Can You Break the Class Ceiling?

Rick Bragg’s memoir, All Over But the Shoutin’, reminds me that each of us has a unique story to tell. More so, the stories of others that attract us do so, in part, because they mirror and enlarge our own story.

Bragg’s personal story is about poverty and having to prove oneself and cast off the label of “poor white trash”—which he does by winning a Pulitzer—and wearing a chip on one’s shoulder despite that. It’s also about hating the rich for what they have that you don’t, and doing right by one’s kinfolk and making them proud, and taking care of them when you can.

In effect, it is a story about class and Bragg’s personal struggle with it.

Bragg was a New York Times journalist and the stories he reported on were of the oppressed, whether they were in the slums of New York, on the beaches of Miami, or in the warzones of Haiti. His subject matter was dramatic, fueled by the craft of a seasoned storyteller, and filtered through the lens of a southerner who understood, first-hand, what poverty was.

“We are the stories we tell,” wrote Teresa Jordan, in an anthology, The Stories That Shape Us. But truth is subjective. Memory is permeable. Stories change depending on the storyteller.

They also carry an archetypal underpinning. That deeper current reflects back to the storyteller not only his own personal quest but also the larger social one his story has the power to impact.

M. Carolyn Miller, MA, designs narrative- and game-based learning. She also writes and speaks about the power of story in our lives and world. www.cultureshape.com