Screening Room: Family Pictures

by Alan Lightman

  In one of my letters to him during this period, I wrote:

  I want to apologize for not spending Thanksgiving with you. We have five Cambodian students in the US, attending universities on the East Coast, and they are coming to our house for their Thanksgiving vacation. I wanted to tell you that on my desk is a wonderful photograph of you at the helm of a sailing boat—I am not sure which boat it is. You appear to be about 70 years old in the photo. You are wearing a hat that says “St. Michaels” and a blue windbreaker, and you look happy.

  In another letter, I wrote:

  This is a birthday note, of sorts. As the years go by, the birthdays seem to mean more.… I am beginning to realize what your father did to you.… What I want to say is that I attribute my better qualities to you. You are my strength.… The blood that runs through me is yours.

  Dad never responded to these letters.

  When he was not reading, Dad watched movies. In earlier years, he previewed all the new movies, but now he watched only the classics, with subtitles of course, mostly foreign—Cinema Paradiso, Raise the Red Lantern, Jean de Florette, Das Boot, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The African Queen. We sat in the den, where he had a cushiony, mechanized chair that could tilt forward to allow him an easy approach from his walker. On the table beside the chair, a pile of books. He would read for twenty minutes with the magnifying glass and light attached to his miracle chair, fall asleep for twenty minutes, then wake up and begin reading again, as if the universe had skipped a few eons and then quietly been sewn back together without anyone’s noticing. I could never tell whether, after a nap, he picked up from where he left off, and I developed a theory that he did not read linearly in a book but in scattered islands of text here and there—quite a feat with a crime thriller—and that he somehow formed a narrative partly based on the actual written words of the book and partly based on the dreams in his naps. I suppose that he was preparing himself for eternity.

  Between spurts of reading and naps, we would have fragments of conversations, he in his chair and wearing his chocolate-colored sheepskin slippers and me stretched out on the embroidered couch nearby. These communications were not easy, as I had to write short sentences on his writing pad. After so many years of not being able to talk to this quiet and gentle man, I finally knew what I wanted to say. But I could not say it, or write it. I wanted to apologize. For fifty years, I had sliced deeper his wounds. I had been a silent partner in his humiliation. I wanted forgiveness. But I could not say it. I was ashamed. I wanted also to say that his life had not been a failure. And that too I could not bring myself to say. What I said was: “I love you.” He couldn’t hear me. I wrote down the words on his notepad. “I love you.” He read the words. Then he nodded and smiled and reached up to kiss me. In a few days, I’d be gone again, drawn back into the cavern of my life in the North. I was not able to say what I wanted to say. Perhaps he understood anyway. Could that, in fact, have been the last act of the phasma? A being that knows neither evil nor good but simply joins lines of the world. A being that exists out of time and can see past, present, and future at once.

  While it is true that we could not ponder our minute existence in space and in time without facing a life of paralysis, it is also true that the whirling of our globe through the vast rooms of space relieves us of certain responsibilities. What do we owe to a father or mother, to the soil of a place, to a moment in personal history, when an infinity of time preceded that moment, and an infinity afterward? Viewed from sufficient distance, we are dots. The long line of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, loyalties and betrayals, successes and failures, hauntings and rehauntings, are as one gasp of air. On the other hand, perhaps the very fleetingness of that one gasp, before which lies an infinite cosmos of dumb bloodless matter and after which the same, bestows an extraordinary obligation, an imperative to make that second count, that flash of blood sing. As the planet of memory goes hurtling through space.

  Here is the photograph of Papa Joe and my father on the front steps of the stone house in Nashville. Here is the photograph of M.A. and Celia, Dad, Edward, and Lila, somehow all sitting on the same bench of the grand piano. Here is the photograph of my father and mother on the boardwalk in Guardalavaca, he in his white swimsuit and barefoot, she in sandals. Here is a photograph of me and my three brothers playing shuffleboard at Ridgeway.

  I have found, and I have lost. I have witnessed the glittering cornfields, the labyrinth of magnolias, the temples of childhood and kin. I have heard the wandering slow speech of the southern dominions. I have held the hot soil in my hands. I have smelled the sweet honeysuckle of memory. It is all fabulous and heart-wrenching and vanished in an instant.

  Acknowledgments

  Screening Room owes some of its inspiration to Michael Ondaatje’s lyrical Running in the Family, a partly fictionalized account of his family history in Sri Lanka, and to Peter Taylor’s lovely novel A Summons to Memphis, about family life and manners in Memphis and the South.

