Screening Room: Family Pictures

by Alan Lightman

  Ten miles east of Downtown, where M.A. and Celia lived, it was quiet. In fact, their house on Cherry was a mile beyond the eastern edge of the city. Much of the area was farmland and open fields. For relaxation, M.A. liked to drive down the dusty little streets with hardly any traffic lights to slow him, past the churches, to Perkins and Poplar, where there was a little pharmacy and an ice-cream shop, and sometimes as far east as Davis White Spot, a restaurant that looked like a private farmhouse in the country, sometimes out the county road to the Lausanne school for girls on Massey. M.A. must have needed the serenity of East Memphis, far from the river and the noise of Downtown and the high-voltage sparks of the rest of his life.

  To manage that high-voltage life—his movie theaters, his bridge tournaments, the many boards and committees he chaired—M.A. required his home to run smoothly, and for that he had a domestic staff (in addition to Celia): his cook, Hattie Mae; his housecleaner, Lucinda; his chauffeur, Willie; and his yardman, Eli—all Negroes and all grateful for the work. In the late 1930s, Hattie Mae moved into a little room attached to M.A.’s garage. She had been living in Orange Mound, a Negro neighborhood between Lamar, Southern, and Semmes, but after some white folks rode through in a Buick one night and threw raw eggs at her and her friends, she no longer felt safe there. She didn’t mind so much leaving Orange Mound, but she grieved moving away from Mount Moriah Baptist Church, which she had attended every Sunday since she was seven years old.

  Even at a young age, Hattie Mae had enormous buttocks. Evidently one was larger than the other, because she listed to one side when standing or walking. She loved turnip greens cooked in mounds of pork fat and heavily buttered biscuits, and she had frequent gallbladder attacks. One day in the mid-1940s, her pain was so bad that she decided to get her gallbladder removed. There being few hospitals that treated Negroes, she went to Collins Chapel Hospital, which had been founded by the Collins Chapel Church and was staffed by Negro physicians and nurses. A few days later, M.A. went to visit her at the hospital, a two-story red clapboard building on Ashland Street. “I jes wants to come home, Mr. Lightman,” said Hattie Mae. “They fixed me up, now I wants to come home.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I feels good, Mr. Lightman.”

  M.A. was impressed with the quick success of Hattie Mae’s operation. Following his usual modus operandi, he immediately asked to meet the director of the hospital, a Dr. W. S. Martin, and was led to a tiny room next to the kitchen. There he was surprised to see another Negro, sitting at the desk and wearing a nice coat and tie. M.A. introduced himself. He was visiting Hattie Mae Harris, he explained, who was in his employ. Dr. Martin nodded. M.A. walked over and looked at the diplomas on the wall. LeMoyne Institute, Meharry Medical College, Bellevue Hospital in New York. “I never saw so many colored doctors,” said M.A. “I didn’t know there were any colored doctors.”

  “Did you think we were all shoeshine boys, Mr. Lightman?” said Dr. Martin.

  M.A. sat down. He had made a mistake, he realized. You learn from mistakes. “I like what I’ve seen here,” said M.A. “I’d like to help. I’d like to help raise funds for the hospital. You need funds, don’t you?”

  “We take care of ourselves,” said Dr. Martin, gazing steadily at M.A.

  “I want to help,” said M.A.

  “You’re the owner of Malco, aren’t you,” said Dr. Martin.

  “Yes.”

  Dr. Martin paused. “OK, you can help us. Thank you.”

  And M.A. Lightman, a white man, became head of fundraising for the Collins Chapel Hospital. And that, too, became part of the ripple he would leave in the cosmos. From time to time over the next decade, he got telephone calls at home, from strangers, saying, “Why are you helping those jigaboos?”

  “Somebody with that kind of power,” says Nate, “the creation of a phasma was inevitable.” We’re driving east on Walnut Grove, passing Baptist Hospital. “It’s a miracle he didn’t burn himself up sooner,” says Nate. “But he had his fishing. That’s where he relaxed. Bridge was not really a hobby for M.A. Bridge was a blood sport. His hobby was fishing.”

