The Prince of Frogtown

The Prince of Frogtown is a 2008 memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Bragg. It is the third in a series of three memoirs that cover different aspects of his life, prominently featuring stories about different family members. The first in the trilogy was the 1997 bestseller All Over But the Shoutin', about Bragg's experience growing up as one of three children of a single mother on welfare; the second was Ava's Man, which focused on his mother's father. Conspicuously absent from the first two memoirs was detailed mention of Bragg's own father. Bragg explains his choice, “I sawed my family tree off at the fork, and made myself a man with half a history.” But as he relates in The Prince of Frogtown, fellow writer Willie Morris convinced him that he, in fact, had to write about his father, observing, “My boy, there is no place you can go he will not be.”

Morris's statement is ironic, at least on its surface. Rick Bragg's father, Charles was not, after all, a major presence in his childhood, and Rick never knew him well. Nevertheless, by interviewing friends and relatives of the man, Rick reconstitutes his story – one that would indelibly shape his own, relating directly to the second plotline that runs through The Prince of Frogtown: Rick's marriage to a woman with three sons of her own, and his struggle to come to terms with the wholly unprecedented realm of step-fatherhood. In particular, Rick focuses on his relationship with his wife's youngest son, an eleven-year-old in need of a father figure, but so unlike Rick in temperament that he feels he cannot come to grips with the boy without delving into the history of his own father, and its ramifications upon his new parental role.

Rick's initial impression of his wife's youngest son – who is only referred to, somewhat dismissively, as “the boy” – is of a soft, melting thing, too coddled for his liking. He is, conveniently for the storytelling, almost the inverse image of what Rick members himself to have been at that age. He recalls this latter point with the somewhat battered but defiant pride of someone who has suffered greatly humiliating hardship, and been forced to make peace with its lasting influence. The primary hardship Rick had suffered, of course, was his father: “My father was already waking with the shakes when I was born,” he describes, before elaborating the same idea a few pages later: “His death was so certain it was like it already happened.”



Through interviews with various people, but especially his father's best friend Jack Andrews, Rick comes to more fully know the man who left behind a legacy of alcoholism and abuse. Always a hard drinker, Charles Bragg grew up in “Frogtown,” a dusty, poverty-stricken excrescence at the side of a polluted stream, where all the men worked in the same factory. Charles wanted out and almost succeeded. A marine in the Korean War, he was devastated – the experience pushed him firmly into the territory of substance abuse – but returned to Frogtown to boast of his service. There he met and married Rick's mother. Marriage, it turned out, did not mellow him. His drinking never tapered off: he feuded with the local police chief; would disappear for weeks at a time; never held down a job; and, at his worst, when he wasn't beating his wife and children, was often off fighting with other hardscrabble men.

However, Rick also learns that, in his better moments, he had a notable sense of honor and of courage, and was capable of great humor. In his final days, Charles expressed, on several occasions, great regret for his failure as a father and husband. None of this, in the end, makes up for his abuse, and Rick never formally admits to loving the man, even after coming to know him through his history. Nevertheless, while looking over a pair of loaded dice his father had left him, Rick has a revelation about what must have been his father's philosophy: “Rig the game if you can, ’cause luck is a bitch for a poor man; and don’t worry what people think, because once it’s all over the people who love you will make you what they want you to be, and the people who don’t love you will, too.”

Juxtaposed against his father's storyline, Rick's journey to understanding and building a relationship with his stepson provides needed levity and tenderness to the memoir. Over the course of the chapters devoted to this arc, interspersed among those dedicated to his father, Rick comes to be a mentor to his stepson, teaching him how to play basketball, throw a punch, and otherwise be a “traditional” boy. Simultaneously, he is forced to come to terms with how different his stepson's life has been from his own childhood, and how, ultimately, that is to everyone's benefit. The experience softens Rick, helping him make peace with his own history of abuse by giving him an opportunity to grow – if sometimes clumsily – into the kind of father he had never been lucky enough to have.