  The characters of Joseph Lightman, M.A. and Celia Lightman, Richard Lightman, Jeanne Garretson Lightman, their four sons, Blanche Lee, and Hattie Mae are based on real people of the same names. Stories relating to these characters are for the most part true but have been embroidered by the vagaries of memory and the impulse for drama. Other Lightman characters are loosely based on members of the Lightman and Levy families, with names changed in some cases; some are amalgamations of real people. Lennie and Nate are fictitious. The events surrounding Elvis Presley, Martin Luther King Jr., E. H. Crump, Lloyd T. Binford, and Sam Phillips are historically accurate, as are most of the places and events in Memphis. The biographical details of M.A. Lightman are accurate, including his many accomplishments and his election as president of the Motion Picture Owners Association of America, although the scene at the Willard Hotel in 1932 has been fictionalized. The role of Richard Lightman in the civil rights movement is historically accurate.

  Many people contributed their stories and recollections, including my father, Richard; brothers John, Ronnie, and David; my aunt Jean Sands Lightman; my aunt Nell Levy; family friends Rosalie Rudner, Lenore Binswanger, Jocelyn Rudner, Nancy Bogatin, and Dot Roth. I thank Memphis historians and archivists Patricia LaPointe McFarland, Ed Frank, Gina Cordell, Sarah Frierson, and especially Wayne Dowdy. I thank the Special Collections department of the University of Memphis Libraries and the Memphis and Shelby County Room of the Memphis Public Library and Information Center. Special archives used included the Mississippi Valley Collection (stored at the University of Memphis) and the Sanitation Strike Archives (stored at the University of Memphis). I thank WKNO Television for making their Memphis Memoirs series available to me. Others who gave assistance include Rabbi Micah Greenstein, Richard Colton, and Bill Everett. I thank LaRose Coffey, Janet Silver, and Lucile Burt for critical comments on the manuscript. I also thank my brothers John and David and cousin Nancy Lightman Tashie for reading an early draft of the manuscript. I thank my wife, Jean Greenblatt Lightman, and daughters Elyse and Kara, not only for critical comments on the manuscript, but also for their moral support. Finally, I thank my late father, for graciously tolerating this upheaval late in his life.

  Notes

  Although facts and quotations are referenced in the following notes, in no way does Screening Room aim to be an exhaustive or authoritative history of Memphis.

  COURTSHIP IN THE SWAMPS

  1 “Yesterday, Dean Howard Barthelme”: The passage from the Tulane college bulletin is fictional, although Jeanne Garretson did give dancing lessons to Tulane students in exchange for homework.

  2 “I criticize you all the time”: Letter dated December 1946, in the possession of author (henceforth AL).

  HONEYMOON AT GUARDALAVACA

  1 Jackie Robinson had just made history: All national and international historical events mentioned are accurate.

  2 “You certainly must be crazy”: Memphis Commercial Appeal, April 23, 1947.

  SHORE LEAVE


  1 “inimical to the public welfare”: From the charter of the Memphis Censor Board in 1921. See, for example, Michael Finger, “Banned in Memphis,” Memphis Flyer Online, May 8, 2008, p. 2.

  2 “the downfall of every ancient civilization”: “Economic Equality vs. Social Equality,” Pleasants Papers, box 2, folder: Censors, Board of 1947. See also “Lloyd T. Binford and the Memphis Board of Censors” in The Tennessee Encylopedia of History and Culture, article on Lloyd T. Binford, p. 2.

  3 “who had too familiar an air”: Finger, “Banned in Memphis.”

  SHOW BUSINESS

  1 It was taken as a given: Much of this material is based on an interview with Richard Lightman by Edwin Howard, “After Show Biz Peak, Lightman’s Career Takes a New Tack,” Memphis Business Journal, October 7–11, 1985, p. 33.

  JEW TREE

  1 “be nice to Negroes and Jews”: Allegedly spoken by the president of Southwestern, at 1948 graduation, as remembered by Rosalie Rudner, interview, November 16, 2008.

  2 “God needs man more than man needs God”: James Wax, conversation with AL, 1980.

  PHASMA I

  1 “spatial disorientation”: The report of the National Transportation and Safety Board on the crash of JFK Jr. is NTSB ID NYC99MA178.

  “SEX WRITTEN ALL OVER HIM”

  1 “I’m black, Jack”: Miriam DeCosta-Willis, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Black Culture in Memphis During the 1950s,” in Memphis 1948–1958, ed. Liz Conway (Memphis: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, 1986), p. 74.

  2 “Elvis had sex written all over him”: Sam Phillips, quoted in Richard Buskin, “Sam Phillips: Sun Records,” Sound on Sound, October 2003. http://www.​soundonsound.​com/​sos/​oct03/​articles/​samphillips.​htm.

  STONE QUARRY

  1 “Street walkers as thick as wasps”: Memphis Commercial Appeal, 1909, quoted in Beverly G. Bond and Janann Sherman, Memphis in Black and White (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2003), p. 85.

  2 “I want to be remembered”: Note dated March 26, 1907, in possession of AL.

  “MAY HIS SUBSTANCE NEVER GROW LESS”

  1 the June 1930 issue: All quotes in this chapter from Film and Radio Review, vol. 1, no. 24, June 30, 1930.

  YELLOW FEVER

  1 “Men climbed over women”: Paul R. Coppock, Memphis Sketches (Memphis: Friends of the Memphis and Shelby County Libraries, 1976), p. 178.

  OF MULES AND DUELS

  1 the mule capital of the world: Information on the mule trade and M. R. Meals in Coppock, Memphis Sketches, pp. 74–75.

  2 “more likely to knock down”: This and the following quotations are from the Memphis Daily Appeal, August 27, 1870. See also Coppock, Memphis Sketches, pp. 229–30.

  COTTON

  1 the Mystic Society of the Memphi: Anecdotal material about the society from interviews with Nell Levy and Jean Lightman, January 15, 2009. Also see the article “The Mystic Society of the Memphi,” http://www.​memphi.​com/​part3.​html.

  2 “Why … did [you picture] the Negro king & queen”: Letter to the editor, Time magazine, June 17, 1946. See also http://www.​time.​com/​time/​magazine/​article/​0,9171,793036-1,00.html.

  GOLD-PLATED TELEPHONE

  1 The fellow who perfected this quid pro quo: For a discussion and testimony about Crump’s buying black voters with protection money, see David M. Tucker, Memphis Since Crump (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), p. 24.

  2 upstart Edward Ward Carmak: Crump’s retributions against Carmak and Wallace are discussed in J. Morgan Krousser, Color-blind Injustice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 143.

  3 “unbridled circulation of obscene and licentious books”: Crump, letter to the editor, Memphis Press-Scimitar, November 8, 1946, Edward J. Meeman papers, Mississippi Valley Collection 85, University of Memphis Library, Box 6, Folder 18.

  4 “mangy bubonic rat”: This and the following quotation are from Tucker, Memphis Since Crump, p. 34.

  5 prominent Negro leader Robert R. Church: This episode is discussed ibid., pp. 18–19.

  6 “You have a bunch of niggers teaching”: Spoken to James H. Purdy Jr., advertising solicitor of the Memphis Sentinel, on October 30, 1940, recorded by James C. Dickerson, editor of the Memphis Sentinel, Edward Meeman Papers, Mississippi Valley Collection 85, University of Memphis Library, Box 6, Folder 16.

  BLANCHE’S PECAN PIE

  1 Blanche’s pecan pie: Blanche learned how to make pecan pies from Anne Coleman of Memphis.

  IN THE DARK

  1 Two years earlier, a white mob: Discussed in Clayborne Carson, Tenisha Hart Armstrong, Adrienne Clay, Susan Carson, and Kieran Taylor, eds., The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., vol. 5, Threshold of a New Decade, January 1959–December 1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 34.

  2 That same year, in Alabama: Ibid., p. 35.

  3 I learned about my father’s quiet pioneering work: The book that discusses Richard Lightman’s work in civil rights in the early 1960s is Selma Lewis, A Biblical People in the Bible Belt (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998), p. 198.

  LORRAINE

  1 “Southern backwater”: This and the following quotation are from Time magazine, April 12, 1968.

  About the Author

  Alan Lightman is the author of six novels, including Einstein’s Dreams, which was an international best seller, and The Diagnosis, a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the author of three collections of essays and several books on science. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Granta, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Nature, among many other publications. A theoretical physicist as well as a writer, he has served on the faculties of Harvard and MIT, where he was the first person to receive a dual faculty appointment in science and the humanities. He is the founding director of the Harpswell Foundation, which works to empower a new generation of women leaders in Cambodia.