Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  In the evening, after suppers of cornbread and beans, Elmo and Mamie listened to records on a wind-up Victrola, their single luxury, and sang duets from the hymnal. She had a lovely voice too, and they sounded beautiful together, but she would not sing drinking songs or hobo songs, which were sinful. They were poor but had enough to live, to eat, till the fields went fallow in Richland Parish, till there was nothing better than starvation wages. The newlyweds needed a new start, and lately all their kin had been talking about a town in Concordia Parish wedged between the river and railroads. Two of Elmo’s sisters had married brothers named Gilley and moved to this place, Ferriday, and another sister, who would marry a man named Swaggart, was thinking on it. But the linchpin of it all was Mamie’s lovely older sister, Stella, who had landed the richest man in all Concordia, a speculator in land and people named Lee Calhoun.

  Lee was not a big man physically, or particularly handsome, and if you saw him walking down the dirt street in work-stained khakis, you might have thought less of him than he was; people regretted that. He had a voice bigger than himself, cursed loudly and often, yet built three churches from his own pocket. He came from money, from educated people, but acted like he crawled from under a broke-down Chevrolet. He was smart as to a lot of things, but especially land. He understood that, despite what the scientists said about gravity, what really kept people from drifting off into nothing was the land. The man who controlled it controlled everything worth thinking about.

  Lee Calhoun did not farm but owned dirt and seed and mules and the plain, bare houses, did not ranch but owned the grass. He saw liquor as a commodity, not as a thing he took into himself. He hired his kin to make bootleg whiskey in the deep woods, men who would absorb the risk of hard time the way other men absorbed blisters from a hoe handle. “He was the backbone of the family, I believe, Uncle Lee was.” If not for him, the clan would likely have scattered, “but he held us together, definitely so.” He owned oil wells and knew millionaires, but if you owed him fifteen dollars, he wrote it in a book, and he would come for it the morning it was due. He held no office, but politicians, judges, and sheriffs tipped their hats to him on the street. He rode a big horse around town; any stick he tied it to, he owned it or owned a piece of it. He was the head knocker, plain and simple, and as his wife’s relatives trickled in, he put them to work.

  “I loved my Uncle Lee. He was kind to us. Uncle Lee was a fine man, a great man. But if you wanted twenty dollars out of him,” says Jerry Lee, “you had to get on your knees.”

  In time, the Lewis-Gilley-Swaggart-Calhoun clan would become a thing of some wonder here, in its personalities and configuration. Cousins and in-laws and other relatives married each other till the clan was entwined like a big, tight ball of rubber bands. Here is just one example: Willie Harry Swaggart, whom everyone called Pa, was married to Elmo’s older sister, Ada. Willie Harry’s son, Willie Leon, whom everyone called Son, then married Mamie’s sister, Minnie Bell, Elmo’s sister-in-law and Willie Leon’s aunt, which made Willie Leon into Elmo’s brother-in-law and nephew and would make the progeny of Willie Leon and Elmo, when they came, double kin. “Me and Jimmy [Swaggart] are double first cousins,” says Jerry Lee, his face deadpan, as if such things happen every day. Other relations were too complex to explain, except to say that future children would have not one relation to the clan but two or more. They were, all of them, singers and guitar pickers and fiddlers and piano players, and some preachers and bootleggers, and some bootleggers one month and preachers the next, or both at the same time, which was not unheard of or even that unusual on both banks of the big river, but especially on the Louisiana side.

  Elmo and Mamie were expecting their first child when they arrived in Concordia Parish in time for planting season in ’29 and moved onto a farm owned by Lee Calhoun in a place deep in the woods called Turtle Lake. There were 2,500 souls in Ferriday then, most of them descendants of slaves, but the Depression had a way of bleaching everything gray, and Elmo tugged a cotton sack and did any work he could. The house had no electricity, plumbing, or running water. But in a time when every other man was out of work and a place to live, out of hope and time, where loaded-down, raggedy trucks passed them on the dirt roads on the way to some vague promise of a better life a thousand miles west, Ferriday would do.

