The following is not of sinful nature. I don’t want Miss Dianne to hunt me down and whip me like Grandma Ava beat Miss Lee, about the head and shoulders, across the yard. Of course, that’s what you get when you hang silk stockings from the clothesline of a married man while his wife is off picking cotton. 

I’m no Lee. I don’t even own silk stockings. Plus, I have my very own Smokin’ Hot Love Biscuit. What in tarnation would I want with another man?

This is another kind of love letter, full of affection for a master who moved a student long before he ever met her.

According to the teaching of Rick Bragg, I’ve added in the elements of a strong southern story. There’s reference to a dead mule and a tribute to my dog. I haven’t included a recipe because the only thing that I make that’s truly prize worthy is my mama’s banana pudding and it’s more about your frame of mind and how you stir it than the ingredients.

May 22, 2021

Dear Rick,

A shelf of special books rests beside the window in my office. When my mind is calculating the words, sliding them back and forth across my mental abacus, the page still loose and quiet, I look out the window when cars pass. I’m from the country and my people taught me to track the coming and going of neighbors. When traffic is light, I stare at the shelf. Storage is premium in our ancient house, built in 1898, so the books on that shelf are there on purpose. 

Mama Eudora is in first position. Harper Lee sings alto, followed by Pat Conroy and James Dickey on tenor and bass. Flannery O’Conner is parked between Willa Cather and John Irving. Kathryn Stockett is there representing a triumphant debut and Dale Carnegie reminds me of timeless practices. My family Bible is in the middle spot because it’s tattered at the seams and I’m still Baptist enough to fear not giving it due respect. David Sadaris is there for humor and Cheryl Strayed for bravery. Next is Elizabeth Gilbert because she and Strayed are friends, and together they bring me good juju. The Artist’s Way is there because, well, it’s Julia Cameron. Then there are those books that I get up and pet along the spine, literary talismen of all things southern and true. The books by Rick Bragg

Thank you for your writing.

Thank you for being the journalist who smoked out truth and blew it onto the page through a fine tobacco pipe.

Thank you for being the person who would scrap in a bathroom in New York City because someone insulted Mama Margaret – who is tough as steel and likes a mariachi band.

I have brothers too, and the victories and scars of my formative years involve the likes of those three and our collective shenanigans. The brother next to me has been (mostly) sober for six years now, clinging to Jesus as he once gripped Jim Beam.

Thank you for turning phrases that I have mixed and baked in my brain. “Ava crowed about that for years,” became a tag line in my own family when we couldn’t let something go. (What kind of jackass cow buyer takes the morning’s milk away from babies?)

Thank you for painting words pictures of our beautiful, flawed south. Silas House nailed it, “You love it and you hate it. It hurts you and it heals you.”

I had an Ava. My Granny, Myrtle Jane, and her man, Arthur Calton Barber, who went by AC, Arthur, and Calt. To his grandchildren, he was Paw-Paw, Pap-Paw, and Grandpa, but to me, Granddaddy. I spent a lot of time with him. He taught me to be quiet without ever telling me to shut up – with a cane pole, a red bobber, and gentle instruction that fish only bite when there’s silence. Damn, I miss him and that mud-forsaken pond and all the things he told me without saying a word.

Your work about Jerry Lee Lewis is an act of grace in motion. (Jerry Lee could have sure enough shot you deader than a dead mule with that pistol beneath his pillow. Course, he wouldn’t have meant to, and no charges would have been pressed.)

You have taken on the rich and amplified wrong. Ten point, Times New Roman proving to be mightier and louder than swords of injustice and bullshit.

I have a speckled beauty named Fergie. She’s thirty pounds of auburn and white sass when she should be twenty-two. At thirteen, her eyesight is cloudy and although SHLB and I are not big people, she crowds us to the edges of our respective sides of the bed. She’s a pain in the ass and I love her more than any dog I’ve ever owned. It’s not lost on me when she’s in my lap at the breakfast table, sharing my bacon, that I’m hoping that someone will be this kind to me as I get old. Nor is it lost on you that your Speck is a tough guy knocked down. I hope you don’t mean it when you say that you are closing in on the end of your writing years. That causes me to hold my breath. The world needs your words. 

I’ve followed you like the stray, partly starved, rescue sort of writer that I am. I’ve read your news articles, books, your Southern Living and Garden & Gun pieces. I’ve hung on the wisdom you’ve imparted in the Looking Glass Writers’ Conference and learned by listening to you read your sentences, planted deep as corn in powerful rows of rustling stalks. They go on for miles and I have walked and picked, grateful.

Thank you for your athletic prose, retreads on gravel road kind of writing. Yours is Hank Williams and Patsy Cline kind of literary music that has made me better and made me proud to be from the land of gnats and humidity. If your writing is indigenous to the south, then we are blood kin.

Rick Bragg, of all those books on my special shelf, yours are my favorite.

Love,

Emily