MEMPHIS
(1949–54)
As they say in professional wrestling, business was about to pick up. In the late summer of 1949 we moved to Memphis, Tennessee, into a big old house on three acres east of the city limits with a cotton field in front and farms behind. A railroad track ran less than a mile north of the property. When we drove up the long gravel driveway the first thing I saw was a small black man standing with a big sickle, like the one Death holds to mow down the condemned. This strange little man wore a hat that seemed too big for him, not formed or fitted like the hat my father wore to work, but round on top and crushed in the back. Later I learned this was worn to create the illusion of being taller. I learned many things from this man; he became my greatest teacher.
Everyone called him Alec, short for “Smart Alec,” although that wasn’t his real name. Alec was our yardman. My father hired him to clean up the property, which had been tied up in a divorce case and grown wild.
I spent a lot of time in the trees, bushes, and drainage ditches of our new yard, but Alec did all of the work, mowing grass and trimming hedges. I followed him. Slowly he taught me many things: how to tell the time of day by my shadow, when it would rain by the leaves on the trees, how to throw a pocket knife underhanded, how to shoot craps, and play Pitty Pat, Smut, and Red Dog. He told me of his weekend adventures with moonshine, dice games, and Car 44 (the local police car). At noon he came into the house to eat lunch. He tuned the kitchen radio to WDIA, “the black spot on the dial,” and listened to Honeyboy and “Bless My Bones” Brother Theo Wade play music I had never heard on white radio.
I had heard boogie-woogie piano, and one day over the car radio I had heard a loose, horn-driven instrumental with a rhythm section like the band at the circus. My father told me it was Dixieland. But I had never heard music like what they played on WDIA. The beat was heavy and repetitive. The notes were long and mournful, like songs in church. The piano didn’t sound like my mother or Two Ton Baker. It was wild music that seemed about to spin out of control. Alec sang while he worked; sometimes songs without words, just long vowels that sounded like an animal howling or a tortured soul moaning in the lonesome night. He sang to pass the time and make work go faster, smoother.
Alec couldn’t read or write. He could sign his name and read the ball scores in the newspaper. He believed the sun revolved around the Earth. He quit school in the fifth or sixth grade. Sometimes he went back on Friday because they had “ice squeem.” He was wise with instinct and natural intelligence, and was kinder to me than any person outside of my family ever was. I think he thought it was part of his job to teach me to be something besides a smart-aleck Yankee kid.
Alec taught me to be cool, to hold my cards close to my chest, not reveal myself to strangers, and how to put somebody on when they were trying to get one over on me. He taught me the importance of loyalty, to protect that which and those whom I loved, and not show weakness in defeat. He was a great teacher and a truly wise man.
I lay in bed each night and waited to hear the train pass at 10:10 on the N.C. & Saint L. tracks north of our place. I imagined stories centered on the train. The passing train carried me into the night, into a dream world of patriotic conflict and heroic deeds. I was a freedom fighter in a postwar society controlled by a military dictator. Hiding beneath the covers from enemy storm troopers, I listened for the night whistle and forgot to say my prayers. Our yard was like a park or the forest preserve where we picnicked. There were birds, squirrels, and twenty trees that two men could not reach around. Occasional coons, possums, and wild things rustled in the trees at night. I played outside, listened to green flies’ daytime drone, and at sundown, to bugs, frogs, the unknown something in the grass that called my name, “Jimmy-Jimmy-Jimmy,” the nighttime cry of crickets, locusts, katydids, tree frogs, and the hoots of owls circling.
My parents liked to dine on the Peabody Hotel roof and dance to big bands from out of town. From time to time they took me, “as part of my education.”
Starched white table cloths
and hotel silverware
like the City of New Orleans dining car.
Spit and polished black waiters
dressed to the teeth,
who were all “Yah, Suh,” and “Yes, Ma’m.”
They called my father “Captain”
and grinned gold toothed smiles,
bowing at the waist.
He called them “Pancho.”
I liked the ice water and the butterfly dinner rolls.
Most of all I liked the drummers.
My mother told me playing the drums made you crazy. Her distrust of professional musicians sprang from a bad experience dating a clarinet player. She told me over and over, “Jimmy, you can be anything in life you want to be. But don’t be a musician.”
She might as well have told me not to put beans in my ears.
Our lives took on a slower rhythm in Memphis. People talked slower, holding on to their words, almost singing. I played in a drainage ditch that ran through our yard of big, old trees and bushes, over an acre of jonquils, yellow in winter’s last feeble snow, instead of Chicago’s grimy concrete alleys. At first it seemed pitiful in comparison to the frozen world by the lake. I hated it. The first few nights I fell asleep to the whine of the window fan on the sleeping porch and prayed I would wake up back in Chicago. Slowly the place sank into my soul.
The school was old, weird, and boring. They let us out at cotton-picking time and for the Mid-South Fair. I guessed it was a school for farmers. I did not belong. I was suspected of being a Yankee and was not to be trusted.
I had finished the second grade at the National College in Chicago, but still couldn’t read. They put glasses on me and kept me in the second grade. The glasses cleared up the fuzzy edges, but didn’t correct the multiple vision I’d had all my life. I learned to read by words’ shapes and memorizing what I heard.
The country school’s social structure was important. Of course, the students were all white, but some were from farm families and others were from new suburban, postwar-boomer families. The lines were drawn clearly.
No lines were stronger than the racial barriers. In Chicago neighborhoods separated races and even nationalities. Interaction was rare. In Memphis, black people were everywhere, but confined within segregation’s invisible walls. It was black or white. No third-world tan or yellow. Jesus loves the little children, but there were rules: drinking fountains, restrooms, movie theatres, waiting rooms, public transportation, schools, and churches were all rigidly and absolutely divided along racial lines. Culture was exclusive to skin color. Strangest of all were the lines between black and white music.
My father’s new office was in downtown Memphis on Front Street, close to Cotton Row, where the international cotton empire conducted business. King Cotton. The Diamond Match office encompassed the Falls Building’s seventh floor. You could see the Mississippi River from the west windows. The Falls Building was old and historic. Legend has it W. C. Handy and his band had played on the rooftop Oriental Gardens. The south side of the Falls Building opened onto Park Lane, or Whiskey Chute, as the locals called it, an alley between Front Street and Main Street that bootleggers used during Prohibition to roll whiskey barrels from the river to Main Street taverns and speakeasies. Park Lane was a great place for kids, a little world unto itself: a barber shop, a store that sold model airplane kits, and best of all, the Fun Shop Magic Land, a dark and mysterious corner shop that sold amateur magic tricks.
Most Saturday mornings, I went to the office with my father. After he went through the mail and finished the bookkeeping, we headed to Pete and Sam’s, an Italian restaurant with a screen door and checkered tablecloths. On weekends the Falls Building’s front was locked, so we exited the side door that opened onto Whiskey Chute.
I was used to playing in the alleys in Chicago
But I soon found my way around Whiskey “Shoot”
You never know when it was going to reach out and grab you
when the ground would open and pull you down the rabbit hole
It’s a one-way wolf ticket with no return trip
on the other side of the secret door
it’s Technicolor.
Outside the door to the alleyway four black men, dressed like hobos or field hands, were singing and playing—a four-string tenor guitar, a violin, a washboard with drumsticks, and a string tied to a broomstick and run through a washtub—the strangest music I had ever heard. A white couple, acting drunk, jitterbugged in the alley. The tall thin man with the washtub bass sang, “Come on down to my house, honey, there’s nobody home but me.”
He laughed, went down low on the broomstick, shouted “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and laughed some more. I was hypnotized. It was like being hit over the head. Never in my short life had I heard anything so moving. It was music from heaven, yet these men were clearly not the angels described to me in my mother’s church.
After one song, my father put a dollar bill in the coffee can and made me leave. But I carried the words and music with me. I hear it now, more than fifty years later. After that experience, other things in life did not seem as important as finding that magic music.
Such musicians were just blocks away in the Beale Street community, but were utterly inaccessible to me, a white boy. How would I discover more about them?
Later I went to the library. There was only one book. Samuel Charters’s The Country Blues had a chapter called “Memphis Jug Bands.” I had seen the great Will Shade and the Memphis Jug Band in the alley, with Charlie Burse on guitar and his brother, Good Kid, on washboard. I didn’t find out who the fiddler player was until years later when Charlie Musselwhite told me his name, Red Robie.
Summer is day heavy
The light moves more slowly east to west
The light holds on
Divisions fall down
They get hot and melt and the night comes on thick and deep
It seems like it was always summer in Sunday School
In the days before air conditioning
the noisy window fan and the piano music
made the heat bounce around the room in 4/4 time
“In the highways, in the hedges,
I’ll be somewhere working for my Lord …”
“Oh, do Lord, oh, do Lord, Oh do remember me,
Look away beyond the blue.”
In Memphis my father joined Colonial Country Club. He loved to play golf and poker. There was a golf course, a swimming pool, and a big old Southern mansion-looking clubhouse where occasional dances were held for members only. I saw several big bands there. Not the touring bands we saw at Peabody Skyway, but local versions like Berl Olswanger, Sy Rose, and Bill Justis, sit-down musicians wearing tuxedos and reading sheet music with singers.
My father played golf on Saturday afternoon and cards on Saturday night. He liked gin rummy. He remembered every card drawn face up. A friendly game of gin could degenerate into cutthroat five-card draw, or even to shooting dice, which my father viewed as low gambling. (Alec loved to shoot craps.) As I got older I noticed my father played cards later and later.
My father, a Methodist, didn’t attend what he called the “damn Baptist” church. Sometimes he would be out all night, and not come home until after my mother and I had gone to church. I sat in the Amen corner down front of the congregation while my mother played piano. I was proud of my mother’s playing, which brought life to the old familiar tunes in the Broadman Hymnal.
Only a couple of kids in our church went to White Station School with me. Ronnie Stoots, who sang in my first band and toured with the Mar-Keys, was in my Sunday school class. The preacher had been my mother’s student in Little Rock. She was always partial to folks from her hometown.
On Sunday afternoons, after church service and lunch, we went downtown to a matinee at one of the big, old first-run movie houses. My mother liked musicals, especially those starring Gene Kelly. Musicians in the movies fascinated me. The piano players—Jimmy Durante, Oscar Levant, Hoagy Carmichael—were never the main character or hero. They were like the comic sidekick in the “B” westerns, the Gabby Hayes character.
We drove to Little Rock to visit grandmother Huddie many weekends. My parents picked me up at school Friday afternoons, and we crossed the river into Arkansas. West Memphis was notoriously wild and wide open. There was a dog track and a stock-car dirt track. Nightclubs lined the highway: Danny’s Club, the Cotton Club, Uncle Ben’s Jungle Inn, and most alluring of all, with its huge neon sign of a couple dancing in full evening dress, the Plantation Inn. Downtown, the Sunset Drive-In showed movies—Reefer Madness, The Miracle of Birth, Black Like Me—the Censor Board in Memphis banned. Beyond West Memphis was farmland, cotton fields, and tenant cabins in rows. Forrest City, Brinkley, DeValls Bluff. We would stop in Carlisle and have dinner at the K.C. Steak House, which served the best steak I ever had. My last meal there was on my honeymoon.
Outside Little Rock was a stretch of highway by the old river backwash, which looked like a swamp. Green moss clung to the bank. Dried out cypress trees and stumps stuck up out of dark, stagnant water coated with thick slime. I looked forward to that strange stretch of road.
We would get to my grandmother’s house about eight o’clock on Friday night. My parents would go out with old friends in Little Rock, leaving me with my grandmother and the radio. I was strongly attracted to Rochester’s gruff, growling voice on The Jack Benny Program. “Mr. Benny, Mr. Benny,” he would croak and the audience laughed. “What is it, Rochester?” Benny replied, and the show was on. Phil Harris, the bandleader, told stories about Frank Remley, his drunken guitar player. It was a radio show about a radio show; the characters played fictional versions of themselves, like twin mirrors in the barbershop where the reflection repeats into infinity. I waited for the story to unwind every Saturday night.
One Saturday night my grandmother and I were at her next-door neighbor’s house, listening to “Rhapsody in Blue” from the Hollywood Bowl on their big console radio. Clarinets lead to a long piano movement that builds and builds to violins playing the melodic theme’s final release. Even now, when I hear that moment of final release, I journey back to Little Rock and the living room radio.
Huddie’s house was full of what I guessed were memories. I listened to rain against old windows in the long afternoons, trying to hold on to those memories. Late at night, the old house made noises I could never figure out. Recalling it now, I recognize the sound of time passing and age encroaching.
The sun went down
over the cemetery
across the railroad tracks.
When the trains passed,
they whistled
until they were gone.
The trains passed
and the whistle hung in the air
trying to stay
and finally fading up into the night.
Night birds and crickets ran together into one song.
The night croaked like a tree frog
and the curtains rustled across the foot of the bed.
The breeze blowing in through the window
was not black like the night outside.
It was clear,
colorless,
almost silent.
It was filled
with ghosts from the graveyard
hanging on like the train whistle
somewhere out and down
the two lonely tracks
to somewhere.
Wisteria vines covered one side of Huddie’s screened-in porch. Sometimes I spent the whole day in the space behind the wisteria. Stones were in the gutter where rain ran when it dropped off the roof. The dirt was sandy and cool when I dug my fingers into it. I found big-headed roof nails, different from big wood nails. A bullet hole was in the window-sill; the police had shot at the Dog Town Ripper, a villain from North Little Rock, whom they had cornered under the house. He was wearing a woman’s flower-print dress and a sunbonnet. The Ripper’s girlfriend, my grandmother’s housemaid, was hiding him. Huddie painted over the bullet hole, but never replaced the windowsill. It added to the wisteria cloaked old house’s mystery.
Saturdays in Little Rock we went downtown to my aunt and uncle’s jewelry store. One of the best comic book shops I ever saw was next door. Main Street had it all: a dime store, a bookstore, and around the corner, a music store selling records. I could walk down Main Street to the Capitol Movie Theater. Further down, toward the Arkansas River, was an army surplus store with push-button switchblade knives in the window.
One summer day I saw something I never forgot. On the corner across the street from my grandparents’ house, I saw an organ grinder with a monkey. The man turned a crank that stuck out of a one-legged black box that made a clanking, tinny music. The monkey was tied by a leather leash and a harness, like the one my mother used to walk me in Chicago. Neighborhood children gathered around the old man and the monkey, listening to the strange, almost frantic sound of the music box and laughing at the monkey as he seemed to dance on his leather restraint. Every few minutes the man stopped turning the musical crank and passed around a metal cup, soliciting coins from the children. Eventually, the audience tired of the spectacle and wandered away. The organ grinder and the monkey disappeared into the afternoon. The music, the monkey dance, and the laughing children seemed sad to me.
In May, Cotton Carnival brought parades and the Royal Barge landing on the riverbank at the foot of Union Avenue. Fireworks flared from Mud Island. Sparkling skyrockets exploded as we watched from my father’s office window. The Royal American Midway Show set up next to the Falls Building for Cotton Carnival. The Midway had rides, games of chance, and sideshows with freaks and hoochie coochie dancers. Harlem in Havana interested me most. A pitchman with a microphone told the audience about wonders they could witness. A black saxophone player droned and a drummer thumped as the pitchman brought out a dancing girl to showcase the exotic pleasure inside. When I went to the Midway with my parents, I stayed at the outdoor stage in front of that tent as long as possible. My father had little patience with my interest and my mother had no sympathy at all. I didn’t get into the tent for the Big Show until I was a teenager and skipped school.