We Were Brothers
Page 11
Toward the end of the summer 2013, I wrote to my brother’s sons. I said, “I am truly sorry that your Daddy ain’t around to read this memoir. I’m rough on him here and there, but I’m rough on myself, too . . . but, hey, that’s what a troubled brotherhood is about. I’m trying to tell the story as best I can. He and I had the best times the last few years he was alive. We buried our hatchets and enjoyed a few short years without an instance of anger or discord. In a way, this memoir is an homage to him as well as a history of our burdened brotherhood.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Jeannie Braham, Paul Mariani, Bret Lott, Mira Bartok, Ann Patchett, and Tony Johnston for generously reading early drafts and parts of early drafts and offering helpful advice.
At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga: Verbie Prevost, Steve Cox, Chapel Crowden, Kittrell Rushing, Hugh Prevost.
My good friend Charles Johnson.
Dr. Timothy Parsons for medical advice.
Todd Moser for photographing his great-grandfather’s sword for me.
Tyson Moser for telling me stories about his daddy.
My brother, Tom; my step-sister Jeanne; my cousin Wayland, all of whom allowed me to interview them when the project was only an idea. They have all gone on ahead.
Mildred Rawlings, director of the Hedges Library at Baylor School and her colleagues Betsy Carmichael and Barbara Kennedy.
Karen Brown and her associates in the Local History and Genealogy Department of the Chattanooga Public Library.
Kathy Pories for making the story better than it was.
Craig Popelars for getting the first draft on Kathy Pories’s desk.
And most of all to my beloved wife, Emily Crowe, for loving me, and for believing in me and this project. I love you, Miss Em, and this book is dedicated to you.
Parts of Brothers have previously appeared, in different forms, in the Sewanee Review, Image Journal, the Oxford American, the Southern Review, the Ontario Review, and Parenthesis.
BARRY MOSER’s work is represented in the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other museums around the world. He has illustrated and/or designed more than 350 books, including Moby-Dick, Frankenstein, The Divine Comedy, and the King James Bible. His edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland won a National Book Award. He is currently the Irwin and Pauline Alper Glass Professor of Art and the Printer to the College at Smith College. (Author photo by Cara Moser.)
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Published by
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© 2015 by Barry Moser. All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-61620-544-7