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Rick Bragg

Rick Brag, born in 1959, grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians in northeastern Alabama. Bragg has worked as a
national correspondent for The New York Times, as well as for the Los Angeles Times and the St. Petersburg Times. He
was also a reporter for a number of Southern newspapers, including the Birmingham News and the Jacksonville News,
writing about cockfights, speed trap towns, serial killers, and Southern celebrities, including George Wallace and Bear
Bryant. He is the author of Somebody Told Me, a collection of newspaper writings, and the autobiographical Ava’s Man
and All Over but the Shoutin’, a memoir from which the following selection has been taken. The excerpt tells what
happened the summer before Bragg was a senior in high school. As you read about this remembered event, pay attention
to Bragg’s vivid descriptions.

“100 Miles per Hour, Upside Down and Sideways”

Since I was a boy I have searched for ways to slingshot myself into the distance, faster and faster. When you turn
the key on a car built for speed, when you hear that car rumble like an approaching storm and feel the steering wheel
tremble in your hands from all that power barely under control, you feel like you can run away from anything, like you
can turn your whole life into an insignificant speck in the rearview mirror.
In the summer of 1976, the summer before my senior year at Jacksonville High School, I had the mother of all
slingshots. She was a 1969 General Motors convertible muscle car with a 350 V-8 and a Holley four-barreled carburetor
as long as my arm. She got about six miles to the gallon, downhill, and when you started her up she sounded like
Judgment Day. She was long and low and vicious, a mad dog cyclone with orange houndstooth interior and an eight-track
tape player, and looked fast just sitting in the yard under a pine tree. I owned just one tape, that I remember, the Eagles’
Greatest Hits.
I worked two summers in the hell and heat at minimum wage to earn enough money to buy her and still had to
borrow money from my uncle Ed, who got her for just nineteen hundred dollars mainly because he paid in hundred-dollar
bills. “You better be careful, boy,” he told me. “That’un will kill you.” I assured him that, Yes, Sir, I would creep around
in it like an old woman.
I tell myself I loved that car because she was so pretty and so fast and because I loved to rumble between the rows
of pines with the blond hair of some girl who had yet to discover she was better than me whipping in the breeze. But the
truth is I loved her because she was my equalizer. She raised me up, at least in my own eyes, closer to where I wanted and
needed to be. In high school, I was neither extremely popular nor one of the great number of want-to-bes. I was invited to
parties with the popular kids, I had dates with pretty girls. But there was always a distance there, of my own making ,
usually.
That car, in a purely superficial way, closed it. People crowded around her at the Hardee’s. I let only one person
drive her, Patrice Curry, the prettiest girl in school, for exactly one mile.
The first weekend, I raced her across the long, wide parking lot of the TG&Y, an insane thing to do, seeing as
how a police car could have cruised by at any minute. It was a test of nerves as well as speed, because you actually had to
be slowing down, not speeding up, as you neared the finish line, because you just ran out of parking lot. I beat Lyn
Johnson’s Plymouth and had to slam on my brakes and swing her hard around, to keep from jumping to the curb, the road
and plowing into the parking lot of the Sonic Drive-In.
It would have lasted longer, this upraised standing, if I had pampered her. I guess I should have spent more time
looking at her than racing her, but I had too much of the Bragg side of the family in me for that. I would roll her out on
some lonely country road late at night, the top down, and blister down the blacktop until I knew the tires were about to lift
off the ground. But they never did. She held the road, somehow, until I ran out of road or just lost my nerve. It was as if
there was no limit to her, at how fast we could go, together.
It lasted only two weeks from the day I bought her.
On Saturday night, late, I pulled up to the last red light in town on my way home. Kyle Smith pulled up beside me
in a loud-running Chevrolet, and raced his engine. I did not squall out when the light changed – she was not that kind of
car – but let her rpm’s build, build and build, like winding up a top.
I was passing a hundred miles per hour as I neared a long sweeping turn on Highway 21 when I saw, coming
toward me, the blue lights of the town’s police. I cannot really remember what happened next. I just remember mashing
the gas pedal down hard, halfway through that sweeping turn, and the sickening feeling as the car just seemed to lift and
twist in the air, until I was doing a hundred miles per hour still, but upside down and sideways.
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She landed across a ditch, on her top. If she had not hit the ditch in just the right way, the police later said, it
would have cut my head off. I did not have on my seat belt. We never did, then. Instead of flinging me out, though, the
centrifugal force – I had taken science in ninth grade – somehow held me in.
Instead of lying broken and bleeding on the ground beside my car, or headless, I just sat there upside down. I
always pulled the adjustable steering wheel down low, an inch or less above my thighs, and that held me in place, my
head covered with mud and broken glass. The radio was still blaring — it was the Eagles’ “The Long Run,” I believe –
and I tried to find the knob in the dark to turn it off. Funny. There I was in an upsidedown car, smelling the gas as it ran
out of the tank, listening to the tick, tick, tick of the hot engine, thinking: “I sure do hope that gas don’t get nowhere near
that hot manifold,” but all I did about it was try to turn down the radio.
I knew the police had arrived because I could hear them talking. Finally, I felt a hand on my collar. A state trooper
dragged me out and dragged me up the side of the ditch and into the collective glare of the most headlights I had ever
seen. There were police cars and ambulances and traffic backed up, it seemed, all the way to Piedmont.
“The Lord was riding with you, son,” the trooper said. “You should be dead.”
My momma stood off to one side, stunned. Finally the police let her through to look me over, up and down. But
except for the glass in my hair and a sore neck, I was fine. Thankfully, I was too old for her to go cut a hickory and stripe
my legs with it, but I am sure it crossed her mind.
The trooper and the Jacksonville police had a private talk off to one side, trying to decide whether or not to put me
in prison for the rest of my life. Finally, they informed my momma that I had suffered enough, to take me home. As we
drove away, I looked back over my shoulder as the wrecker dragged my car out of the ditch and, with the help of several
strong men, flipped it back over, right-side up. It looked like a white sheet of paper someone had crumpled up and tossed
in the ditch from a passing car.
“The Lord was riding with that boy,” Carliss Slaughts, the wrecker operator, told my uncle Ed. With so many
people saying that, I thought the front page of the Anniston Star the next day would read: LORD RIDES WITH BOY,
WRECKS ANYWAY.
I was famous for a while. No one, no one, flips a convertible at a hundred miles per hour, without a seat belt on,
and walks away, undamaged. People said I had a charmed life. My momma, like the trooper and Mr. Slaughts, just figured
God was my copilot.
The craftsmen at Slaught’s Body Shop put her back together, over four months. My uncle Ed loaned me the
money to fix her, and took it out of my check. The body and fender man made her pretty again, but she was never the
same. She was fast but not real fast, as if some little part of her was still broken deep inside. Finally, someone backed into
her in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly, and I was so disgusted I sold her for fourteen hundred dollars to a preacher’s
son, who drove the speed limit.

