Last Train to Memphis Read online

  It’s doubtful if either ever really knew Vernon or his family: certainly they would have had no way of imagining their hopes and dreams, and for all the pictures that we get of Vernon as an improvident loafer, there appears never to have been a time that he was not working or actively in pursuit of work. He supported his mother, after all, and he had taken in Gladys’ sister’s boy. When Elvis went to visit his cousin Willie Wileman (Willie’s grandmother was Minnie’s sister, and he was later to become a versatile and well-known musician in the Tupelo area), he was the sophisticated city cousin. From Willie’s point of view: “All of us were country kids. We wore overalls, and he wore pants and a shirt. We would ride bicycles together—he would always get out and mix and mingle. But he was a city dude!”

  In the fall of 1946 Elvis started a new school, Milam, which went from grades 5 through 9 and was about half a mile from Mulberry Alley. He failed to make much of an impression on any of his sixth-grade classmates, but that would hardly have been surprising, irrespective of social status, given Elvis’ own cautious, watchful nature. Despite Willie Wileman’s testimony, in the sixth-grade-class picture he is the only child in overalls, the only one visibly struggling to put on a happy postwar face, the only one whose expression gives any harbinger of a different kind of future. He looks curious, optimistic, at ease with himself—but no more a part of the group picture than he was in the earlier school snapshot. His seventh-grade classmate Roland Tindall moved to town himself from Dorsey, Mississippi, the year before and had encountered the same sort of dislocation. “It was unbelievable, the change, from leaving all my friends, the people I had grown up with and known from—well, you just knew everyone. Then, to come to Tupelo and have three classes of one grade, I mean in this time you can’t really comprehend it. I wanted to go back to the country.” To Elvis it was altogether bewildering and, at the same time, no more bewildering than anything else that was happening in his life. He was watching, he was waiting—but he didn’t know for what.

  The Presleys moved around some in the next year, and Gladys went back to work at the Mid-South Laundry. By the time Elvis started the seventh grade, they were living on North Green Street, closer to school and in a respectable enough neighborhood, but in a respectable colored neighborhood. Unlike Shake Rag, which had a Catfish Row kind of appearance and was destined to be obliterated in the first urban renewal project to be carried out in the state of Mississippi, in 1968, North Green Street ran right up against one of the “better,” more exclusive, white sections of town and consisted, for the most part, of neatly kept one- and two-family homes. Although the house that they rented was designated as one of two or three “white” houses in the area, they were surrounded by black families, black churches, black social clubs, and black schools (the Lee County Training School, where Ben Branch taught music for years before moving to Memphis and joining the Stax horn section, was just down the hill). To friends and relatives this was a matter of some note—this was not South Tupelo, for example, where all the mill workers and factory hands lived—and not all of their old friends came to visit the Presleys in their new home, but it was nothing so shocking or out-of-the-way that it would prevent Gladys’ sister Lillian and her family from occupying the same rental when Gladys and Vernon left.

  It was in his seventh-grade year that Elvis started taking his guitar to school every day. Although teachers in later years would recall the early manifestations of a child prodigy, many students viewed his playing more dubiously, dismissing it with the same faint wrinkle of distaste with which they would greet déclassé fare of any sort (“hillbilly” music and “race” music probably fell into the same category in this regard). Others, like Roland Tindall, admired him for what they saw almost as a declaration of faith. “Elvis would bring his guitar to school, as far as I know, from the very beginning of the school year. At that time the basement of Milam was like a recess area, you went there during lunch hour—it was all open down there for the children to stay out of the wet and cold. Many times Elvis and a boy named Billy Welch would play and sing down there, and we would stay inside just to hear them. Once in a while Elvis might perform for an activity period in the classroom, but only occasionally, because those type of children didn’t believe in country music and that was what he sang. He told us he was going to the Grand Ole Opry. Not bragging: he just made the statement.” “He brought his guitar to school when it wasn’t raining,” said James Ausborn, Mississippi Slim’s brother, who had recently moved to town himself. “He’d bring his guitar swung over his back and put it in his locker till lunchtime. Then everybody would set around, and he would sing and strum on that guitar. All he talked about was music—not the Opry so much as gospel music. That was what he sung mostly.”

  A classmate, Shirley Lumpkin, told Elaine Dundy, author of Elvis and Gladys, “The nicest thing I can say about him was that he was a loner,” and another classmate, Kenneth Holditch, recalled him to Dundy as “a sad, shy, not especially attractive boy” whose guitar playing was not likely to win any prizes. Many of the other children made fun of him as a “trashy” kind of boy playing trashy “hillbilly” music, but Elvis stuck to his guns. Without ever confronting his denigrators or his critics, he continued to do the one thing that was important to him: he continued to make music.

  Neither Roland nor James ever visited Elvis at his home on North Green Street, although James continued to go to the radio station with him and, occasionally, to the movies. Roland, by his own account, was not a social person. “All the socializing I did was at school, but we were very close friends there. At Christmastime in the seventh grade he gave me a little truck, and he gave Billy something of a similar sort—it was one of his own toys. I remember that impressed me, that he wanted to do something so badly that he would give us one of his toys when he couldn’t afford anything else.”

  Frank and Corene Smith visited shortly before the Presleys left Tupelo for good, but by then they, too, had fallen somewhat out of touch with their old parishioners, and Vernon and Gladys were not attending church as regularly either. Because the house that they were renting was clearly reserved for white people, to the Smiths the Presleys “were not living in the black community,” a distinction that Vernon and Gladys would certainly have made themselves, but a distinction that might have been lost in a real sense on their twelve-year-old son. Living across Main Street from the jumble of crooked alleyways and tumbledown shacks that made up Shake Rag, he would have to have sensed something of the life, he could not have missed the tumultuous bursts of song, the colorful street vendors’ cries, he would have observed it all with intense curiosity, and he might have envied the sharp flashes of emotion, the bright splashes of color, the feelings so boldly on display. But he was forever sitting at the gate; there was no entry point for a stranger, there was no way in.

  On North Green Street, “Elvis aron Presley” (as he signed his library card that year) was like the “Invisible Man”—he was the boy who lived in Dr. Green’s house, he belonged, he had business there. For the first time he was truly in the midst of another world, a world so different that he might as well have stepped right onto the movie screen, and yet he was an unseen, and unsuspected, presence—like Superman or Captain Marvel, unprepossessing in their workaday disguises, but capable of more than anyone could ever imagine, he was just waiting for the opportunity to fulfill his destiny.

  You walked by the Elks Club just off Green, where a small combo that patterned itself on Louis Jordan might be playing “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens,” or Jimmy Lunceford or Earl “Fatha” Hines might stop in after playing a dance at the Armory on the Fairgrounds downtown. You walked by a bar and barely heard the wailing of the jukebox over the noise of men and women drinking and gambling and signifying the sounds of love. On weekends the churches would be jumping, in a fashion not dissimilar to an Assembly of God congregation when it started speaking in tongues, but with a joyfulness and a sense of celebration, an expelling of emotion that was embarrassing for a
closeted young boy to see at close hand—it seemed sometimes as if they were in the throes of a kind of passion that was not meant to be revealed in public.

  Several times a year, in warm weather, a slightly moth-eaten, crudely patched tent would be erected on a vacant lot on the east side of Green for a revival: Friday night, Saturday night, all day Sunday, people would come from all over, dressed up in their finest regalia, the women in pink and yellow and hot fuchsia, wearing fantastic feathered boa hats and carrying their weight without apology, the preachers preaching without anything to hold them back, getting lost in their Bible, chanting, breathing, snorting rhythmically, gutturally, breathlessly, until their voices soared off into song. You didn’t have to go inside to get the feeling—the sound, the sense, the allure, were all around you. You only had to walk up the street and the street was rocking. Well-to-do white college boys and their dates would come out for the show on Saturday night—there was really nothing like it, you had to hand it to the colored people, they really knew how to live. The college boys were strictly tourists, though. If you lived on North Green Street, you breathed it in, as natural as air—after a while you got used to it, it became yours, too, it was almost like being in church.

  In the fall of 1948 Elvis started school again. Sometime in the first month or two, a few of the “rougher-type” boys took his guitar and cut the strings, but some of his eighth-grade classmates chipped in and bought him another set. When he announced in the first week of November that he and his family were leaving for Memphis, the other children were surprised but not shocked. People like the Presleys moved all the time. On his last day of school, Friday, November 5, a classmate named Leroy Green recalled to writer Vince Staten, he gave a little concert. The last song he sang was “A Leaf on a Tree” and, according to Green, “most people wouldn’t believe this, but I went up to him and I told him, ‘Elvis, one of these days you’re gonna be famous.’ And he smiled at me and said, ‘I sure hope so.’ ”

  They moved on a Saturday, Vernon explained, so that Elvis wouldn’t miss a day of school. “We were broke, man, broke,” Elvis declared in later years, “and we left Tupelo overnight. Dad packed all our belongings in boxes and put them in the trunk and on top of a 1939 Plymouth [actually a ’37]. We just headed for Memphis. Things had to be better.” According to Gladys: “We’d been talking about moving to Memphis. One day we just made up our minds. We sold off our furniture, loaded our clothes and things into this old car we had, and just set out.” Elaine Dundy posited in Elvis and Gladys that Vernon Presley was fired by L. P. McCarty for using the company truck to deliver bootleg whiskey, but Gladys’ cousin Corinne Richards recalled prior discussion of the move and saw it as part of a family migration, soon to be joined by other Presleys and other Smiths. In any event, Tupelo was a dead end. What they were looking for in Memphis might have been difficult to articulate, but what they were seeking to escape was perfectly clear. “I told Elvis,” said Vernon, “that I’d work for him and buy him everything I could afford. If he had problems, he could come to me and I’d try to understand. I also said, ‘But, son, if you see anything wrong going on, promise me you’ll have no part of it. Just don’t let anything happen so that I’d have to talk to you between bars. That’s the only thing that would break my heart.’ ”

  “There were times we had nothing to eat but corn bread and water,” recalled Vernon not long before he died, “but we always had compassion for people. Poor we were, I’ll never deny that. But trash we weren’t…. We never had any prejudice. We never put anybody down. Neither did Elvis.”

  MEMPHIS: THE COURTS

  November 1948–June 1953

  MEMPHIS CIRCA 1950.

  (COURTESY OF JIMMY DENSON)

  A SMALL, FAIR-HAIRED BOY, fourteen years old, sits on the front steps of the three-story brick building. It is twilight, and you would never notice him if you didn’t know he was there. There is scarcely a word of greeting to any of the frequent passersby: men coming home from work, boys playing corkball, little girls dressed up in their Sunday best visiting a neighbor’s apartment with their mama. A sailor from the nearby Millington base passes by on Third, while a jaunty teenager, wearing a neat Eisenhower jacket and wide, billowing pants, turns the corner from Market Mall, the tree-lined, grassy way that divides Lauderdale Courts, a trim collection of public-assisted garden apartments in the heart of downtown Memphis. Two blocks away is Ellis Auditorium, where they have boxing and musical events and the high schools all graduate in the spring. Ellis sits on the corner of Main, which, of course, in 1949 is the hub of Memphis city life. Movie theaters line Main Street: the Malco, Loew’s State, the Strand, all on South Main “downtown,” the Suzore No. 2, a second-run house on North Main just up the street, where you can gain admission for a dime. There are buses that run up and down Main, but if you don’t have the money, all you have to do is walk. The Hotel Peabody is no more than three quarters of a mile away. Goldsmith’s giant department store, which offers the latest in fashions and furnishings and can serve as readily for dreams as for purchases, sits on the west side of Main, with the corner of Beale, and the beginning of the colored section, just beyond. There is a world within a stone’s throw of the Courts, but there is a world within it, too.

  The young boy silently watches and observes: the black children playing in front of the two little ramshackle shacks just across the street from the well-maintained redbrick apartment buildings; the nurses changing shifts at St. Joseph’s; the trolley cars on Jackson; the bigger boys coming back from playing football at the Triangle on the northeast end of the Courts. Finally he spots his father coming home from work just two blocks away. Vernon Presley is carrying his lunch pail. He turns in from Third and comes down the path, not hurrying but not lingering either. The towheaded little boy rises from the stoop, as if it were coincidence that he should be sitting out there. The two of them flash each other a quick half smile, the boy and the man; then they turn in, enter the door of 185 Winchester, go up the steps to the first-floor landing and in the door of Apartment 328, where dinner is waiting. Gladys looks at them both. Maybe she says “I was just beginning to worry.” Does she give the man a quick kiss? Perhaps. The picture is blurred. But she hugs the boy as if he might have been gone for years.

  WHEN THE PRESLEYS arrived in Memphis on November 6, 1948, they moved into a downtown rooming house at 370 Washington Street, then some six months later into another one nearby, at 572 Poplar, just around the corner from the Courts. They may have found the latter through a neighbor from Tupelo, Mrs. Tressie Miller, who lived upstairs; maybe Vernon had even stayed in one of the boardinghouses during the war. The house on Poplar, like many others in the area, was a big old Victorian-style edifice that had been cut up into sixteen single-room apartments, three or four to a floor, with a shared bathroom at the end of the hall. The Presleys paid $9.50 a week rent and cooked their meals on a hot plate. In the evening the whole family might cross the street to attend services at the Reverend J. J. Denson’s Poplar Street Mission. The Reverend Denson had a fine voice. He played the guitar, and there was always lots of singing and shouting and carrying on as well as a communal supper to be shared. Some nights the family would have dinner with Mrs. Miller and reminisce about Tupelo. Gladys got a job as a sewing machine operator at Fashion Curtains, and then, after her brother Travis and his wife, Lorraine, had moved up within a few weeks of the Presleys’ arrival, Vernon and Travis found work at Precision Tool, a munitions manufacturer—perhaps he had worked there during the war. It was over at Kansas and McLemore, about two miles away; in good weather Vernon and Travis could walk, in bad weather they might drive or take the bus up Third. Poplar Avenue was a busy commercial thoroughfare, but it was an isolating one as well. It was hard to get to know people in the city, and Gladys tried to persuade her other brothers and sisters and in-laws to join them. “The places that they moved in up there didn’t seem much better than what they had down here,” sniffed her cousin Corinne Richards Tate, but eventually most of t
he family moved up, forming a little enclave in the vicinity of Third and Poplar.

  The new address was within easy walking distance of United Paint, where Vernon had gotten a job as a loader in February, but they lived there for less than a month before putting in an application for public housing in June. Vernon was making 85 cents an hour, $40.38 a week with overtime, when Jane Richardson, a home service adviser for the Memphis Housing Authority, interviewed Gladys Presley in the Poplar Avenue rooming house on June 17, 1949. She noted the poor conditions under which they were living, a prerequisite for consideration. Miss Richardson wrote: “Cook, eat, and sleep in one room. Share bath. No privacy…. Need housing. Persons interviewed are Mrs. Presley and son. Nice boy. They seem very nice and deserving. Lauderdale if possible, near husband’s work.”

  They finally gained admission to the Courts on September 20, at the start of Elvis’ freshman year at Humes. The rent was $35 a month, about what they had been paying on Poplar, but instead of a single room they got two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom of their own. There was a $2,500 ceiling on annual family income as a qualification for continued tenancy, and it was noted that the Presleys possessed no telephone and a car that barely ran, and that Vernon sent $10 every month to his mother in West Point, Mississippi. The repairs that the apartment needed were detailed on a Housing Authority form on the day they moved in: “Wall around bath tub needs repair… apartment in need of paint job… 1 shade will not roll in bedroom… light in front hall will not stay on… oven door will not shut tight… one leg broke off cabinet… bathroom sink stopped up… faucet in kitchen sink needs repairs.” But this marked the real beginning of the Presleys’ arrival in Memphis.