  On November 11, 1929, Mamie gave birth to a golden-haired boy. They named him Elmo Kidd Lewis Jr., and even as a toddler he could sing. He was, the relations say, a beautiful boy, obedient, the good son. His mama and daddy called him Junior, and would talk of their hopes and plans for him—Elmo’s dream, really, that the boy might grow up to be a singer on the radio or stage. The boy minded his mama, said sir and ma’am, and liked school, liked church, and carried around a slate and chalk or a pencil and scrap paper to practice writing and spelling. By the time he was in his first year of elementary school, he was writing songs to sing in front of the congregation.

  In 1934 Elmo went to work in one of Lee Calhoun’s other enterprises. Lee made whiskey for years in a kind of shadow corporation, in a magnificent, glowing, fifty-gallon copper still hidden in the woods not far from Elmo’s front door at Turtle Lake. He had made it before Prohibition and would make it after the repeal of the Volstead Act, because such faraway things had little to do with thirst in Concordia Parish or the local law. He never, of course, paid a dime of tax—Lee had a deep disdain for the federal government and most governments and anyone who wanted to boss him the least little bit—so he hired Elmo and his brother-in-law/nephew Willie Leon Swaggart and other kin to increase production, which they did with great success, between frequent testings for quality control. “People said it was good whiskey, the best whiskey,” says Jerry Lee. The local law did not care that Lee Calhoun made liquor; the fact that men would drink whether it was legal or not, taxed or not, was just what was. Illegal liquor made the church people happy, in a way, because it was like having invisible liquor, until a drunk staggered into the middle of Main Street and urinated in the general direction of Waterproof.

  Sometimes Lee would ride to the still to check on things, but he seldom lingered, knowing that the only way the government would successfully link him to the liquor business would be if they caught him standing hip deep in the mash. In winter of ’35, Elmo was in the woods with Willie Leon Swaggart and three others, running off a batch, when the trees around them started shaking and a gang of armed men crashed through and pointed shotguns in their faces. They were Treasury agents, the lowest form of life. They took an ax to the beautiful still and let the lovely whiskey flood across the ground. Then they loaded Elmo and the rest in a truck, and with another man holding a shotgun on them, took off down the road.

  Then providence intervened, though not so much that it would do Elmo any good. As the truck rattled down a dirt road, it passed a very pregnant Minnie Bell Swaggart laboring along the shoulder. She saw Willie Leon sitting in back of the truck and began to sob and run, calling his name. When the agent in charge saw the young woman waddling down the road in tears, he told the truck’s driver to pull over before she gave birth there in the ditch. He asked the prisoners who she was, and Willie Leon told him. The agent thought on this, and told Willie Leon to get out and go home with his wife. Willie Leon and the pregnant Minnie Bell went down the road, praising His name.

  Elmo kept his mouth shut about who owned the still. He knew his family would be cared for, and his crop would be waiting when he got out, because even if he was tighter than Dick’s hatband, Lee Calhoun took care of his own, unless they did some dumb thing like talking to the federals. In January of ’35 he left in chains for the federal prison in New Orleans, sentenced to a year but knowing he would be home in six months. Other men had books or prayer to pass the days, but he just sang. “Daddy told Mama it was ‘nice,’ and said he got three good meals a day,” Jerry Lee says, and in truth the prison turnips and the beets and white beans flavored with salt pork were better than what a lot of families were subsisting on.

  In
late spring, he came home to Ferriday more or less untouched and unchanged, at least as far as anybody could tell, and well fed. He went back to work in the fields, but not in the woods at the still; the federals had warned him that if he was caught making or even hauling liquor again, he would do real time. At night, he showed his namesake how to play his old guitar. The three of them, Mamie and her Elmos, would pretend they were on the radio, like the Carter family, to remind themselves that short cotton and chain gangs and a rising river were not all there was. She was expecting again, and the new baby kicked Mamie hard and often.

