A living history -- of a family and a region

The Prince of Frogtown By Rick Bragg, Knopf, 255 pp., $24

A few weeks back, sheriff's deputies in a north Georgia county followed "the sweet smells of sugary corn blended with the bite of distilled alcohol," as the Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter put it, to the site of a moonshiner's still up in the woods across Cane Creek. It was a rare find these days, "a piece of living history," said Sergeant Pat Cook. So rare, in fact, that the deputies thought that after they removed it, they might offer it to a museum.

The living history and folkways of the Southern hill country - including a try at moonshining with a dead possum - are what animates "The Prince of Frogtown," the third and final of Rick Bragg's evocative family memoirs.

Bragg is himself, as he describes one of his informants, "a survivor from an age of storytellers in a place where such people grow wild." But for all his storytelling skills, this is a grim book.

The land of the southern Appalachian foothills had "magic masquerading as nature" - "the round summits of the highlands . . . softened by yellow haze in summer and gray, cool mist in winter . . ." But the people left the hills for the mills "and had died sorry. But they met their quotas and punched their time cards and went home to sleep under quilts dyed with roots and berries, a people neither town nor country, but something in between."

Bragg remembers as a child seeing a man with an empty sleeve, once a guitar player who had dreamed of showing his stuff in Nashville, whose arm had been mangled in a shredder in the cotton mill. "Everything you need to know about a mill village," writes Bragg, "is in that empty sleeve."

In the earlier books - "All Over But the Shouting" and "Ava's Man" - Bragg celebrated the lives of two extraordinary women, his mother and a grandmother. This final volume is about Bragg's father, Charles. He was a slick dresser, with "splashed-on respectability"; a smooth-talking charmer who wrote "I Love You" under the stamps of the letters he sent home from the Marines when he was wooing Bragg's mother.

There are great stories - like the possum in the still, recalled for Bragg by his father's boyhood friend Jack Andrews.

At some point, as teenagers, Charlie and Jack "decided to get rich being bootleggers." They brewed it up in a five-gallon can, the sugar, yeast cakes, and malt syrup, and hid it away in a patch of honeysuckle.

But one day the boys found that a possum had fallen into the souring brew. "We ain't gonna pour it out," Bragg's father declared. They filled their Nehi and Dr Pepper bottles and sold it at a quarter a bottle behind the pool hall. And if any of their customers noticed any unusual flavor, they did not complain.

Jack remembered Charlie laughing, "wondering if any of them boys got any hair in their teeth."

But that "prince" of the mill town known as Frogtown abandons his family as he descends into a state of permanent drunkenness.

There was the tricycle he had bought Bragg for a Christmas present. After a day of drinking, it got run over in the driveway.

And there was the dog he had brought as a present for Bragg's brother. And then, hoping to make some money, matched him in a dogfight but, hung over himself, brought him home eviscerated. That was the night Bragg's mother "started saving dimes, nickels, and pennies, for our escape."

For all the stories, all the characters, all the vivid writing - much of it incorporating folk idioms - this is not quite the perfect book that it should have been.

In his 40s, Bragg married a woman with three sons, two of them grown. Bragg's relationship with the youngest, known only as "The Boy," is described in short vignettes interspersed throughout the book. On their own, they would have made an affecting memoir; here they are somewhat of a distraction.

Michael Kenney is a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge.