Читать книгу Jerry Lee Lewis - Rick Bragg - Страница 11

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THE FATHER OF WATERS

Concordia Parish, Louisiana

THE BEGINNING

The water would rise up every few years, wash across the low, flat land, and take everything a poor man had, ruin his cotton and corn and drown his hogs, pour filth and dead fish into his home, even push the coffins from the earth and float his ancestors all the way to Avoyelles. Jerry Lee’s sister, Frankie Jean, tells of a day the rains beat down, the rivers rose, and the swelling groundwater shoved the dead from the mud. “Uncle Henry and Aunt Maxine had been nippin’, and they went by Uncle Will’s grave and saw he’d come partway out of the ground. Uncle Henry said, ‘Oh, Lord, Maxine, the Rapture has done come and the Lord has left us here. He tried to take Will and Will just wouldn’t go. Oh, God, Maxine, we done been left behind. Oh, God, Maxine, I told you not to buy that whiskey. . . .’” The point is, it takes guts to stay with it when the land you owe the bank for runs liquid between your toes and balls of water moccasins form islands on the rising tide. Water was everywhere, was life, and death. A person could not live here in this low place, Jerry Lee believes, and be afraid of water.

“We were going to the backwater one day, me and Daddy,” he says, traveling as far back as his memory could reach. “I was three years old.” It was late summer, the Louisiana sun hot on his blond head. Elmo, singing about trains and untrue women, swung his boy like a knot on the end of a rope. They followed the river to a place where the current slacked and died and pooled in lakes and sloughs, as still as black glass. The air smelled as it has always smelled and smells now, of a thousand years of silt, rot, and mud. His daddy pushed an old boat into the shallows, and they headed to deep water. The boy had never been out so far, never done more than wade close to the bank, toes digging into the silt and sand, his mama and daddy holding his hands. This water had no bottom, let in no light. They drifted a while, just living.

Then his daddy reached for him, lifted him high in his arms, and threw him out of the boat.

The water closed over his head. He thrashed toward the light, sank, and clawed his way up again, in panic. He kicked at it with his legs as if it was filled with devils, all twining around his skinny body, dragging him down. It was not a cruelty, he knows now, it was just his turn. It did no good to wait till a boy was older. The terror only grew with the child. You threw them both in the river and took what came out.

“Get with it, boy!” his daddy yelled.

Jerry Lee drank the water in, breathed it, choked.

“Swim,” his daddy yelled, “or float!”

“Help me!” the boy hollered.

But his daddy only knelt in the boat, his arms outstretched.

“Come on, boy!”

“Help me!”

“Come on.”

Then he felt iron fingers on his arm and he was lifted up, up, forever out of his fear. He thinks now his daddy would have saved him; surely he would, would have dove into the suffocating black and pulled him free just in time. But what kind of boy would he have held there, squalling? “It wadn’t no easy place,” he says now. But it was here, at the river, that his people came to settle, to snatch once more at the good life after the high ground failed them for the last time.

“If you’re ashamed of where you’re from, then you’re ashamed of yourself,” he says of the years he lived in overalls, mud-bound. “I ain’t never been ashamed. Ferriday, Louisiana, is where I’m from. We lived a while at Black River, and lived a while down at Angola, when Daddy helped build the prison there. Daddy was up at four o’clock, and Mama was up five minutes after. Daddy followed carpentry work, so we moved all the time, moved three times in one week, to old shanty houses, mostly. He farmed cotton, corn, soybeans, split halves with my Uncle Lee, and he made some whiskey. Mama picked cotton. It was a small place, but it never seemed small to me, when I was a boy.” It is where his people, all of them, are buried, “so it’s home to me.” He has never been one of those poor Southern children who claim to have lived in blissful ignorance of their poverty and the life into which they were born; such a thing leaves no room to dream. “It kind of dawns on you after a while. It occurred to me pretty quick.” His mama and daddy never owned much of the bottomland when he was a boy, sometimes not enough to fill a teacup, but that only made it more precious. It was their last stand, this Concordia Parish, and even now, as he crosses the bridge from Natchez, he breathes easier, as if someone has lifted a heavy hand off his chest. He has to try to remember the bad of it; the good comes easy, “all good, good singin’, good eatin’, good—You know that song about the tree?”

I’m like a tree that’s planted by the water.

I shall not be moved.

People have been dying beside these waters a long time, hoping for a piece of the unsteady ground, hoping to grow something from it. Would he have been the same if he had come from a gentler place? “The talent would have come through,” he says, “even if I’d been born in some big city. But it mighta been . . . different.” It might have been, somehow, gentler. “I think my music is like a rattlesnake. It warns you, ‘Listen to this. You better listen to this.’” That essence, the toughness and meanness and maybe even a spike of savage beauty, he believes, crawled straight out of this mud.

In Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, historian Lee Sandlin identifies a quality that seems to have marked Mississippi River people from earliest days: “They all lived for the spontaneous, heedless surge of wild exuberance, the sudden recourse to violence with no provocation—the violence if not of act then of thought and language. They routinely did and said extraordinarily foolish things for no reason other than joie de vivre.” One such character was a Bunyanesque scalawag named Mike Fink. “He was a creature of pure impulse—and yet whatever he did, no matter how bizarrely random it might be, he did perfectly. He achieved without effort what nobody else could do in a lifetime of labor. His air of godlike grace, of what in classical literature was called arete, transcended everything about his personality—which was in all other ways appalling.”

Figures like Mike Fink “had a ritual game they’d play called shout-boasting,” Sandlin writes, “the point of which was to make up surreally violent claims about themselves, and then dare to fight anybody who challenged them.”

But it is not boasting, as Jerry Lee says, “if you really done it.”

The Spaniards came to the river in 1541. Hernando de Soto led men in iron helmets into the malarial jungles in a bloodthirsty search for nonexistent gold and was one of the first white men to die in the heat, damp, and mosquitoes thick as fog; some say his rusty conquistadores still ride in the mist. Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville et d’Ardillières, knight of the Order of Saint-Louis and founder of the Colony of Louisiana of New France, brought settlement and Bible and sword; soon the indigenous tribes were extinct. Flags would go up and down as white men fought over it all, till the Old World finally retreated from the yellow fever and floodplain.

In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase gave the mud to a new nation, and Thomas Jefferson sent naturalist William Dunbar to see what all the dying was for. Dunbar explored the Mississippi, Black, and Ouachita rivers by boat and horseback, and in his journals he made the land sound like paradise. “Vegetation is extremely vigorous along the alluvial banks; twining vines entangle the branches of trees [with] the richest and most luxurious festoons.” The result was “an impenetrable curtain, variegated and spangled with all possible gradations of color from the splendid orange to the enlivening green down to the purple and blue and interspersed with bright red and russet brown.” Dunbar saw endless oak trees, red and black, along with ash, pecan, hickory, elm, and persimmon; the soil was “black marl mixed with sand,” the riverbanks “clothed in rich canebreak.” The forest along the river would offer “venison, bear, turkey . . . the river fowl and fish . . . [along with] geese and ducks surprisingly fat, and excellent.”

And the river itself? Dunbar wrote of its unpredictability and moods, of whirlpools and crosscurrents where, “even in the thread of the stream, we can make no sense of it.”

Natchez would become the seat of civilization here, and it was a city of two faces. One was gentility itself, a place of plantations that set a standard for opulence, of cotillions and white columns, of high tea and fine saddle leather, London silver and Parisian gowns, all resting on a foundation of human bondage. On the other face was a leer, a wild gateway to the West peopled by gamblers, whores, pirates, riverboat men, trappers, no-accounts, swindlers, and dope fiends, where keel-boats, riverboats, and oceangoing ships lined the docks; the river was so deep that the big merchant ships could creep all the way from the English ports to the whorehouses in Natchez Under the Hill. Sailors from around the world drank, fought, and cursed here in their language of origin. Beyond the lights, pirates used lanterns and bonfires to lure boats aground, robbed passengers, and rendered their bodies to the catfish.

Across the river, in Concordia Parish, in rich bottomland fed by centuries of flood, the land was hacked and burned into vast, gray-brown fields. Small towns like Vidalia, Waterproof, and St. Joseph bustled with commerce, as great steamboats tied up to take on unending cargoes of cotton and lumber. The Southern Belle, Princess, Magnolia, Natchez, and New Orleans served meals to rival any restaurant in New Orleans and had staterooms to rival the grandest hotels. The Indians called them “fire canoes,” and they routinely burned to the waterline. But every arrival in Natchez or Concordia Parish was a carnival, to see what the river would bring. Their captains became mythical figures, and poets told of them as the Greeks sang of Agamemnon:

Say, pilot, can you see that light?

I do—where angels stand.

Well, hold her jackstaff hard on that,

For there I’m going to land.

That looks like death a-hailing me

So ghastly, grim and pale.

I’ll toll the bell—I must go in.

I’ve never missed a hail.

It took muscle to power it all, and by 1860 there were 12,542 slaves in Concordia Parish alone, compared to 1,242 free whites—a cold-blooded economy wherein many plantations were controlled by absentee owners who saw the fields as a pure business venture. Life expectancy was so poor for slaves here that slave owners in other states used Louisiana plantations as a lash to keep their own slaves in line, saying if they misbehaved, they would be sold south. With populations in such disproportion and order kept by bullwhip and rope, it was a tense and brittle arrangement, prone to insurrection. One often-told story involves a slave, found guilty of murdering white men and kidnapping white women, who was burned on a pyre, or at least it was planned that way till he pulled his chains free of the post and staggered off—only to be shot dead, disappointing the crowd.

Violence lay thick here, like the air. Duels were so common on the sandbars that they take up fifteen pages in Robert Dabney Calhoun’s History of Concordia Parish. Democrats shot at Republicans, husbands shot at judges in their wives’ divorce claims, and physicians and generals shot at senators, congressmen, and the commanding officer of the Mexican War. In 1827, Dr. Thomas Maddox challenged planter Colonel Samuel Wells to a duel over some forgotten thing. Both men missed their first shot and honor was satisfied, but their seconds decided to settle old scores and opened fire. Two men died. One of the combatants, the planter Jim Bowie—who would go on to die famously at the Alamo—stabbed a man to death with his knife. The two sides did not consider honor satisfied and would argue for years over who among them was the biggest lout, rogue, skunk, and low-bred. Most affairs were not so bloody, as those smoothbore pistols were notoriously inaccurate, and most gentlemen would accept a clean miss as providence and pull a cork. With Concordia Parish in mind, the Constitution of 1845 tried to curtail dueling, warning its practitioners that they risked being “deprived of holding office of trust or profit.” (It is lucky, say some, that the practice was outlawed before the arrival of Jerry Lee.)

The war dismantled the old society. Ulysses S. Grant took Vicksburg midway through the war, and Natchez followed. Natchez became a gracious occupied city, while in Concordia slaves walked off the fields and headed to occupied New Orleans, some to fight for the Union, and some to bring their own music to town, where they blended it with local Creole sounds and bent it into a new music called jazz. The bottom-land fell hard into a puzzling time when black men wore badges, carried guns, served in the statehouse, and stood in judgment of whites on juries and from the bench itself. Reconstruction brought carpetbaggers, night riders, and Jim Crow, but it was still cotton that swung fortunes for rich and poor. Poor whites, who survived dysentery and grapeshot and suicide charges against the high ground, came to skin logs out of the woods; ex-slaves came to work the dirt, old stripes on their backs. The twentieth century brought the levees, so tall a man had to walk uphill to drown, but the river was indifferent still, and when hard rains came, it washed over and through and drowned the poor men’s dreams anyway, and fish swam in the streets of the river towns.

But it does not take much dry ground to hold up a train track, and that is where a relative prosperity—and for some poor men and women, a promise of salvation—took hold. The Texas & Pacific and Iron Mountain railroads decided they needed a terminal in Concordia Parish to service trains that hauled wood and cotton. It would be a corporate town, drawn up by an investment company on the site of an old plantation and named for the owner of the plantation, J. C. Ferriday. It was incorporated in 1906, and for passersby it was as if a town appeared overnight. Author Elaine Dundy called it “a town with no natives,” a wide-open place with a cotton compress mill, a sawmill, a lumber-yard, and a large compression plant on the pipeline from the Monroe gas fields to Baton Rouge. By 1920 there were 2,643 whites and almost 10,000 people of color in the parish, and on payday they came to Ferriday to spend their money.

Ferriday, Louisiana, would become known as one of the wickeder places on earth, a place where brothels, gambling dens, and saloons ran around the clock. “Not only a bad town . . . the baddest town,” as Dundy wrote in her biography of the place. Men beat each other to death in the street over wives or cards, or even if someone kicked a deer hound. Hogs and cattle roamed Main Street, and in winter, when forage was lean, men knocked the limbs off the trees so livestock could get at the moss. Railroads would come and go, but by the 1930s, as the Depression sucked the life out of much of the country, the Texas & Pacific, the New Orleans & Northwestern, and the Memphis, Helena & Louisiana all made the village a destination. Drummers and gamblers and oil speculators arrived a trainload at a time, bound for the King Hotel, and hoboes came off the boxcars like fleas.

It was busy, and busy meant work.

“The Lewises come from Monroe” to Ferriday, said Jerry Lee, and their history was not always one of cotton sacks and shanty houses. His great-great-grandfather was Thomas C. Lewis, a landowner who became a parish judge in Monroe. His son, John Savory Lewis, Jerry Lee’s great-grandfather, was a fearsome, powerful man, a prosperous slave owner, but when the Yankees came, that dynasty fell, too. Some of his children would prosper, but one, Leroy Lewis, Jerry Lee’s grandfather, drifted in and out of professions till he settled on farming, for which he had no aptitude. His talents were in making music. He fiddled like a man on fire, fiddled as the old century gave way to the new. He passed that love of music and talent to his children, with a kind of perpetual grin that defied everything the broken South had left him. He was also prone to drink hard and often and then just disappear for a while, leaving his wife, Arilla, to wonder if he was dead. “You drunk, ain’t you?” Arilla would ask when he reappeared, wobbling. “No,” he would say, “I am intoxicated.”

In 1902, a son was born in Mangham, Louisiana. Elmo Kidd Lewis was one of eleven children, a good-looking boy with crow-black hair and that squared-off face and a permanent, inked-on grin. He was what his blood had made him, a man of great physical strength with a lovely voice and flair for music, and the thirst of generations. But there was no cruelty in him for smaller souls, say his son and others who remember him, no meanness for women or children, a lowness other men who liked a drink could not always claim. By the time he was born, there was nothing of the old family left to him but a name, so in daylight he dragged a cotton sack and swung a hammer, and in the nighttime he picked guitar and sang. He did not fight other men; never had to, just slapped them down to the ground, “quick as nothin’,” says his son. He wore that badge of honor Southerners bestow on good men who drink, if they “didn’t bother nobody” and “never missed a day of work.” To the landowners, he was a cotton-sack-pullin’, nail-drivin’ machine. Elmo had his dreams, of someday playing music onstage, but there was such a vast distance between that and his waking life, across rows and rows of cotton that wasn’t going to pick itself, that he seldom talked about it till he was older and the dream had gone to seed, after which he talked about it all the time. Like many working-class Southerners, he felt something deep inside when he heard Jimmie Rodgers sing of lost love, shantytowns, lonesome whistles, and chain gangs, and could see himself yodeling on the radio like his hero, before tuberculosis choked him to death in a New York hotel at thirty-five.

I’m gon’ buy me a pistol, just as long as I’m tall

I’m gonna shoot poor Thelma, just to see her jump and fa-all

The great flood of 1927 drowned the fields and made hard times worse, as powerful men of the state tore apart the levees to flood the land upriver and save New Orleans. It was a bitter time in Louisiana, a historically corrupt place that proudly carried those traditions into the twentieth century. In ’28, ragged and angry voters put in power a kind of half-mad puppeteer, a song-leading dictator named Huey P. Long, known as the Kingfish. He swore to redistribute the wealth of giants such as Standard Oil and to make every man a king. He preached reform from the towering state capital, built by poor men on relief, and lived lavishly in a suite in the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. He had ambitions to claim the White House and scared rich people to death. From the eve of the Depression, as governor and senator, he built 111 bridges and thousands of miles of roads, and he promised to end the plight of hungry children, the soul-killing darkness that enveloped them, if desperate men like Elmo would just give him a little more time.

In the heartbreak of that moment, in Richland Parish, Elmo met a dark-haired girl named Mary Ethel Herron, whom everyone called Mamie. She was a lovely girl, if a little serious, and devout, which scared off the lesser rascals, but good women are naturally drawn to a rogue. She saw in the grinning, rawboned Elmo one of the most striking men she had ever met. On weekends in those days, the country people would congregate at an abandoned house, sprinkle cornmeal on the plank floor to slick it up, and dance. Elmo played his guitar and sang, and won her heart from the lesser rascals. She was a good woman, which in Southern vernacular usually means long-suffering, but Mamie was different. She was gentle on the outside but had iron in her jaw. She understood that all men have in them a certain sorriness, and she was willing to run the train if other hands were unsteady. Elmo and Mamie were married in 1929, when she was seventeen and he was ten years older, as the Depression settled on the land. He farmed other men’s dirt, and she picked cotton beside him, when they could find work.

Mamie’s mother’s people, the Foremans, were prosperous, but her mama, Theresa Lee, married a poor farmer named Will Herron, and the prosperity had died at the bottom of that lover’s leap. The only legacy the Foremans passed on was a thing in the blood, a kind of darkness that dropped across the mind and left a person to wander, haunted, till they found a way out. There are names for it now, clinical explanations of dementia and depression, but not so much back then, in the low country. No one—at least no one Jerry Lee can recall—ever refused to pick cotton or frame up a house because they felt depressed; people walked inside it, lived next to it. “I guess I get it from both sides,” Jerry Lee says, and he will not talk about it much beyond that. It is just a thing that rides across the generations, landing where and when it chooses, and a man could blame all his actions on it, all his mistakes and miseries, if he chose; he chooses not to do that, any more than he blames—except in the rarest of circumstances—the whiskey, the drugs, or the devil. He owns his mess.

Elmo’s father-in-law, Will, was a hot-tempered, stumpy little man who raised excellent deer dogs and was said to be quick to pull a knife. “Kill you,” says Jerry Lee, “at the drop of a hat.” When Will and Elmo hunted together and came to a fence line, Elmo would just pick the little man up like a child and set him down on the other side, recalls Jerry Lee. That sometimes made Will Herron so mad he hopped like a small, agitated bear, but it was hard to cut a man like Elmo, who smiled at you without even a trace of fun. Herron was “four-foot-somethin’,” says Jerry Lee, but the old man was a crack shot and could bring down deer even from the saddle of a horse. “He’d say to Daddy, ‘You don’t get none of this deer,’” if he was mad at his son-in-law, but Herron seldom stayed mad for long. Elmo had that gift, too; he was a magnet for forgiveness.

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.