by Susan Orlean
ON THE ROAD, at truck stops and diners, we ate Reese’s peanut butter cups; Reese’s Pieces; Sour Cream ’n Onion Pringles potato crisps; 3 Musketeers; chicken, baked, simmered, stewed, smothered, potted in pies, or creamed à la king; chicken-fried steak; chicken-fried chicken; chicken even for breakfast sometimes, if we’d traveled all night after a show and never got dinner. Arriving in Columbus, Georgia, after driving since midnight, we had baked chicken at ten in the morning, which was the earliest I had ever eaten chicken in my life. Most often, the Southernaires take their meals at truck stops, which have telephones at the tables and showers for rent and sometimes Southernaires tapes for sale in racks near the cashiers. “Truck stops have beautiful food,” Mack once explained to me. “Besides, we can get the bus serviced at the same time we eat.”
Now and then when I was with the Southernaires, I felt we spent more time arranging to eat, stopping to eat, ordering food to go, waiting to eat, and eating than we did at gospel shows. The night I began my travels with them, we left Jackson, drove about twelve miles, then pulled off at a truck stop and had dinner. It was a quarter to one in the morning. None of the Southernaires understood why I found this odd. The truck stop was fairly empty, and the nine of us spread out at five or six tables, so when Huey said grace our “Amen”s ping-ponged around the dining room. When the Southernaires’ agent books a date for them, she tries to get the promoter to pay for their hotel and dinner, to supplement the small amount they are paid for the show. Sometimes the promoter offers to cook them dinner instead of underwriting it. In Madison, Georgia, an old man who was a friend of the promoter set up a booth outside the auditorium with paper plates, napkins, an ancient deep fryer, and a Crock-Pot, and started cooking yellow perch and hot dogs for the group to have before the show. When I asked him if the fish was good, he gave me a funny look. Then he slapped a piece of perch across the palm of his hand and said, “Like I said, it don’t got no bones.”
AT THE CONCERTS, I saw men wearing spats and women wearing hats such as I’d never seen before: a black porkpie with a turquoise veil and bow; a midshipman’s white cap with little pearls sewn along the rim; a tricorne of orange faille; a green beanie; a purple derby, worn at a slant; a red saucer that had netting looped around the edge and a piece of stiff fabric shaped like a Dorito sticking straight up from the crown; a fuchsia-colored ten-gallon with an ostrich feather drooping from the hatband. The hats were on elderly ladies, who moved through the crowds like cruise ships. Teenage girls came to the concerts, too, in flowered dresses or in jeans and tank tops, wearing their babies slung on their hips, the way hikers wear fanny packs, or jouncing them absentmindedly, like loose change.
I heard people at gospel concerts call eyeglasses “helpers” and a gravel road “a dirty road,” and I heard an infant called “a lap baby,” and a gun called “a persuader,” and dying called “making it over,” and an embarrassed person described as “wanting to swallow his teeth,” and a dead person described as someone who was “having his mail delivered to him by groundhogs.” Everybody talked about Jesus all the time. He was called a doctor, a lawyer, a lily of the valley, a lamb, a shepherd, joy in the morning, a rock, a road, peace in the evening, a builder, a captain, a rose of Sharon, a friend, a father, and someone who is always on time. I met a man named Porkchop and a man named Midget and a little boy named Royriquez Clarencezellus Wooten. I heard other gospel groups perform: the Christian Harmonizers and the Sensational Harmonizers and the Harmonettes and the Religiousettes and the Gloryettes and the Gospel True Lights and the True Gospel Singers and the Brotherhood Gospel Singers and the Five Singing Sons and the Mighty Sons of Glory and the Fantastic Disciples and the Fantastic Soulernaires and the Fantastic Violinaires and the Sunset Jubilaires and the Pilgrim Jubilees and the Brown Boys and the Five Blind Boys and Wonder Boy and the Spiritual Voices. The concerts were like big public conversations. The exhortations that people called out to the singers most often were “Take your time!” and “Let Him use you!” The exhortations that Huey and Roger called out most often were “Do you believe in Jesus?” and “Can I get just one witness?” and “Are you with me, church?” and “You know, God is able.”
In Madison, Georgia, the Southernaires performed as part of a program given in a school auditorium. As soon as the concert began, a tiny woman in a peach-colored pantsuit got up from her seat and made her way over to the aisle, and then she spiraled around for about an hour, gasping, “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!” with her eyes squeezed shut and her hands flapping in the air. People stepped around her carefully when they went to and from their seats. On the stage, a local group was performing, and one of the singers had raised her arms and turned her palms toward her face as she sang; she had six fingers on each hand, and each nail was painted coral pink. After the song, she leaned over the edge of the stage and said sharply, “Isn’t Satan busy? Satan’s a stubborn old mule. I remember when I would lay out all night on what they call the disco floor. Then something hit me in the head. The voice I heard, it was just like threading a needle.” I saw only one white person besides myself at one concert—she was the desk clerk at the motel where we were staying, and Huey told her if she gave us good rooms he’d give her a free ticket. Huey introduced me to the audience one night, and afterward someone passed me a note that said, “We Welcome You, To Madison, Georgia. From: Hattie.” I read it and looked up, and the woman who had written it fluttered her handkerchief at me, and during the next song she crossed the room and kissed me.
MARIANNA, FLORIDA: We arrive at four-thirty in the morning, after driving all night. Granard will try to negotiate a half-day rate at a motel, since we will sleep for only a few hours and then will leave to set up the show, and after the show we’ll get back on the bus and start driving to McCormick, South Carolina, for the next show. Even for a gospel group as well established as the Southernaires, every dollar makes a difference. One night, I found a scrap of paper on the bus on which someone had been doing calculations. It said, “Show, $1500. Records $232.” When all was said and done, that appeared to be all they would make that evening, and they had to pay for their food and gas and lodging and split the remainder eight ways. The motels we drive by and consider around Marianna are squat, cinder-block buildings on weedy lots. At the first one we try, the night manager comes out and looks at the bus and then he tells Granard the motel is totally booked, even though the parking lot is empty. We stop at another motel, and Granard negotiates for ten minutes, until the clerk gives him a hospitable price. Mack pulls the bus behind the motel, where the parking lot turns into dirt and saw grass. My motel room is stale and dreary. There is a shopping program and a white gospel show on television, and a lizard, paralyzed but pulsating, on one corner of my door.
The next afternoon, the air is completely still. The street leading to Marianna High School is lined with palm trees, and not a frond is moving. The school is a pretty building with Mediterranean inclinations. Its walls are apricot brick. The lawns around it have been roasted. Some little blond girls are playing kickball in front of a bungalow next to the school. A few yards away, a group of old black men wearing short-sleeved white dress shirts and creased fedoras, their pants hiked up to their diaphragms, are standing and talking. When they see the bus, they hitch their pants up even higher and start trotting toward it, waving us around to the side of the school. Mack pulls up to a loading dock and yanks the gears until the bus wheezes and settles down.
Huey stands and stretches, half bent: He is too tall to unfold himself fully in the bus. He nudges Roger, who is listening to his Walkman, and then wipes his forehead, peers out, and says hoarsely, “I always do love Florida.”
Through the loading-dock door comes Sister Lula Cheese Vann. She is a husky woman with the haughty bearing of a big shot. She is dressed in a salmon-colored luncheon suit, a dozen rings and pins and bracelets, and a structurally complex salmon-colored hat the size of a breadbox. In her right hand is a flyer for the evening’s program. In her left is a q
uiver of paper fans, which are printed with an essay entitled “How to Get Along with People,” and are sponsored by her full-time business, the Vann Funeral Home. By vocation, Sister Vann is a mortician; as an avocation she promotes gospel. She comes to the open door of the bus and says smartly, “Southernaires. Hello. Do you know who I am?”
Huey steps out and says “Sister Vann,” in his most sultry voice, and shakes her hand. Sister Vann melts a little. The old men form a buzzy circle around them, giving orders and gesturing. Gary and Melvin step out, wearing work gloves, jeans, and T-shirts, and start shoving the equipment out of the belly of the bus. Mack is dragging the record crates up the ramp of the loading dock.
The hall of the school is cool and empty. The front door is propped half open; a wedge of yellow late-afternoon light, of parched lawn, of palms, of shuttered bungalows, of tar-drizzled sidewalk, of little blond girls wandering by is showing through. The hall begins to fill. Mack, setting up the cassette table, is clowning with two young girls in fancy dresses. A brassy-voiced woman walks past them, hauling her teenage daughter by the elbow. “I would like Sister Vann to give her a listen,” the woman says to Mack. “Put her on the program. Yes, I would.” Brother Alonzo Keys, a handsome chatterbox from Panama City, Florida, who is singing tonight, comes over to pay his respects to Huey and the Southernaires. Sister Gladys Madrick, who will open the gospel program, flounces by, trailed by three skittery young women in lavender dresses. The auditorium is medium-sized and tidy, with smooth gold seats and purple fittings. Three women are already seated, halfway back, and are flapping at one another with Sister Vann’s fans.
By seven, Melvin has finished the sound check, so the Southernaires go back to the bus and change into the clothes they will wear for the hour or so before they change into the evening’s uniforms—whichever of their six sets Granard has chosen. Melvin has put on a mustard-colored blazer, a mustard shirt, and a black tie. Huey is wearing a turquoise tunic. The last sunlight has deepened and now fades. The neighborhood is dead quiet and dim, except right here, in this little pocket, which is full of noise and commotion, with the school lights flaring, and someone in the auditorium already yelling, and Sister Gladys Madrick’s organist starting to play.
THE UNIFORM THAT GRANARD chooses is a black double-breasted suit that they wear with a crisp white shirt, a tie with a purplish gardenia print, and smooth black shoes. Onstage in this uniform, they look polished, natty, and a little grave. Sister Vann introduces them: “I feel blessed. I never, never thought I’d get the Jackson Southernaires here in Marianna, and here they are. The Lord’s been good to me.” She pauses. “Now, before I start with the Southernaires I want to say to you-all that we got to stop this screaming and crying about the price of these tickets. This program costs seven dollars a ticket, and I can tell you, with God as my witness, that this is the cheapest the Jackson Southernaires have ever been anywhere they’ve gone. So give God a hand, would you, and quit this miserable complaining!” A smattering of applause. Sister Vann smiles wanly. Her funeral home motto is “Concern for the Living, Reverence for the Dead.” “I am so glad to be following in God’s footsteps,” she says. “And I’m glad God put love in my heart and I don’t mind sharing it. Now, Marianna, the Jackson Southernaires!!”
Maurice taps the drum, and they begin. Each program opens with Roger singing “I’ve Been Changed.” It’s a song with a clunky, unlovely beat, but it always rouses the crowd. Singing it, Roger is coiled and ferocious. The auditorium is mostly full now, and the audience is clapping in time. When Roger finishes the song, he steps to one side, and Huey comes forward. “Say ‘Amen,’ Marianna,” he says.
“Amen!”
“Say ‘Amen’ again.” Huey flicks the microphone upward, looks forward, and then snaps the microphone to the right and his head the other way. It is a tiny gesture, but vivid—as if he has stolen a look at something and then torn himself away.
“Amen.”
“Sing it, Huey. Sing it! Sing it!”
The woman next to me leans over and whispers, “Oh Lord, we got a loud one here.”
“Let me ask you something,” Huey says, stepping forward. “How many of you here know there is a heaven?”
“A-men.”
Huey gives his testimony, about the night his house burned to the ground. It is a terrible true story: He lost everything he had, and his son could have died if Huey had not stumbled on him as the family was getting away. Around me, people are nodding and weeping. I have now heard Huey tell this many times—to me in private, and also at several shows—but each time the clenched and anguished look on his face seems fresh. After the story, he always sings “He Will Make a Way,” which begins as a sweet, slow, melancholic exchange between singer and chorus, and then rises into a storm. In the last verse, Huey is shouting that God will make a way, that he always makes a way, and then he can’t speak anymore, and he starts laughing, and sweat is running down his cheeks, and he turns his eyes upward, and he stares up past the auditorium ceiling, and tears stream down his face.
Huey steps back, exhausted, and Maurice starts the rattling drumbeat for “No Coward Soldier.” Roger will take over until the end of the show. He bounds to the edge of the stage and starts singing. The woman next to me, who had taken my hand and held it through most of the show, now releases it gently, as if she were putting a hooked fish back in the water, and turns to me and says, “I’m sorry, baby, but I got to get loose.” Then she jumps out into the aisle and bends forward from her waist and snaps in a staccato rhythm back and forth as Roger sings.
At that point, I get up and work my way along the row and across the far aisle and stand in the doorway by the side of the stage. It is almost midnight. Someone is frying catfish out front, and the peppery smell thickens the air. Someone with a wheezy cough is standing behind me. A big bug smacks into me, sizzles, and falls. I can see everything from where I am standing: a man in the front row pitched back in his seat and crying without making any noise; twin teenagers in dotted sundresses fanning themselves a few rows behind him; Mack, at the back of the auditorium, sitting on the gray plastic crates that hold the group’s records and tapes; a diapered baby in a sailor suit, draped over the shoulder of a slim woman in a yellow sheath; a woman, too wide to sit in an auditorium seat, teetering on a folding chair someone put out for her near the exit door; Roger, on the lip of the stage, taking little explosive bounces on the balls of his feet; Huey, behind him, leaning against the electric piano and running his hand over his hair, his expression a mingling of rapture, fatigue, and distraction, a sort of stillness absorbing him, as if he were in a different, quieter place; a banner over the stage showing the Marianna High School Fighting Bulldog mascot dressed in a snug purple crewneck; a toddler; a wheelchair; a tossed-away flyer; a flash of white in the crowd each time a woman flaps her handkerchief or a man raises his to dab his face—a flash as incandescent as a lit bulb or the luminous envelope of a flame.
Roger jumps off the stage and hollers, “What day did you get the Holy Ghost? Did you get it on a Monday? On a Tuesday? On a Wednesday? Did someone here get it on a Thursday?” One by one, people rise up like bubbles and float toward the stage, grab his hand, shake it hard, and then spin and dance away. He calls for anyone who got the Holy Ghost on Sunday; he sings that God don’t need no coward soldiers. He shouts that he wishes he had a witness. He says he knows some people here tonight are going through something. He claps his left hand to his head and then whips it down and pounds his chest. The night is ending. The Southernaires’ time is nearly over. They will be back on the bus and on the road to Jackson within the hour. The music is roaring. A little breeze is picking up outside, lifting bits of grass and gravel and blowing them away. Roger stamps his foot and screams, “We will surely meet again someday!”
AFTER THE PARTY
MIDMORNING, ON A BLUSTERY DAY IN NEW York, Sue Mengers is in her New York hotel, the Lowell, killing time. She doesn’t know where she’s going from here. She has an apartment in Par
is and a house in Beverly Hills, a room key in Manhattan, the story of Hollywood of the late sixties and seventies in her head, and no particular plans. She fidgets around the room. She wants to open the window for you or lend you a sweater if it’s open too much or get you cappuccino and a nice breakfast even if the temperature is perfect and you want nothing to eat. She has the fussy, buzzing restlessness of someone who wants to be occupied doing something for someone else. Her phone rings. “Yes, hello,” she says, answering impatiently. “No, no, I don’t want to go to the Russian Tea Room. I was there the other day, and it was so . . . stressful.” She coughs and listens, staring hard at the floor. “Okay, we can do the Russian Tea Room. We can do it.”
She will be having lunch with Helen Gurley Brown, an old friend. After that, she’s not sure. She doesn’t think she’ll stay long in New York. “New York is such a working place,” she says. “If you’re here but you’re not working, it’s hard to fit in.” She will probably go back to Paris. She doesn’t talk about going back to Los Angeles. For almost two decades, she was one of the most powerful agents and most commanding hostesses in Hollywood. She rose fast in a business that was then dominated by men. She outmanned many of them: She was the toughest negotiator, the bluntest adversary, the nerviest deal maker. In her years at Creative Management Associates, which then became International Creative Management, from 1967 to 1986, she made a lot of movies happen. She represented, among others, Candice Bergen, Faye Dunaway, Brian De Palma and Anthony Perkins. Then she lost one big client, and then another, and her way of doing business—all personality, no strategy—started to seem an anachronism. She no longer fits in. She hasn’t had more than a few people over for dinner since 1986. She doesn’t want to go to screenings anymore; she doesn’t want to go to big parties. As she tells it, Hollywood is a club that she loved to belong to, yet you can tell she never felt she really belonged. For a while, people appreciated her usefulness, which is not the same as belonging, although for a stretch it can look the same. She was tactless and contemptuous, and made enemies needlessly, either because she knew in her heart that someday she would no longer belong and so indulged a preemptive bitterness or because she believed she’d belong forever and so could afford to do anything. She coughs again. She says, “I feel just like the Queen Mother, because I have this association with Hollywood but no function there anymore. I’m just like her.” She smooths her hair, looks away, and then says, “Only not as rich.”