  The state was in mourning as Mamie neared her time. On September 8, 1935, Huey Long had strutted down the hallway of his capitol, intent on pushing through a redistricting plan that would remove from the bench a longtime political enemy, Judge Benjamin Pavy. The judge’s son-in-law, a young doctor named Carl Weiss, stepped from the crowd of onlookers and fired a single shot into Long’s body; his bodyguards fired sixty-two rounds into Weiss, most of them after he was dead. Long, the friend of the little man, was laid out in a tuxedo, and two hundred thousand people filed by to see him in repose. One great storm in Louisiana had finally blown itself out; another one, at Turtle Lake, was just beginning.

  The new baby came twenty-one days later, on September 29, 1935, after the last of the cotton was in. “Dr. Sebastian was supposed to deliver me,” says Jerry Lee, who has heard so many stories of the night of his birthing that it is as if he was up there in the rafters himself, looking down. “At least, he was supposed to. . . . Well, he did make it into the house.”

  Mamie knew something was horribly wrong that night. The pain was awful, worse, much worse, than she remembered. Elmo went for the doctor, and she prayed.

  Dr. Sebastian and Elmo could hear her wail as they neared the house.

  “Thank God,” Mamie said, as they came into the room.

  Dr. Sebastian told her to hush, it wasn’t time yet, but to Mamie he seemed a little unsteady on his feet. The doctor had been at home, relaxing with a drink or two.

  Elmo offered him a drink of corn whiskey, to be polite. Dr. Sebastian looked at the clear whiskey the way a scientist could. He examined it for trash, and there was none, and for color. It looked like spring water. This was good whiskey. He unscrewed the lid—it smelled strong and rank and hard, which was also the way corn whiskey was supposed to behave—and took one long, slow, big slash, to be polite, and then another.

  Sometime later, when she knew it was time, Mamie cried out for them, but found only Elmo at her side.

  “Where’s Dr. Sebastian?” Mamie croaked.

  “Over there,” Elmo said.

  “What?”

  “He’s a-layin’ over there,” Elmo said, and pointed across the room.

  Dr. Sebastian was asleep in a chair.

  “Wake him up,” Mamie said.

  Elmo had tried that.

  Dr. Sebastian dreamed.

  “I can handle this,” he told Mamie.

  Of course the child would not be born in the usual way. The baby was breached, turned in the womb, and emerged not head- but feetfirst. Elmo did not really understand the perils of that, but Mamie did. Babies strangled this way, died horribly or were damaged for life, and mothers died in agony.

  Elmo took hold of the baby’s feet and pulled.

  “Watch his arm,” Mamie said, iron back in her jaw.

  Elmo nodded.

  “Watch his head,” she said, and did not remember much after that.

  “Daddy brought me right out,” he says now. “I come out jumpin’, an’ I been jumpin’ ever since.” He likes to say that, likes the idea of it, as he likes the idea that it was his daddy and mama who brought him into the world without help from outsiders: one more little legend inside the larger one. It was a time rich in babies, and in legends. Over in Tupelo, that January, another poor woman gave birth to a son she named Elvis. In Ferriday, in March, Minnie Bell Swaggart, who had rescued her husband from the prison truck, gave birth to her son, Jimmy. Another of the extended family, Edna Gilley, soon gave birth to another cousin, whom she named Mickey. All of them came in the span of two years, all of them somehow anointed, all of them destined to sing songs and bring their gifts to the multitudes in one way or another, with great success but varying degrees of cost.

  Mamie and Elmo named their second son for an actor Mamie sort of remembered, some Jerry-something, and for Lee Calhoun, whose whiskey turned out the lights on Dr. Sebastian, and perhaps a little bit for his grandfather, Leroy Lewis, though family members would argue on whom the boy was named for exactly. It was, regardless, the happiest time of their lives, and it would have stayed that way, if time could have only gone slack, somehow, right then, and pooled deep and still.