I tell that story to show just how effectively I wasted high school, and came so close to wasting my mother’s sacrifice. I
had dreams but no ambition. I cut class and shot twenty-foot jumpers in the gym. I made a solid C average. I never, ever
did any homework. I read things I wanted to read, but I never studied the things the teachers thought important. I was the
master of ceremonies of the talent show, in a borrowed suit. I won contests in public speaking, because talking was so
easy, and joined the school newspaper, because words didn’t cost anything. I drank a little at parties and after ball games
and on a road trip to Atlanta to try and get into a topless bar—which failed. I never, never danced no disco, unless some
young lady wanted me to. I pitched for the Ed Fair Landscaping Dirtdaubers in the summer, and in one game I hit back-
to-back home runs. If I needed money for dates, and there was no work because of the weather, my grandmother gave it to
me from the change purse she hid under the mattress.
Because I worked, I paid for my lunches now. I had two pairs of blue jeans, which got me through the week, but
nobody had to know that but me. I had a class ring made from fake gold, but nobody had to know that either. I was, if not
bright, at least not bad-looking.
I should have studied hard and tried to win a scholarship to college, should have seriously prepared myself for the
future, should have focused on dragging myself out of poverty, the way so many people do. But of the varied weaknesses
in me, the strongest is the desire to live for the moment, and let tomorrow slide. That is fine, if you are a Kennedy. It was
dangerous for boys like me, or at least, it should have been.
But I had a charmed life. The wreck had proved it, as other things would, all my life. Even then, I was smart
enough to know that when you perform without a net, you by God better not fall.
(1997)
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Rick Bragg “100 miles per hour, upside down and sideways” Questions

1. Provide an example of something Bragg does to draw his reader immediately into his
essay.

He first pull us in with the connection of being a young boy but then uses very "exciting"
language, i.e. "slingshot myself into the distance, faster and faster" (Bragg).

When he talks about turning the key in a car, such a simple, everyday task, he makes it seem as
an important event.

2. What specific details does Bragg include to convey the feeling of traveling at very fast
speeds?

Descriptive language, for example: "feel the steering wheel tremble in your hands from all that
power barely under control, you feel like you can run away from anything, like you can turn
your whole life into an insignificant speck in the rearview mirror" (Bragg). We can see that he
makes the perscription that inside the car, life itself, moves faster, it becomes a insigificant
speck of time.

3. In the first paragraph, Bragg switches from the 1st person pronoun “I” to the 2nd person
pronoun “you;” however, the use of “you” in an essay is considered taboo by many. Why
do you think Bragg uses it?

To make us put ourselves into that experience, to make it connect more with us, to make us feel
like we are turning the key in a rumbling storm.

4. What does Bragg do within this essay to capture the true thoughts and feelings of himself
as a teenage boy?

He describes his highschool life. How he felt lost. He wasn't unpopular, he got girls, but he still
felt lost. What he invested his time into to find himself is his car. This was his, "thing".

BOTH essays (Tan and Bragg)

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1. Both of these two essays contain many of the characteristics of a personal memoir. What
do you think a few of those characteristics might be based on similarities you notice in
these two essays? List at least 4 things you believe are characteristics of a personal
memoir.
1. A flashback to an important event.
2. Very desrciptive language in order to convey the event as vivid and happening now.
3. Emotion - the event described is not any other, random event, but rather a very personal and "opening" event.
4. Meaningful Resolution - the ending is meaningful; there is a deeper meaning within the "lesson" of the memior, and I
think this is because it is a story from life; it is something we can connect with and create our own meaning as we have
our own life experiences.