  Once a month, M.A. and Hank Davis and Dougie Jemison drove out to Horseshoe Lake, in Arkansas, about thirty-five miles southwest of Memphis. They owned a little marina shack there, built on stilts at the edge of the lake and surrounded by ancient cypress trees, and they kept a beat-up metal boat with a five-horsepower engine. Most seasons, they fished for largemouth bass and panfish, but sometimes they could catch crappie and catfish. Catfish was M.A.’s favorite. He would bread it with white cornmeal, then fry it in hot peanut oil. When the fish was a golden brown, he sprinkled on just a tad of lemon pepper. He and Hank and Dougie cooked the fish on a propane stove, best accomplished within a few hours of hauling the catch into the boat. The shack had three cots, where they slept some nights so that they could go out on the lake before dawn the next day. They fished in the rain, in the heat of the summer, in the cold of winter, once while it was snowing. On rare occasions, they didn’t feel like fishing, and they would sit out on the deck, Hank and Dougie drinking beer, M.A. lemonade, and listen to a country music station in Tunica. M.A. didn’t much care for country, but Hank and Doug didn’t much care for catfish.

  M.A. didn’t have to watch his back with Hank and Dougie. Hank owned a clothing and shoe store, inherited from an uncle, and Dougie sold life insurance. Both were older than he, both on their second marriages; Hank was completely bald and overweight, Dougie stumbled more every year from advancing multiple sclerosis. It must have been amazing to M.A. that he could pass hours in the boat with Hank and Dougie talking about nothing more than the trips they had made to visit their children, the crazy bets they had made with friends, their wives. They were sweet men, M.A. must have thought, and he probably loved them. They were simple men. When they went home, they had their financial problems and their health problems and the complications of their lives, but they did not suffer great defeats, or great victories, because they lived on a small stage. They did not reach for what was outside of themselves, as he did. In a way, M.A. must have envied them. But only a little. He would never give up what he had, that thing he couldn’t talk about to anyone. M.A. nourished, he cherished, he celebrated that sleepless biting animal that lived in his stomach and left him no peace.

  Yellow Fever

  My second week home. Uncle Ed’s funeral was ten days ago. Or maybe twelve.

  We’ve been driving for hours, passing through neighborhoods I faintly recall—a cousin, two brothers, Lennie squeezed into the backseat. It has been raining.

  “Where are we?” I ask. “Wasn’t there a defense depot here?”

  “Torn down. Bros, you have been gone long.”

  As I remember it, Memphis, like Gaul, was divided into three parts: Downtown, butting against the Mississippi River on the west; Midtown; and East Memphis. In the 1920s to 1970s, before its revitalization, Downtown was home to many of the city’s black residents, except those who lived in Orange Mound, south of Southern Street between Midtown and East Memphis. Beale Street was downtown. The Peabody Hotel was downtown. All the old clubs and hotels and music houses lodged themselves downtown. Today Midtown is a mix of working-class and affluent families. In this area, you also have High Point Terrace and Berclair, northeast of the university, with homes built in the 1940s and 1950s for returning GIs. East Memphis, near Poplar Avenue, has always housed well-to-do white families in neighborhoods like Belle Meade and Hedgemore, as well as shopping malls and office buildings. Go just a mile south from Poplar and you see Hispanic and black families living in shacks, with their laundry on clotheslines.

  In the mid-1960s, in high school, I dated a girl from Whitehaven, a working-class neighborhood in South Memphis. Suddenly, her name comes to me. Sandra. We met at a community theater. She was a good actress, and she had curly brown hair and long eyelashes. I visited her house in Whitehaven many times, but she felt uncomfortable coming to mine in East Memphis. And she could never unde
rstand why I wanted to go away from Memphis for college. I remember the roundness of her face.

  The neighborhoods merge like the hours. Somehow night has fallen. Lennie rolls down the window and lights a cigarette. “Your father is the most generous man I ever met,” she says between drags. “He used to give away thousands to charities—the International Red Cross, poor people in Appalachia, Save the Children, Save the Whales, environmental groups. And the Democratic Party. He got on everyone’s list. When your mother complained that he was being too generous, he promised to cut back, but he couldn’t. One day, his accountant called him up and told him that he had completely plowed through his capital and couldn’t afford to give away another penny. Even that wouldn’t have stopped him. What stopped him was going deaf. He can’t hear people on the phone asking for money anymore.”

