Singing in a Strange Land
Page 8
C. L.’s ministerial schedule structured much of their family life. To prepare the sermons each week demanded concentrated periods of time, as did his studies, meetings, and pastoral duties. Sunday, of course, was intensely busy: the 11:00 A.M. service (which might last two or more hours) followed an 8:00 A.M. Sunday school session and preceded the mid-
afternoon prayer meeting for youth. Later on Sunday evening, the congregation gathered again for a second service. If there were no guest preachers for one of the services, Franklin preached twice on a given Sunday, introducing his sermons with his signature hymn, Rachel’s favorite, “Father, I Stretch My Hands to Thee,” all without the benefit of a microphone. As his reputation grew, other ministers called on him as a guest preacher or invited him to preach a week-long revival in another city. Little wonder, then, was Vaughn’s recollection through the child’s eye: “Mostly, Mother really took care of us because dad was always gone all the time, always going. So, she really raised us.” There were some quiet moments, when the frenetic pace eased. Semial, Barbara’s younger brother, recalled hearing that after the children were asleep, Barbara and C. L. would read into the night and share their ideas. But certain of C. L.’s activities would fragment even those moments.27
On November 17, 1940, Mildred Jennings gave birth to a daughter she named Carl Ellan. Mildred was then a teenager, “a girl, quite young,” her daughter recalled, and a member of New Salem, as were her parents. Sometime during her pregnancy or soon after the delivery—the timing is not clear—the new mother told her parents that the baby’s father was her twenty-five-year-old pastor, C. L. Franklin. Their response is unknown, but after the birth they sent their daughter away to relatives in Shelby County, outside the city limits, while they kept their granddaughter to raise themselves. Carl Ellan remained in close touch with her mother as she grew up. Franklin visited but a few times when she was an infant, family members later informed her, but she has no memory of him in her youth. It would be eighteen years before father and daughter spent any time together.28
At the time, at least a portion of the congregation knew about C. L.’s daughter. As a sixteen-year-old church member in 1940, Alma Hawes Black sharply explained years later, she and her friends not only knew about C. L.’s involvement with Mildred Jennings but heard as well adult church members and her parents at home discuss the issue. Some churchwomen were so upset, Black stated, that for some time afterward, they chaperoned young girls at church functions their pastor attended. This public knowledge of so private a pain would have been deeply troubling to Barbara. Family stories passed down on her mother’s side have led Carl Ellan to believe that her birth was the result of a brief sexual encounter and not a sustained affair. If true, and it seems plausible, Barbara might have found over time the will to forgive her husband. But Jennings family traditions speak of separations of unknown intensity and duration between Barbara and C. L. during these Memphis years. There was also talk in the congregation, some church members recalled six decades later, not only about Mildred Jennings but of other affairs as well.29
Mildred Jennings suffered, too. Seduced by her pastor, she was in effect banished from her parental home and her church community, from friends and from her child. That her parents may have made those arrangements in an effort to contain the scandal may not always have been a consolation.
Franklin never spoke publicly of the impact of his infidelity on his marriage, nor did he immediately acknowledge his paternity within the family. It was not until 1958 that his other children learned of Carl Ellan’s existence. What C. L. did do was to continue to build his career, ever more aware of his magnetic appeal and preaching prowess. He was, of course, not the first Protestant cleric to father a child outside marriage. Baptist ministers had a reputation for affairs with women in the congregation, and Lizzie Moore, a New Salem member at this time, pointedly noted her pastor’s appeal to women who were drawn “from far and near” when he preached.30
But Franklin seemed to think that the real threat to his ambitious career plans was less the fact of his paternity than open discussion about it. An affair with a consenting, adult woman—while not to be proclaimed publicly—could indeed remain a private matter. For a pastor to press himself on a young congregant, however, violated multiple trusts within the church community. The private sexual lives of public men were rarely acknowledged during the 1940s, save when the inability to maintain surface normality allowed a major scandal to erupt. Franklin, who neither acknowledged Carl Ellan publicly nor requested forgiveness, was not the only pastor to find in the greater good of his divine mission the very grounds to suppress discussion of behavior that would also harm personal ambition. Indeed, he may have reasoned from within his faith that his sins were, in fact, between him and his God alone. More than a decade later, he chanted his cry from the pulpit for a more general forgiveness from his sins that possibly included this moment as well. “O Lord,” he began,
Lord, when I go back through my life,
I’m doing wrong all the time,
I bow down and tell him,
“Lord,
Would you give me strength/to overcome/my weaknesses.”
How he prayed in private in 1940 is not known.31
Barbara’s options in this difficult moment were profoundly constrained. C. L.’s schedule drove their life in such a way that left limited time for them together. In addition, her relationship with those in the church who knew of these events perhaps now required an additional reserve to protect her own hurt. And yet Barbara persevered, in her own way adding to that impression of normality. She remained C. L.’s wife, bore him two more children, and continued her role in the church, where her support was even more essential for her husband’s career. Socially, of course, her choices were sharply limited; for only a few women was divorce a perceived option in that Afro-Baptist world. Practical concerns loomed as well. Barbara was, in effect, an unpaid adjunct in her husband’s church. Like many women in that era, Barbara possessed few skills and fewer resources beyond domestic work to enable her to survive with her children apart from her husband. How she or her husband acknowledged this unequal dynamic within their relationship is unknown. But there was another consideration. Barbara’s religious faith flowed from a commitment to the central Christian promise of forgiveness and the possibility of redemption for all of humanity’s sinners. How could she, a penitent herself before her God, withhold from the man she undoubtedly loved what she herself desired in this world as in the next? So they kept going. Settled in at 406 Lucy Street, Barbara gave birth to her second daughter, Aretha Louise, at home in March 1942. Two years later, Barbara delivered their third daughter and last child, Carolyn.32
From a child’s perspective, life on Lucy Street was charmed. Vaughn, the only Franklin child old enough to retain strong memories of life during World War II, emphasized that as a ten-year-old, he never knew about segregation because the white world rarely impinged on his childhood activities. He lived in an all-black neighborhood, attended a school with black teachers and administrators, and worshiped in a church that few, if any, whites ever entered. He thought his mother was “a very strict disciplinarian,” but so were the neighbors who, if they “saw you do something wrong,” Vaughn recalled wryly, “they would whip your tail and then tell your parents.” Both sets of grandparents visited, and Vaughn especially remembered the visits of his mother’s brothers, who would take him on his “little Schwinn bicycle . . . up and down Beale Street,” where he would hear “this blues music coming from these different clubs.”33
For C. L. and Barbara, the neighborhood also proved attractive. As a circuit preacher in Mississippi, C. L.’s path frequently crossed those of two brothers and fellow Baptist ministers, Jasper and A. R. Williams. C. L. occasionally had preached at Jasper Williams’s church in Greenwood, and over time the three men became close friends. The Williams brothers came “out of Mississippi with Reverend Franklin around the same time,” Jasper Williams Jr. recollected, and by 1942,
they all lived on Lucy Street in Memphis, with A. R. Williams next door to the Franklins, just across the street from Jasper Williams Sr. and his family. If old enough, the children had the run of each other’s houses. C. L. was closest with his next-door neighbor, A. R. Williams. The two men played checkers regularly, the games framed by both friendly competitiveness and continuous, prolonged conversation. Williams Sr. was more of a manuscript preacher, one who wrote out his sermon and neither chanted nor evoked intense emotional reactions. C. L. and A. R. shared the whooping style in their preaching.34
Increasingly, Franklin’s preaching, the foundation of his growing prominence, possessed an undeniable blues sensibility. He “played” his voice, not a guitar, and he prowled the sanctuary as he preached rather than the stage. But for C. L., as for many other ministers nurtured in southern black culture, both expressions addressed the spiritual and physical pain that daily informed life in the segregated world. At the very center of the sacred and secular performances by these talented soloists, an ability to improvise in word and tone allowed each to seek the emotional core in their audience. As performers they stood out from the audiences they addressed, facing them as unique individuals, even celebrities, free to interpret received texts, to reach inward to voice the deepest emotions, and to create new sensibilities. Vocal improvisations dominated: the timbre ranged from falsetto to a full-throated groan within a given song or sermon, and vibrato, the wavering vocal quality that elongated vowels and word endings, raised emotions and signified meaning. For both bluesman and preacher, the intimate pattern of call and response, where audience and artist sought to draw out—to elongate—the essence of the other in a joined search for deliverance, underscored the very communal nature of the performance. The messages offered were not, of course, always identical, but there was a common bond. One Mississippi-born Baptist preacher, who defined the blues as “a worrying mind,” thought only someone with a Christian perspective on sin and the soul could sing them.35
Surprisingly, Vaughn Franklin has no memory of a record player in the family home on Lucy Street. “We never did hear it” at home, he declared, even on the radio. He did not “have the slightest idea” what music his parents might have listened to at home, but he explicitly remembered the limits on his listening: “’Cause all I was listening to was gospel—and that was it.” By the 1940s, a blues influence already infused religious music, a consequence of the innovations of Thomas A. Dorsey and others. Yet the pattern C. L. imposed at home in Memphis (Vaughn remembered him as “a very, a very strict person”) may have reflected what he thought fathers with aspirations for themselves and their children should do. Among many black Memphians with aspirations and ambitions there existed a widespread, intensely negative image that connected the music of Beale Street with near-rampant sexual promiscuity, drug use, and the persistent violence that contributed to the city’s national reputation. For a young aspiring minister not yet thirty, who had already risked much indulging his sensuality, Beale Street and its images were not associations to cultivate overtly.36
Perhaps the key word here is “overtly.” Beale Street was, as longtime resident George W. Lee wrote in 1934, “the Main Street of Negro America . . . a place of smoking, red-hot syncopation.” W. C. Handy, popularly known as the “father of the blues,” helped establish the Street’s reputation when, some years before, he played dances in a park on Beale for crowds that approached a thousand people. “I remember the hands in particular—ebony hands, brown hands, yellow hands, ivory hands,” he recalled, “all moving in coordination with nimble dancing feet.” For all of its mythic power, the heart of the Street’s shops and clubs were crowded into the short seven blocks between Fourth and Front Streets. There, for a moment, Handy thought, people “had forgotten yesterday and never heard of tomorrow.” Blues artists embellished the Street’s image further, and their recordings broadcast the news nationally. For bluesman Hosea Woods, one of the Street’s major appeals was obvious:
I’m going to Memphis
stop on Fourth and Beale
If I can’t find Roberta
I hope to find Lucille.
The sexual excitement that permeated images of the Street and neighboring Gayoso Avenue, where most of the brothels actually were, touched women as well. Ethel Waters urged her female listeners across the black South that when a “Memphis man comes knocking at the door . . . If you know your business let him in / Because he is so different when loving begins.” Bessie Smith turned the image around as her “Beale Street Mama” demanded of her wandering man, “It isn’t proper to leave you mama all alone,” and threatened, “Beale Street papa, don’t mess around with me / There’s plenty of petting that I can get in Tennessee.” Some perceptive whites caught the excitement as well. Sam Phillips, who would later record many great southern singers—from B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, and Rufus Thomas to Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash—on his Sun Record label, first discovered Beale Street as a sixteen-year-old in 1939. He and his friends, all young white Alabamians, “drove down Beale Street in the middle of the night and it was rockin’! The street was busy. It was so active—musically, socially. God, I loved it!”37
Whites were certainly a presence on Beale Street. George Lee’s quip that the Street was “owned largely by Jews, policed by the whites, and enjoyed by the Negroes” was a partial truth that reflected a tortured, very American, racial classification.38 For black Memphis, Beale Street was the crossroads where rural manners and expectations discovered electric, urban possibilities and from that fusion created new visions. Despite a sharply limited black entrepreneurial presence, Beale remained a beacon to black southerners throughout the Mississippi valley. On Saturdays, the “country people” thronged to its shops, coming by wagon, Model-T, and horseback, Lee witnessed, to “bargain with the Jews for clothing, buy groceries at the Piggly-Wiggly, and fish and pork chops of the Greek, and sometimes moonshine in the ‘blind pigs’.” Children as well reveled in the excitement, enjoying a piece of candy or a small toy as a reward for a week’s worth of farm chores. By sundown, most families pointed homeward. Saturday night, however, was another experience, one that belonged “to the cooks, maids, houseboys and factory hands,” Lee noted. “For on this big night of the week . . . the color and tempo of the street reaches its highest point.” Here the hands and feet Handy had put in motion moved again to the music, the whiskey, and the promise of sexual adventure. It was a release from the harshness of the week’s work, cleaning up after white folk or endlessly picking other people’s “white gold.” As the blues classic “Stormy Monday” expressed it: “Well, the eagle flies on Friday [payday] / and Saturday I go out to play.” White Memphians’ experience of the musical culture of Beale Street remained largely limited to Thursday nights, when the Palace Theater, in a special whites-only midnight show, headlined that week’s black artists in a fashion that allowed whites to listen without violating their commitment to segregation.39
Many New Salem members would probably have disavowed Beale Street’s enticements, even though more than a few had found their way there the night before. (As the blues song has it, after the eagle flies and you go out to play, “On Sunday I go to church, pretty baby / and I kneel down to pray / ‘Lord have mercy / I wish the Lord have mercy on me.’”) C. L. was sensitive to this, and that may explain why he never preached on the evils of Beale Street from his New Salem pulpit, just as he had earlier refused to criticize directly those in his Mississippi congregations who danced and drank. This intricate balancing spoke to many who navigated between traditional ways and more modern impulses. Lorene Thomas, a devoted New Salem member for almost a decade when C. L. arrived, lived her family life in the space between those two approaches. A woman of deep faith, in 1940 she married Rufus Thomas, a Mississippi born, Memphis-reared young man who already had a career as a blues singer, vaudeville comic, and tap dancer. The same year they married, Rufus took over as emcee of the Palace Amateur Night, the weekly talent contest for young blac
k performers. Rufus (and decades later his daughter, Carla) had a long career performing blues, rhythm and blues, and soul music, all the while married to a deeply religious woman who rarely, if ever, attended his performances. Throughout his marriage, moreover, Rufus Thomas and his children remained active members of St. John Baptist Church, while his wife worshiped at New Salem. As Alma Black explained it: “Everyone knew that Rufus was ‘walking the dog’” on Beale Street, but “people wore many hats. When they put their church hat on, different from his Beale Street hat.” Muddy Waters, thinking of his first visit to Beale Street in the 1930s, tersely grasped the heart of the Street’s cultural power: “Beale Street was the street. Black man’s street.” All week long, in all its facets, so it was.40
Important as they were, however, blues music and church rituals were not the only cultural expressions black Memphians created, as Ralph Ellison put it in 1944, “upon the horns of the white man’s dilemma.” Among the black elite, literary and dramatic societies, as well as select social clubs, structured life in a rather exclusionary fashion. More inclusive, if not mass organizations, were the black fraternal orders, including the Prince Hall Masons and the Knights of Pythias. C. L., who less than a decade later would hold the highest rank in the Masonic fraternity, in all likelihood joined a Prince Hall Masonic lodge at this time. As throughout the black experience, fraternal lodges in Memphis maintained close ties to the church and included men (and in the auxiliaries, women as well) of varied economic standing committed to the moral code encouraged in church.41
A far more populist excursion were the games of the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro Baseball League. Founded in 1919, the Red Sox played at Lewis Park, named after their second owner, R. S. Lewis, a local funeral director. Situated at the corner of Iowa and Wellington in South Memphis, a short four blocks from New Salem, the park and its games were enormously appealing; indeed, if Beale Street could be culturally divisive for some, Lewis Park provided a common meeting place for all of black Memphis. Black churches concluded their services early before a Sunday doubleheader to allow worshipers to get to the park on time. “They put on the best frocks, the best suits, the best of everything they had and went to this ball game,” Rufus Thomas, who himself cut quite a figure, observed. These crowds of more than eight thousand were diverse: ministers, businesspeople, and professionals in the crowd sweated cheek by jowl on humid Sunday afternoons with working people who had just come from church or were more slowly recovering from a Saturday night party. Occasionally, someone of the caliber of a Jesse Owens, the 1936 Olympic star, would take on the Red Sox players in a challenge race before the start of a game. This but heightened the feeling of racial pride already evident in the communal celebration the games encouraged.42