66 pages • 2 hours read
All Over but the Shoutin'
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Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: The Widow’s Mite
Chapter 5 Summary: When God blinks
This chapter starts with a description of the rundown house where Bragg’s father took his family the last time they were all together.
Charles Bragg had told a tale about having a good job and a house, and his wife got her hopes up once again. He behaved like a family man for a time but inevitably turned to heavy drinking and violence again.
During this time, Bragg also spent time with his father’s family and got to know his grandparents Bobby, an “eccentric” who still drove a horse and wagon in 1965, and Velma, a “sad-eyed little woman who looked very much like the part Cherokee she was, a sweet-natured woman who hovered over the men when they drank whiskey...” (57).
Chapter 6 Summary: The free show
The title of this chapter refers to Bragg’s first exposure to George Wallace and his anti-black political campaigning.
The main narrative of the chapter concerns Bragg’s father succumbing to another round of serious drinking and abandoning his family yet again.
Chapter 7 Summary: No papers on him
This is a very short chapter concerning the dead “Baby Bragg,” whom his mother lost in childbirth. He never had a name or a chance to live.
Chapter 8 Summary: In the mouth of the machine
In this chapter, the author gives us more detail about his mother’s life. He tells us that she went back to handpicking cotton in the fields until the machines took over and closed down that source of work.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
Even when Bragg’s family lived together in a house they paid rent for, their lifestyle was still at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. “I saw peeling paint and missing boards, and looking back on it now I know my father must have rented it for a song, because it was a house no one else would have. We would have said it was out of Faulkner, if we had known who Faulkner was” (53).
Bragg does have some pleasant memories of life with his father. For example, when he was six years old, he “believe[d], we were something like a family...he came home smelling of dust and paint, not whiskey, and on Fridays he cashed his check and put money in my momma’s hand for groceries before going to get drunk” (54).
When Bragg’s father abandoned the family for the final time was the most difficult of all, because his proud mother insisted on staying on rather than begging her family for help. They were desperate for food, and his mother was pregnant and sick. The family eventually returns to their grandmother’s and Bragg’s mother lost her child at birth.
After her final separation from her husband, Bragg’s mother made herself into a virtual recluse because she was ashamed of her poor clothes and downtrodden appearance. She expected to be ignored at best or at worst snubbed and gossiped about because she was poor and had no husband in the house.
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