Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  The same could not be said of the grown-up Vernon Presley, Jessie’s youngest son. Although Vernon was strikingly handsome like his father, he was terribly insecure. He dressed like a dandy and strutted about like a peacock, but until Elvis became wealthy, his finances were exceedingly precarious. Repeatedly, other people had to pull Vernon out of holes that he had dug.

  A year after his marriage, probably in April 1934, Gladys became pregnant. That fall, Jessie, Vernon, and his older brother, Vester, built the little house in East Tupelo with two rooms and a front porch where Elvis would be born. It was located next door to Jessie’s substantial four-room house on Old Saltillo Road. Within the family, Jessie’s house was called “the big house.” Vester was always a good brother to Vernon, and Jessie clearly favored Vester over Vernon.

  Orville Bean provided the land and the cash, $180, to buy the materials to build the house. There is no record in the Lee County courthouse that Vernon ever bought or began to buy the house and lot. Surely this was another very common case in which a farm owner allowed a farm laborer to build a house on his land to live in while he worked for the employer. Most likely, Vernon, teenage husband and father-to-be, paid his rent with labor on Bean’s farm.

  Vernon and Gladys moved into their new home in December 1934. At 4:00 a.m. on the icy cold morning of January 8, 1935, Elvis’s twin brother, Jessie Garon, was born. Jessie was stillborn. That afternoon, thirteen-year-old Catherine Hall, who lived next door, saw him lying in a tiny casket by the window. The baby was perfectly formed. Catherine thought he was merely asleep and not dead. She was horrified. Someone had made a terrible mistake. They were about to bury a live baby! One of Vernon’s sisters soon assured her that Jessie Garon was dead and that he would be buried nearby in the cemetery across the road from the Baptist church in Priceville, a community at the top of the long hill above the house. He would be buried near all the Presleys there, she said, so he would not be lonely.

  Thirty minutes after Jessie Garon’s birth, Elvis Aron appeared. Gladys had a very difficult labor, and she and Elvis subsequently spent some days in the county hospital. The expenses of Elvis’s birth and Gladys’s medical care ($15 for the birth) were paid by the county welfare department. Vernon could not pay for his son’s birth, but he did give him his own beautifully euphonic middle name, Elvis. For his middle name, Aron, he gave him an adaptation of the first name of his best friend, Aaron Kennedy. Elvis later added an a to spell his name as Aaron.

  “Elvis” was a very unusual name, but it was not original with the Presleys. When Elvis’s father, Vernon Elvis Presley, was born in 1916 there was a little boy named Elvis Tucker living nearby. In the census of 1920, Jessie and Minnie Mae were listed as farmers living a dozen or so miles east of Tupelo in Itawamba County. Spencer and Bell Tucker tenanted a farm close by and were probably relatives of Minnie Mae. They had named their oldest son, who was five years old in 1920, Elvis.

  Vernon was not a habitual criminal, but he often thought he deserved more than he got and sometimes simply took things that did not belong to him. Mostly he resisted steady labor, a mode of behavior that he had hit upon to rebel against his hard-working and domineering father. For years, he had been a great disappointment to Jessie, who responded to his son’s inadequacies with strict discipline. At one point, he sent fifteen-year-old Vernon off to live and work with relatives, hoping for a change, but to no avail. After his marriage, Vernon worked at a succession of jobs and succeeded at none. Then he tried forgery.

  In 1937, he had raised a pig to some unknown degree of maturity. Needing money, he sold the animal to Orville Bean for $4. Why he did not sell it to a more generous buyer is not clear. Bean probably already owned a part of the pig, the result of having provided housing or feed or both for the animal. Such sharing arrangements between farm owners and workers were ordinary in the always poor, low-wage Southern economy.

  Whatever the provenance of the pig, Vernon felt that he had been cheated out of his just return. He had probably been drinking with Travis Smith, who was Gladys’s younger brother, and another young man named Lether Gable when the three of them decided to alter the amount of Bean’s check. Travis later told his son Billy that they had added a zero to the $4.00 to make it $40.00 and changed the writing to read “forty” instead of “four.” Vernon did the necessary penmanship because Travis could not read or write. With no children and unmarried, Travis and Lether took their share of the loot and lit out for Texas, expecting to get rich. They very soon returned, each with only a new shirt, new trousers, and a huge wide-brimmed Texas hat to show for their venture. The police arrested them virtually as soon as they stepped down from the train in Tupelo.

  The ink had hardly dried on the forged check before the sheriff grabbed Vernon and locked him up in the Lee County jail. On November 16, the three young men were arraigned in criminal court, pled not guilty, and were held over for trial in the May 1938 term. Thus, self-pity and stupidity left Vernon confined in the county jail for six months.

  Vernon’s father did not lift a finger to help his son. Instead, Jessie used the circumstances to rebuke Vernon more publicly, pointedly, and viciously than ever before. Jessie had the resources to bail Vernon out of jail pending trial and bring him home to his wife and child. But he did not. Instead, he cosigned the $500 bond that freed Travis Smith, Gladys’s brother, until the court convened in May 1938. Other persons provided bail for Lether Gable, including at least one of his relatives. The message was clear. Family and clan counted for everyone except Vernon. Both Travis and Lether were freed on bail on January 4, 1938, four days before Elvis’s third birthday. Of the three conspirators, only Vernon was left in jail, where he could contemplate the error of his ways and ponder the depth of his father’s rejection.

  For two months before and four months after his third birthday, Elvis only saw his father as a prisoner in the county jail in Tupelo. His very first vivid memories of his father—his first memories of family life, of the three of them together—would be from those emotionally wrenching visits. Many of his early memories would be of traveling the long mile over the causeway across the flat bottom land on either side of Mud Creek from East Tupelo to Tupelo in some generous person’s car, entering the jail, encountering the guard with a badge and a gun, his father’s eager and needy embrace, the awkward and anxious conversation, and then, finally, alone again with his mother in the little house in East Tupelo.

  Criminal court convened for the spring term on Monday, May 23, and on Wednesday, May 25, Vernon, Travis, and Lether again stood before Judge Johnston. They had changed their pleas to guilty. Gladys would have been there, seated in the audience, and she would have had Elvis by her side. They would have watched anxiously as Vernon stood to receive his sentence. The judge faced a crowded calendar, and he wasted no time in sentencing each man to three years in the state penitentiary, Parchman, in the Mississippi Delta more than a hundred miles west of Tupelo.

  Lower-Class Crime in the Great Depression

  In retrospect, three years in the state penitentiary seems a harsh penalty for a failed attempt to settle a minor difference over the value of a pig. But there was more going on in America just then than pig stealing. It was the Great Depression and times were hard. People were stealing to eat, making bootleg whiskey to survive, and joining in labor strikes. Some, like Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, took to robbing banks across the South, in the process killing guards and police officers. Lee County had its own experience with bank robbery in 1932 when “Machine Gun” Kelly walked into the Citizens’ State Bank in Tupelo in broad daylight, emptied its coffers, and made a clean getaway with some $17,000. Kelly was soon taken quietly by the FBI at the home of his very respectable parents in Memphis.

  Vernon’s difficulty with his employer was personal, but it was exacerbated by the malaise of the Great Depression. If workers living on a landlord’s land in a house that the landlord owned felt they could violate the landlord’s property with such impunity, the economic and social ord
er of society would disintegrate into chaos. All things considered, Bean had treated Vernon and his little family generously. Vernon, in return, cheated him. Further, he did not even have the decency to flee after the crime; rather, he pled not guilty, as if Bean, not he, had done something wrong. It was okay, he seemed to say by his actions, to appropriate the property of the well-to-do when you felt that they had given you less than you deserved.

  If Bean wanted Vernon punished, it was understandable. Also, the severity with which District Attorney Floyd W. Cunningham and Judge Johnston came down on Vernon and his cohort was a function of the times. Vernon’s case occurred in the midst of a severe labor crisis in Tupelo. The city was exceedingly proud of its eager embrace of industrialization and modernity in previous decades, including a Carnation Milk Company processing plant. On the south side of town, there was a large locally owned textile mill employing several hundred workers. The workers and their families lived in small but comfortable wooden houses around the mill, a “mill village” built and owned by the company. The company flourished during the 1920s, but in the 1930s profits narrowed and wages shrank, and hardship in the village rose. By 1937, organizers for the United Textile Workers had moved into Tupelo. In mid-April 1938, one organizer, Jimmie Cox, was seized by a gang of eight men, thrown into a car, and driven out into the country. He was then tied to a tree, his pants removed, and whipped severely with belts. Threatened with being dragged behind a car with a rope around his neck, Cox promised to leave the area. The men left. Cox walked on to the nearest town, Pontotoc, and telephoned for help. Sarah Potter was in Tupelo as a representative of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. She reported the event to the sheriff’s office and the press. Two days later, the sheriff’s office announced that it would act on the matter only if Cox filed a proper affidavit. No one was ever tried for the crime.

  All over America, labor unrest was rampant in 1937 and 1938. Auto workers, steel workers, and textile workers rose in militancy, and factory owners and civil authorities showed a readiness for violent response. Throughout the South, governors in textile states ordered out the National Guard to protect the mills. Guardsmen built circular “machine-gun nests” of sandbags around the mills in World War I fashion and manned them with soldiers wearing tin pan helmets and carrying machine guns. It was as if they were about to fight a class war in which masses of workers would swarm out of their hiding places in the villages and attempt to seize possession of the factory buildings. National survival, it seemed to many Americans, was at stake.

  In Tupelo, striking workers were forcibly evicted from their mill houses by local toughs specially deputized for the task. One of these men was Lee Turner. He was sixty-two years old and notorious for sudden fits of anger and acts of violence. Turner’s brief authority seems to have gone to his head. Soon after the evictions were completed, one day on the streets of Tupelo he flew into a rage at an unoffending young man passing through town and shot him to death. With Turner’s “second shot,” the Tupelo Daily News said, the young man “fell forward on his face.” The paper identified him as a war veteran, deplored the crime, and urged stiff justice for his killer. Turner was tried two days after Vernon was sentenced, quickly found guilty, and sentenced to serve the remainder of his “natural life” in Parchman. That weekend this irascible and violent old man, like Vernon, sat in his cell on the first floor of the county jail waiting for “Long Chain Charley” to come for him. At Parchman, there were many other men like Turner, violent men, killers with short tempers, waiting for Vernon to join them.

  Parchman Farm

  On Wednesday, June 1, Vernon, prisoner number 12231, was registered at the prison hospital in Parchman. He was twenty-one years old, five feet ten and one-half inches tall, and weighed 147 pounds. He described himself as a farmer. He could read and write and professed five years of schooling. Asked to identify his “primary family,” he chose to name neither his wife nor his mother but rather, pathetically, his father alone, “J. D. Presley.”

  The prison record describes Vernon as having an oval face, arched eyebrows, a concave nose, a small mouth, good teeth, and a medium complexion. His body was unscarred. Indeed, the prison registrar recorded no identifying marks at all on Vernon’s body, which made him a rarity in that way among inmates.

  In contrast, Vernon’s brother-in-law Travis Smith bore marks of a hard life, physically and mentally. In his early twenties, he could neither read nor write and had no schooling. Travis’s face was “narrow” and his complexion was “sallow.” His teeth were “bad” and his build was “small.” He stood five feet seven and one-half inches tall and weighed 129 pounds. He bore a tattoo, “NBB,” on his right forearm. A tattoo in that time and place advertised a willingness to fight, to take pain and also to give it. “Don’t tread on me,” it said, sometimes literally with an image of a coiled snake. Travis also had a number of scars, including a cut scar on his left thigh. For Travis’s occupation, the registrar wrote “none.” Lether Gable gave his occupation as truck driver. Like Travis, he was slight of build and scarred, including a cut scar on his upper lip. Vernon was about to enter an institution that by design was full of Mississippi’s most ruthless and violent men, men who were practiced in and relished violence. They loved to beat, shoot, knife, rape, and sometimes kill.

  Parchman Farm was essentially a twenty-thousand-acre plantation spread over a six-by-eight-mile rectangle that used hundreds of convict laborers to produce a cash crop, cotton, for the benefit of the state. Idleness among prisoners was no problem there. The mode of operation was one that Mississippi knew well, having perfected the practice during slavery; it was a plantation using forced labor to produce cotton and most of the goods necessary to sustain itself. The goal at Parchman, achieved year after year, was to show a profit by growing, reaping, and selling a huge cotton crop. Parchman did not pay its laborers, and there was never a labor shortage. Even in its very first year, 1905, the prison fed $185,000 into the state treasury.

  Parchman, awful as it was for its inmates, was conceived and instituted as a reform measure. It replaced the convict lease system in which prisoners, both white and black, were rented out to private entrepreneurs, often treated with great cruelty, and sometimes worked to death. In the 1880s, William Faulkner’s great-grandfather built his railroad from Ripley to Pontotoc using convicts rented from the state at the rate of $50 a year. When some people complained that he starved and beat those men, he replied that they were fed as well as any people on poor relief and were not abused physically.

  In view of the fact that the great majority of convicts in Mississippi were black, it is ironic that the reform in the state’s prison system was the work of the state’s formative racist, Governor James K. Vardaman. In terms of humane treatment, it was the white prisoners he was concerned about, but he was also mindful of the money to be made by the state’s using convict labor, white as well as black, and the patronage opportunities he would gain in staffing a prison. Vardaman led the state in purchasing the Parchman plantation. The new penitentiary would house white convicts, but it was also designed to contain the very worst members of the majority black population in the state.

  Vardaman, like many other leading whites in the black belt South at the turn of the century, felt that blacks in America freed from the stringent controls of slavery were retrogressing to their natural state of savagery. In freedom, the veneer of civilization was falling away, as evinced by the vast increase in the number of attacks on white women by “black beast rapists.” Over several generations, black people would simply die away, destroyed by their own inadequacies. Meanwhile, they must be rigorously contained. Such was the contemporary white view. “You cannot create something when there is nothing to build on,” Governor Vardaman declared. “But they can be well trained, and that is the best that can be done with the genuine Negro.” Parchman Farm was created to make the most out of the worst black men in Mississippi.

  Originally about 90 percent of the inmates were bl
ack, but the number of whites rose rapidly between 1917 and 1925, from 149 to 280, more than 20 percent of the total. Almost a third of whites in 1925 were “bootleggers,” having violated state liquor laws. By the time Vernon arrived in 1938, during the Great Depression, whites made up about 30 percent of prisoners.

  In Vernon’s time, there were a dozen field camps spread across the forty-eight square miles of absolutely flat Delta landscape that was Parchman. Camps 4 and 5 held white prisoners. Prison records indicate that Vernon was in Camp 5, along with Travis, Lether Gable, and about 150 other convicts. Each camp was isolated and largely self-supporting, growing and preparing its own food, doing its laundry outside in large wash pots, repairing its tools, and caring for its livestock. Each camp was under the absolute authority of one man, the sergeant, who lived in a house on the grounds with his family and earned $50 a month. He was assisted by white “drivers” who literally drove the men before them in the fields. If the task was to chop the grass away from the stalk of the cotton plant using a hoe, each man would have a row to hoe. If there were 150 men, they would work 150 rows simultaneously, forming a “long line” moving across the field. The driver would ride behind on his horse, carrying a “bull whip,” strips of leather fixed to a handle, used to reprimand laggards. Occasionally, a convict with a bad attitude would be stripped, held on the ground between the rows, and lashed until welts rose and blood oozed.