Changes

|title=Redbirds

|author=Rick Bragg

|date=May 1999

|isbn=1860463975

}}

Rick Bragg was born in the deep South of the United States, in Alabama. His father was a violent, hard-drinking man who regularly beat his wife; once as a small child, Bragg saw his mother tip away his fathers 'likker' and watched when his father returned and she simply stood there, took off her glasses and said, "Don't hurt my teeth." His mother was a determined, strong-willed, loving woman, who spent her entire life struggling to protect her sons from their father, the effects of poverty and the ignorance that had so constricted her own life and marriage. After years of abuse his father finally abandoned his wife and children when Bragg was only six. His mother moved the family to live with her parents where she struggled to scratch a living picking cotton and taking in washing so that her children could live just a little above the poverty line. She went without a new dress for almost twenty years. Sometimes they needed money so badly that she and her sons went trawling the garbage heaps for bottles to return for a cent or two. They were not alone, but it must have been so hard for an honest, proud woman and it's heartbreaking to read: