All Over but the Shoutin'

For the most part Bragg feels at home in Atlanta, and he is close enough to visit his family more often. However, his visits are usually short because he is busy traveling for stories to other places less gentrified than Atlanta, such as New Orleans.

In this chapter, Bragg’s grandmother, known to the family as Miss Ab, dies of pneumonia. Bragg goes home for the funeral. His mother was not at the church service. She stayed at home waiting “for the sadness to pass” (277). Bragg leaves the funeral to sit with his momma.

Bragg goes to South Carolina to cover a big national story about the abduction at gunpoint of two children by a black man. At first, like all the reporters covering the story, he writes about the frantic search for the missing boys.  Only later does he realize that the story is a lie and that Susan Smith, the young mother of the two boys, had purposefully drowned her children in a lake.