‘I’ve got a picture of Elvis like that. But there’s more sweat on his face in mine.’ I’d been admiring a picture of Elvis Presley wearing dramatic Prussian blue, his face cinnamon coloured, in a Mississippi roadside café, when the waitress had sidled up, commenting lovingly on it. A fat man sat entranced by George Jones’s version of ‘From here to the door is your freedom’ coming from the jukebox. I had just entered Mississippi from the state of Alabama, intending to follow the Elvis Presley Highway from Tupelo – Elvis’s birthplace – to Memphis where Graceland, his home for twenty-one years, is situated.
Mississippi is green after the arid south-east, smouldering jade green, azure morning glory flowers tumbling from the roadside into the cotton fields, slithers of dark cloud over the landscape consumed by kudzu weed.
Some of the towns along the way hold a miasma of antebellum streets. Old black ladies swept up leaves with brooms. An old man in a lavender suit, a little russet chicken feather in his hat, limped down College Street in Columbus where Tennessee Williams was born. His house, still belonging to St Paul’s Episcopalian Church, is lilac grey, buff, sky blue. Near by is a plaque to a lady who started Confederate Flower Day in memory of the Confederate dead on 25 April 1866. The mudguard of a car on front of me, said: ‘General Lee may have surrendered but I haven’t.’
An old couple had approached a woman hanging round the Presley birthplace in Tupelo when I arrived, inquiring about the site of the Battle of Tupelo. ‘Don’t know. It was before my time,’ she answered curtly. (It had been a Union victory.) But she was able to lavish them with information about her first sight of the Presley boy, which occurred on a visit home from Illinois in the 1930s. On the kitchen wall is a picture of him, between his parents who resemble sharecroppers in disconsolate photographs of that period. ‘They look tired there,’ the woman said. ‘They became less tired later on.’ The house – a cabin really – has two rooms. Apart from the photograph on the wall there is little else besides a framed copy of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’. Elvis spent thirteen years in Tupelo where his mother slaved in a shirt factory, his father trying to farm.
Ceramic Dalmatians and homegrown watermelons were sold at a stall near by. Nearer still a woman was having a garage sale, the main item offered being vacuum cleaners. Posters advertised a concert by a gospel singer called The Spiritual Messenger of Tupelo. Gospel singers are the main source of imaginative palpitation, of imaginative arousal in Southern towns like Tupelo, whose town centres are composed of chamois-coloured and yellow-ochre buildings, whose fringes are desultory and manically uniform. Elsewhere in the South, at a gospel concert, I’d seen a fat, grey-haired black woman drag herself round the hall, a bandage on the tip of her right foot in the shape of an Arabian slipper, and some minutes later the same woman, completely transformed, in an immaculate buttercup-coloured dress, swinging and heaving and exulting on the stage, arms outstretched, singing: ‘Hold on just a little bit longer. Help is on the way.’
There is an Elvis Presley pond near the birthplace, packed with ducks, an Elvis Presley church. The ducks on the pond gluttonously converged on an old lady who’d painfully walked from a wheelchair to feed them. She and her husband were touring the United States in a van. They were from California. They’d just been to Graceland. Next stop was a canyon in Arkansas. She reminded me that Elvis had started off singing with a church choir, that of the First Assembly of Christ Church. People offered me bits of information along the way, in cafés, in the Presley birthplace, accelerating a biographical collage. There was even a tea towel suspended on one café wall which read:
Can it be true –
that this Christmas when he sings
‘Mama liked the roses’
(which was written for his mother
whom he loved so much)
he will be in Heaven with his Moma
singing the song to her.
One shop along the Elvis Presley Highway sold pigs’ lips and pigs’ feet in jars, alongside jars of candy sticks, the pigs’ feet having imbued the preserving liquid with a violet colour. A multicoloured ceramic chicken posed in pedalling position on a bicycle outside a house. There were terracotta gargoyles outside a cabin called ‘Point of View’. A number of times palmists’ signs beckoned. Calvary was evoked outside bungalows, a triad of tall, narrow crosses, a millionaire touring the South at the moment, distributing crosses. Churches occurred every few minutes. The Alberta Church of God. The Church of Christ, established AD 33. Signs outside them warning you: ‘Owning a Bible is an awful responsibility.’ ‘Education is easy but wisdom is hard to get.’ On Elvis Presley Boulevard, leading into Memphis which is just over the border in Tennessee, Moonies sold red roses to motorists.
Graceland, halfway down Elvis Presley Boulevard, is reached by a shuttle service from an airport-type mêlée of souvenir shops, ticket kiosks, very functional ice-cream parlours on the other side of the road. Two of Elvis’s planes, stationary on tarmac, lined within by apple green and rose pink and holding enclaves of shirts with igniting, night-sky patterns, contribute to the airport atmosphere.
Elvis Presley lookalikes, looking as if they had nowhere else to go, slumped about the day I was there, one with rumpled hair, scarlet shirt, pale blue suede shoes with citron-yellow laces. Three ladies with ash-colour eruptions of hair at the back determinedly patrolled the area. But Graceland on the other side of the road, amid slightly rolling parkland, right down to the quality of the light through Tiffany glass, had the opulence and serenity of mosques in remote Arabia.
The woman who’d been hanging around the Presley birthplace in Tupelo had told me that Elvis had Graceland built for his mother, Gladys Love Presley, in 1956 but he was drafted into the army before they could settle in properly. She joined him in Fort Hood in Texas but on the way back to Graceland in 1958 she became ill and instead of being taken to Graceland from the train station in Memphis she was rushed to the Baptist Hospital in Memphis where she died.
The first thing I noticed was the quantity of ceramic monkeys among the ripples of turquoise fabric, among the burgundy lampshades. Elvis apparently had a pet chimpanzee, whom he dressed in a sailor suit, who used to pull obsessively at girls’ dresses. In many of the rooms Elvis spoke to you, one way or another. In a TV interview constantly being shown in one room he was asked, after his return from the army in Germany, what his advice to young people about to serve would be. His voluptuary’s lips brazenly contorted. His militarily coiffured frame shuddered a little. His head experienced a quaking resonance at the question. ‘You can’t fight them. They never lost yet.’ Elsewhere, beside a Jewish chai pendant which he wore at his final concerts, is an inscription: ‘Don’t criticize what you don’t understand, son, you never walked in that man’s shoes.’ His wife’s volcanic wedding headdress near by. A poster for Change of Habit in which he starred with Mary Tyler Moore. ‘Could she forsake her vows and follow her heart?’
Outside, among the cockscombs and the caladiums, are the Presley graves. A teddybear in a skirt beside Elvis’s grave. A pool of water in the ‘o’ of his middle name, Aaron. His mother, Gladys, and his grandmother, Minnie Mae Presley, buried alongside him. Behind them, set in a wall, a row of primitive, ruddy-coloured, Spanish stained-glass windows. A pool near the graves with viridian lighting effects in its depths. Elvis died on 16 August 1977 after having played ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’ and ‘Unchained Melody’ on a gold-plated piano. Beside his grave are the words: ‘God saw that he needed some rest and called his son to be with him.’ A girl I’d met in a library in Alabama told me how her brother used to deliver Cadillacs to Graceland. Elvis gave Cadillacs as gifts. And with each delivery he joined Elvis to sing gospel songs. Only the men sang gospel at Graceland. The girls decorated the house or brought refreshments.
In the works of William Faulkner Memphis is a city where ‘Sonny Boy’ is sung at funerals and ginger ale and punch served, where special beds are constructed at brothels for gargantuan customers. ‘So this is Memphis. Where have I been all my life?’ declares one character who’s from just down the road in Mississippi.
The night I was there, 16 September, a helicopter threw fireworks in the shape of a spade from the sky to inaugurate the construction of the biggest pyramid in the world beside the Mississipi. The atmosphere on Beale Street was Dionysian. But maybe it is every Saturday night.
William Faulkner’s Mississippi fraternity boys came to Beale Street and its environs to lose their virginity, to encounter madames with names like Reba Rivers. The street musician on Beale Street who drew the biggest crowd on the night of 16 September was an old black man with olive hair, who wore an ivory-yellow patterned shirt, his voice having the disconsolate, railroad whine Beale Street blues are famous for.
‘I’ve been practising a long time now,’ he told the crowd. ‘So I might improve soon.’
‘I’m the real Uncle Ben. Not the one on the rice packet. I have nieces and nephews all over America.’
The quips worked him up to another song: ‘If I don’t see you tomorrow I’ll see you the next day right around noon.’
A little black boy came up and dropped a dollar in his hat.
‘I’ll dance at your wedding,’ he shouted after the boy.
Motels are easy to get in Memphis. I got one downtown, among the yellow and rose warehouse buildings, Sun Records where Elvis made his first recordings just across the road.
In Memphis there’s a 1970s soul singer who’s made the transition to preacher – Reverend Al Green – and everyone is welcome to his services in the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church on Hale Road, off the Elvis Presley Boulevard, each Sunday morning. These services are joyful. A line of about twenty deaconesses clicked their fingers as they swung and jived into the church from the back, the morning I attended. They wore surplices with funnelled, half scarlet, half white sleeves. There were scarlet crosses on their stoles. To start the service a bespectacled, partly crippled boy got up and sang: ‘This little light of mine, I’m going to make it shine.’ Al Green, in an ultramarine gown, took up his seat at the front of the congregation. Visitors were asked to stand and say where they were from. There were three hesitant young people from Chiswick. The highlights of that service were Reverend Al Green’s daughter giving a dramatic recitation and a girl, Denise, in a violet, handkerchief-hemmed top singing her story about being saved from her life of prostitution by the grace of God. Reverend Green’s daughter in a white poodle dress, wearing large glasses, stomped around the altar, attesting:
I may not have any royal blood coursing in my veins
My name doesn’t belong to any great family tree
My living conditions are kind of down
But I’m still determined to be
Somebody
Someday.
At the back of the church is a picture of planes crashing into skyscrapers, cars crashing on highways, but figures in white sheets rising from the crashes, through the windows of mulberry and vermilion skyscrapers, from Peaceful View Cemetery. There was the glitter of diamanté and Venetian glass throughout the church. One dress was white and pink rococo, like a candy-stick bar. Pearl necklaces were tied in fist-like knots on women’s bosoms. One woman, in a black coat, waving a rose handkerchief from joy throughout the service, wore a papal dome of a hat, radiating with silver incrustations.
‘If you stop condemning you might see something beautiful,’ Al Green half sang as part of his sermon.
At the end, a little black girl having snuggled in my arms, we, the visitors, were told to come back. But here, as in many places in the South, you must respect and you must be prepared to give something, an anecdote, a little bit of autobiography, a description of an intersection in Catford or Forest Hill.
On my way back south, diverging just a little from Route 78, the Elvis Presley Highway, I passed through William Faulkner’s town, Oxford, Mississippi. Cows half submerged themselves in lakes around Oxford. I passed a mule-drawn covered wagon. Earlier, just before Oxford, I’d seen a poster advertising a Beautiful Mule competition. Revival meetings were held in marquees towards evening, the marquees lighted up beside the cotton fields, flaps open on to the night. The congregations at these were all white for some reason and I heard a pop song coming from one – ‘This will be the last time.’ The moon was coral pink, low over the fields.
Back in Tupelo I stopped for a few minutes on the site of the Battle of Tupelo, two cannons on it, and again heard music coming from the night, not Elvis, not gospel, but a Tammy Wynette number, ‘Golden Ring’, which was mellifluous in this spot where the Confederates and the Union clashed, the Union winning, the bruised feeling of the past still in the air, as it is in so much of the South.
I got a motel in Columbus and read, in magazines picked up in the foyer, about the imminent canonization of Princess Grace of Monaco, of how it’s been confirmed that Wild Bill Hickock was gay, before going to sleep.
In the morning I saw that the wall opposite the motel had a 1930s fresco on it, a sea scene, a shoe-salvage shop tucked into the building, and an old black lady, acrobatic contortions on the wings of her glasses, walking, very erect, past a sign which said ‘Heaven will make it all OK.’