  “He never knew how much money he had in the bank,” I say. “Maybe that’s why he was so generous.”

  “Richard is just generous,” says Lennie.

  Now, we’re driving on dark little streets, lost somewhere south of Downtown. At the edge of our headlights, rabbits scamper across the road.

  “I think it’s a few streets up on the left. Maybe not.”

  “When was the last time you were in this area?”

  “Twenty years ago.”

  We turn down a street, hit a dead end, back up. Sweet smell of magnolia. On the next street, lights go on in a brick house, then off, like a summer firefly. A lone car passes. Then another street.

  Finally, we see the sign on a wrought-iron gate: Temple Israel Cemetery. A small building, a chapel, dark silhouettes. In the distance, the gray nubs of gravestones in a line, like vertebrae. This is what I have come to find, the grave. Perhaps this is what I’ve been searching for, perhaps this will put an end to my confusions about him, my grandfather. We park our car and wander down the gravel paths. Ronnie has brought a flashlight.

  “Over there.”

  “Who are all of these people?”

  And then we find the place, the two headstones, M.A. Lightman and Celia Sapinsley Lightman. And the damp ground below. Here. I stare in shock at the ground, at the spot. I can hear my breathing. Clouds of mist shimmer in the beam of the flashlight. Is this all? It seems a joke that this patch of earth pretends to encompass the remains of M.A. I imagine looking down through the wet soil, deeper, until I reach the bones—there, only a few feet below me. His bones. They are only bones, only bones.

  Driving back, we take a detour through Downtown. Restaurants have closed, and the streets are empty. Neon lights silently flicker on and off. Through the glass window of a hotel reception area, we see a night clerk sitting at the desk.

  At the corner of Adams and Third, we stop at St. Peter’s Catholic Church, with its two Norman Gothic towers looming in the night sky like the guard posts of a European fortress. Ronnie, who works in the neighborhood and has always been the most clever of the four brothers, miraculously produces a key and lets us in a side door. Are we breaking the law? We talk in whispers. Using our flashlight to find our way, we walk single file down dim aisles, past the elaborate altar with the two disciples standing below Christ on the cross, past the stained-glass windows. We sit in a dark pew. Sections of a filigreed brass gate gleam in the low light like the eyes of little forest animals. The place smells of linseed oil. Ronnie tells us that across the street, at the old LaSalette Academy, the Dominican sisters treated victims of the yellow fever epidemic in 1878. Three years before Papa Joe arrived in the South. People called it the “black vomit.” Seventeen thousand Memphians were infected and five thousand died. Dead bodies piled up faster than undertakers could bury them. Some people expired so suddenly they literally dropped in their tracks. Other victims managed to crawl into this very church, to pray in their last hours or to receive final rites. Twenty-five thousand souls fled the city on railroads. “Men climbed over women and children to force their way through the windows of overloaded escape trains,” said a publication at the time.

  I conjure the scene: Sleep-deprived doctors and nuns in their wrinkled white habits fighting a demon whose nature was unknown. Hemorrhaging patients were carried in on stretchers and laid on the floor of the academy across the street. Perhaps brought here for their last rites, in this wooden pew. Suddenly standing, dizzy, I run down the dark aisle, out the side door, into air. It is night, it is night, and the stars are quiet lights in the sky.

  Well after midnight, the car deposits me at my father’s house. My brothers offer a sleepy goodbye and head off into the night. At this hour, my father has long since gone to bed, and the only light visible is the lamp outside his front door, its glow muffled by the humid southern air. I reach in my pocket for the two keys, one to the outer iron-grated door and one to the inner wooden door—all the houses here in East Memphis being heavily barricaded against break-ins and robberies. Slowly, I walk up the long driveway, past the large oak around which my brothers and I played cowboys and Indians, past the lawn that meanders about the trees and flower beds moving up from the street to the house like a beckoning sea and sweeping all the way to M.A.’s house next door. My father was proud of this lawn and used to have it fertilized and reseeded several times a year.