  2

  WHISKEY IN THE DITCHES TWO FEET DEEP

  Concordia Parish

  1938

  The serpents balled up in the hot dark over his bed, a whole nest of them tying and untying in knots, scraping quietly across the boards of the attic, eighteen in all. Their rattles sang, but the boy never heard. Odd, how he never heard. But Scripture tells of the slyness of serpents; in the Pentecostal South they slide not only through the still water but across faith and myth. Old men hung serpents on barbed wire to bring the rains, and would not look a serpent in its eyes for fear of being charmed. In the fields of Concordia Parish, old women told of serpents that formed a circle and rolled like a wheel, and re-formed if they were chopped in two. But myth is myth and Scripture is the Word of God, and it tells over and over of the serpents’ duplicity and evil and jealousy, in Eden, Egypt, and Canaan, after God reduced it to a thing that crawled on its belly, and decreed, in Isaiah, that dust shall be the serpent’s meat. The story of the serpents above little Jerry Lee’s bed has endured for seventy years and will endure long after this, as people tell how the rising waters lifted the copperheads and diamondbacks into trees, barn lofts, and rafters. They talk of how surely the serpents would have come down in the night and coiled in the dark corners and under beds if the boy, in his covers, had not seen a big rattler slide through a knothole in the boards above his head, “stuck his head down, and looked right at me” in the dim lamplight in his room.

  “This ain’t your bed,” the boy called up to it.

  The snake hung there, a few feet from his face.

  “Daddy,” the boy said, quietly.

  “Daddy!”

  But Scripture says, too, how a man without fear will go among dragons and serpents and, with God’s sanction, protect his tribe. People tell how Elmo crawled into the dark of the rafters with a kerosene lantern and piece of hard hickory and, catching them in that writhing knot, beat them to mush against the boards till they stopped singing and there was no sound in that tight space but him, breathing hard.

  His daddy could not have been any other kind of man, not weak or goody-goody or ordinary; the boy’s memory could not have endured that. He has forgiven him all the rest. “He was a man. He was a magnificent man,” he says. His father had almost no schooling, “but he was a smart man,” a capable one who could not read a book of literature but could look at a machine and tell you how its pieces fit. In a less desperate place, a more prosperous time, he might have been anything, maybe even been successful, but in the bad years he was what he had to be. It was not a good age for gentle men in Concordia Parish, when men clawed at scraps and fought each other in desperation and drunkenness and sometimes just to prove their worth, when there was no other way it could be. “Daddy didn’t walk around no man,” says Jerry Lee. “His hands were so big he’d just slap people, just slap ’em about, and he never lost no fights.” A lot of people do not see why a man had to fight. “All of that, all that of not being able to do for your family, it’ll get to you, and it got to him. I saw him knock men off the porch,” men who came collecting, or threatening. “He knocked one man off the porch and he fell so hard he broke his leg, just popped him off like he was nothin’, with his left. Wasn’t nothin’ could take my daddy down.
He could beat anything, but one thing. He couldn’t beat the Depression.”

  The busy town had proven no great salvation, after all. Jerry Lee was too small to recall the worst of it, when cotton wasn’t worth the muscle or diesel it took to plow it under, and construction jobs dried up, no matter how far a man drove or rode a boxcar to chase the work, but he remembers how his mama and daddy spoke of it, like it was a war. Elmo could have gone to his brother-in-law, Lee Calhoun, and begged for a little extra, but that was not in him, so he walked downtown to the grocery and threatened the storekeeper, backed him up against the wall. “He demanded food,” says Jerry Lee. “He told ’em, ‘You got a store full of food here, man, and my family, my wife, my boys, ain’t got nothin’. And he walked out of there with the food he asked for, and when he could, when he got money, he’d pay the man back. All I know is, my daddy never let us go without.” His daddy cleared swamps, dug stumps, and stood in line with other men to do any job that came along, and their families waited and prayed, even the backsliders, for things to ease. It had to ease. How could a man’s labor be worth so little as this?

  There was only one man hiring. After the raid that sent Elmo and Lee Calhoun’s other in-laws to prison, Lee was out of the whiskey business . . . for about a week. He found a new place to set up in the trees and had another still constructed of even newer copper that gleamed like new money, and in no time his kin were running off good liquor again, for it was one of the certainties of hard times that a man could not be so poor he could not find money for liquor. But the consequences of getting caught were serious now. Elmo and the other in-laws, once convicted in federal court, had lost all the grace they would receive. Mamie asked him not to go back to it, but there was no denying that liquor money was better than the bare subsistence he made in the field, and they were already beholden to Lee Calhoun, already living in his house on a farm that grew only debt.