perished more slowly, choking on the cotton they breathed in the unventilated, oven-like rooms. The mangling of fingers, hands and arms was routine. The plant kept no records of such things, so there are no statistics, only grim memory. But you do not imagine a missing hand.”
In his previous books, especially the stunningly good “All Over but the Shoutin’” Bragg writes bitterly, yet perceptively of the economic deprivation which settled like the dew over his beloved southland. Poverty is always a character in the Rick Bragg canon. In “The Most They Ever Had” he charges headlong at that subject, blasting away at those in power – the politicians, the mill owners and operators, etc. – who shamelessly profited at the expense of their fellow man.
Yet, Bragg also recognizes, if only grudgingly, that the economic system he abhors WAS the best chance most of these people had to live better lives.
How does he know this? Because they told him so and if Bragg is anything, he is a great listener.
“An inch at a time it pulled him into the teeth of the machine. He was alone in the big room – there were always supposed to be two men there but the other one had gone to talk to the bosses – and the rollers, with their saw teeth, pulped his arm but would not let him go. He fought it; beat it, but it just kept grinding. The blood ran into the gears, onto the floor. ‘It took three minutes to take my arm,’ he said. He finally jammed it with a broomstick.”
Recognizing how much “the mill people” have contributed to his success as a writer, Bragg pays his debt to them in carefully chosen words, often their words. Not all of the words are pretty. Many of the stories told in “The Most They Ever Had” are bittersweet at best. Some are tragic. But they all ring true to the times they evoke and to the people who truly lived lives of quiet desperation, but did so with a dignity and tenacity that demands respect.
Much of what we take for granted today, these people’s blood and sweat made possible.
“The Most They Ever Had” by Rick Bragg is published by MacAdam Cage. The cover price is $23.