All Over but the Shoutin'

Bragg knew that his mother had always longed for a house that would be a real home, a safe and warm place for herself and her family, a refuge from the harsh reality of being poor.

Once it seemed that dream might become reality when her husband moved her and the three boys into an old house he had rented. It was, however, a terrible disappointment. “I believe that if I would have listened very carefully, I could have heard my mother’s heart break and tinkle down in pieces on the warped floor. She did not say anything, of course. She never said anything. It was just one more broken promise, one more sharp slap to her pride. But if that was all she had to endure, she could” (53).

Bragg does his best to make his mother’s dream come true. He saves his money and buys her a real house with a yard and woods and a working furnace. And his mother is finally happy in her home.

Bragg was born in 1959. In that time, owning a home was the essence of the American dream. It took until 1996 for Bragg to achieve that dream for his mother, but he did it. It speaks volumes about the appeal of the American dream that it so dominated the author’s life. He truly believed that the key to happily ever after was to own a home free and clear. Perhaps for him and his mother he got it right.

It would not be at all surprising for a reporter who worked closely with photographers to employ the sense of sight to describe a new place or a powerful experience. Bragg, however, uses the sense of smell to help recreate for the reader the horrors he witnessed in Haiti. “That first day, the images of poverty and cruelty whirl through my head one after another after another, but the smell seldom changes. It is a mix of flowering plants, charcoal smoke, human waste, rotting garbage, crushed sugar cane, old sweat, death” (203).

In Bragg’s account, smell often becomes the dominant means of connecting the reader to the firsthand experience, as here: “In the morgue, the bodies are piled haphazardly, to no particular scheme or order. The air conditioning and coolers have broken down, and the smell of rot is so strong it chases away all other living things...” (206)

The author continues with the sense of smell motif when describes the neighborhood where the rich people live. “Up in Petionville, where the air smells better, people concede that they gave the army money, food, and even guns, at least partly financing the coup.” (207)

Bragg recognized that smell distinguishes rich from poor in Haiti because it was true for him in his own childhood. He describes the middle-class and poor schoolchildren as being on two sides of the classroom. “On your side, people step away from you in the hamburger line, because you smell like sweat and fertilizer and diesel fuel” (98).

The sense of smell also has more pleasant connotations for Bragg as here, where he describes returning to his grandmother’s house where he grew up: “They say you can’t remember a smell, but I could smell...stronger than anything, the smell of fatback, fried crisp, that smell that lasted all day and rode to school with you on your hands, so that you could put your hands to your face during history class and get hungry all over again” (315).

Since strong smells were so much a part of his early life, it is no surprise that Bragg would use his nose wherever he went, even if the smells, as in Haiti, were terrible.