  Walking toward the dim eye of the lamp, I suddenly remember a story my mother told me just before she died. I had forgotten it until now. One day in the mid-1950s, M.A. stopped here on his way home from the office to deliver a package to Dad. Although he lived next door, M.A. rarely visited. For family gatherings, we went to his house. It was just before dinner. My father, then in his mid-thirties, would have been sitting in his wingback chair in the living room, alone, reading the newspaper while my mother did battle with four young children elsewhere in the house.

  The package brought by M.A. that day may have been a collection of business papers to sign, or perhaps the copy for a movie advertisement Dad had designed and M.A. had edited. Afterward, my grandfather evidently thought he would take a shortcut to his house next door. Instead of driving down our driveway, right on Cherry for fifty feet, and then up his own driveway, M.A. drove his car straight across Dad’s lawn, destroying the grass and leaving deep ruts in the ground.

  Of Mules and Duels

  Lennie: “You are positively wilting, my dear. You’ve been in Boston too long. Did you know that M.A. and Celia had a mule named Bob? Kept him out in the barn behind M.A.’s house. Seventy years ago and more.”

  Me: “I did know that. I thought …”

  Harry: “Lila said he smelled like a pile of fresh manure and looked at you cross-eyed. Wasn’t there some story about Bob and Celia?”

  Lennie: “Bob had a fascination with Celia’s hats. He nipped one of them right off her head, a wide-brimmed sun hat. Chewed it to shreds in ten seconds flat. Celia acted like nothing had happened. She went back into the house and came out with a different hat, a beautiful thing with a ribbon. I think Celia put ribbons on everything. She used ribbons for bookmarks. Every book in the house was hers, except for M.A.’s crime novels. Anyway, Celia had a whole closet full of hats. She began to gently scold Bob about the first hat, but gently you know, Celia was the most gracious person in the world, and that mule lurched sideways and took a bite out of her second hat, and a clump of Celia’s hair with it. After that, M.A. got furious and wanted to sell Bob to a work farm, but Celia wouldn’t let him. She tried to get on Bob’s good side by feeding him rye bread, which he gobbled up. But whenever she wore a hat, he took a bite out of it. Anybody else could wear two hats at once and Bob wouldn’t show the slightest interest.”

  Harry has gotten himself going now. A little-known fact, says Harry, is that Memphis was once the mule capital of the world. Before the Civil War, the first mule pens were on Jefferson, and then they moved to Third Street, where the converging railroad tracks allowed the loading and unloading of a dozen stock cars at the same time. A stockyard on McLemore, just west of Third, could hold four thousand mules. In the 1890s, auctions sold as many as a thousand mules per day. Mul
es from Memphis went to the Spanish-American War and then on to South Africa for the Boer War.

  According to a historian named Paul Coppock, says Harry, the most fabulous mule auctioneer in Memphis was M. R. Meals, called the Colonel. Meals, who weighed in at three hundred pounds, hurled out his patter in a high-pitched chant that charmed both buyers and animals. The Colonel could sell two mules a minute.

  Some of the buildings that once housed the old mule barns stood well into the mid-twentieth century. One was on the north side of Monroe, east of Fourth, the establishment owned by H. T. Bruce. Now the space is occupied by an apartment complex. Not far away are the old buildings of the cotton trade on Front Street, many still standing. There is the F. G. Barton cotton factors building. At number 56, you can still find the old Fulton & Sons Cotton building of red brick, with semicircular windows bordered by Gothic-like stone. As I listen to Harry, I realize I was right there at 56 Front Street two days ago, on Sunday. Next door is an ancient wooden building with crumbling shutters, boarded up. On a quiet Sunday morning, with no people or cars, Front Street feels as if it has slept through the last hundred years. As I walk past the old buildings with the Mississippi in view, I

  am alone in this comfortable old glove, dusty side streets, glass storefronts, the whistle of steamboats, the clop-clop of horse hooves, the shouts of the bidding from open windows of the cotton exchange, smells of the oil from the railroads, magnolias and the perfumes of southern ladies.