University of Tennessee of Chattanooga English professor Earl Braggs has just publish a memoir, “A Boy Called Boy.” Photo by Mark Kennedy.Earl Braggs’ new memoir, “A Boy Named Boy,” is a small book.
A digest-sized paperback, it slips perfectly into the back pocket of a pair of jeans. That is to say, it travels well.
This is ideal because even though Braggs cautions, “life doesn’t happen in a straight line,” life often does unfold on the open road, where a book like Braggs’ memoir serves as a satisfying travel companion and life atlas.
Braggs, a prize-winning author and the first African-American to hold a tenured professorship in the English department at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, has released his memoir (Wet Cement Press; Berkeley, California) at a moment of national reckoning on race. His students at UTC describe him as “brilliant” and “creative.”
A child of the 1950s, Braggs’ stories of growing up in a small, coastal North Carolina fishing town in the middle of the 20th century recall an era when crushing poverty and casual racism were baked into daily life for many Black people in the South.