Memphis Rent Party

by Robert Gordon

  There was popular aesthetic, and there was Memphis. Hadn’t Sam Phillips kept the takes with the technical mistakes—bum notes, phones ringing—because the spirit was present? Tav Falco’s approach to music was similar: “Here was an art form that I could participate in by just picking up the instrument,” Tav told me, “like a Kodak Instamatic camera.” Capturing this spirit wasn’t about the force of spewing one’s guts; this was an artistic process to honor. The chaos of Like Flies on Sherbert was intentionally developed. Memphis wasn’t about getting it right or wrong, it was about getting it.

  As a writer, I’ve learned that sharing that captured moment takes careful reflection. Bum notes in a song can bring pleasing idiosyncrasy, but in writing they’ve caused me much regret: choosing words that are awkward or flat-out incorrect, getting facts wrong, mistakenly betraying what an interview subject understood to be a private moment. Jim and I talked about that too—the business of recording, of capturing time. It can be so unforgiving, displaying mistakes. It can also prolong a beautiful present.

  Years later, Jim made passing reference to his old house on Yates Road in Memphis. He, it turned out, was the hippie in the house behind the one we lived in when I was about six. My younger brother and I would hang on the cyclone fence we were not as tall as and stare at the cadre of long-haired freaks going in and out. The Memphis beatniks—my people! They frightened as much as intrigued; I remember many a stoner wandering in their backyard like something out of a Monty Python Flying Circus episode opening. I remember not just the volume of the music but its physicality as it boomed out of that little shack of a house, refusing all constraints.

  Jim died in 2009 and I miss him all the time.

  ERNEST WILLIS

  In high school, I’d learned that the ordinary Memphis surrounding me was full of extraordinary history. I’d heard Furry Lewis, I’d seen the powers of Jim Dickinson. Then I found out about the man who lived in a trailer beneath the old Mississippi River bridge. Nothing would make you turn your head if Mr. Willis walked past, but if you engaged in only a few minutes of conversation, you’d realize how extraordinary was the life he’d built.

  I had an early interest in local traditions, and in high school I began to volunteer time at the Center for Southern Folklore. (What’s not to like in a name like that?) I met Mr. Willis when the center’s director, Judy Peiser, had me help disinter one of his hand-built fishing boats from the bank of the Mississippi River. She wanted to display it at her upcoming Memphis Music and Heritage Festival. Four of us successfully unearthed the boat on a humid summer afternoon. Someone remarked on all the cool river water flowing past, and the irony of it being too dangerous to enjoy; there are stories every summer of people swimming in the Mississippi and drowning. (Of the turbulent undercurrents, locals say that if you heaved a big log deep enough into the water, it would as likely surface a mile upriver as down. Another: Locals say the Mississippi is too thick to drink and too thin to farm.) Mr. Willis showed us a place where we could “safely” cool off in the Mississippi, which we did, though with great trepidation.

  A camaraderie had developed over the course of the day’s work. Not long before departing, I followed Mr. Willis out his trailer’s front door and he halted, looking off at the huge span across the Mississippi with pylons larger than barges. He was in a reverie. “When they were building this bridge,” he said, “and they were pouring concrete into those pylons, a man fell in.”

  “Fell into the river?”

  “Fell into the pylon, buried in the concrete. They couldn’t get him out.”

  He was almost unaware I was still there. He continued, “Sometimes I lay in bed at night and wonder about that man.”

  I stood still, sensing he was about to express something deep, an abiding concern.

  But someone who’d been helping with the boat saw him at the door and hollered. Mr. Willis’s head snapped, and as he answered, the mood was broken and I was left to ponder.

  Not long after, I arranged to visit again. I brought a friend with me and told her the story on the way over: If the conversation should again go to that moment, we should not say a word but let the thought bubble up unsullied.

  We sat in Mr. Willis’s living area, beneath the thrum of bridge traffic, and talk turned to the river, then the bridge, and when he told the story about the man, he fell into that same trance, said those same words: “Sometimes I lay in bed at night and wonder about that man.” My friend and I exchanged glances and our breathing slowed.

  But Mr. Willis just stared off.

  And we waited.

  But he just stared off.

  Realizing I’d never find out otherwise, I asked in a hushed tone: “What do you wonder about him?”

  He replied with a practical urgency that completely broke the tone of the moment: “When Jesus comes, how’s he going to get up out of there?”

  Mississippi Reverie

  Previously unpublished, 1985

  Ernest Willis sits in his brown vinyl chair and looks out the window of his house trailer. In his front yard, the Mississippi River is rolling past. Willis’s face is as calm and serene as the water itself. “I’ve done so many things,” he says, shaking his head. His brown eyes seem to be looking at something that happened many years ago. “A book wouldn’t hold it all.”

  Willis, seventy-eight years old, lives in a trailer on the Arkansas bank of the Mississippi River, beneath the three old bridges. He has lived there for the past thirty-six years. “I came here on July 4, 1949. I had a twelve-by-twelve-foot tent, a dirt floor, a kerosene stove, and an old army cot. I drove a 1940 Chevrolet touring car and pulled a two-wheeled trailer that held a boat I made. That was all I had.”

  Today, Willis lives in a trailer with two rooms. He has furniture, electricity, and a telephone. He has lifetime property rights to a small plot of land. He has a lawnmower. He has thirty-six years of river memories.

  His yard is a touch of suburbia amid the wilds of the riverbank. Behind him is a huge soybean farm. Beside him is the overgrowth of the bridge’s right-of-way. In front of him is whatever the river recently washed up. In the very center of Willis’s yard is his trailer. A lush, well-groomed lawn surrounds it. A cottonwood tree that he planted on the day he arrived now towers over the yard. A floating shed, tied to the cottonwood with rope as thick as a man’s leg, contains Willis’s fishing gear. It sits at rest on the bank, awaiting high water.

  Willis surveys it all: The automobile bridge overhead with its constant rumble of cars and its steady roar of tractor-trailers; the intermittent thunder and screech of the train bridge; the fleet of rusty, empty iron barges docked several yards below him; the third largest river in the world. These are his home. They belong here. The candy wrapper from a workman on the bridge does not. Willis walks across his yard to pick it up.

  Ernest Willis does not look like he’s almost eighty. Lean, with powerful arms, square shoulders, and a straight back, Willis’s body would look normal on a man half his age. “The doctors say I have the body of a forty-year-old man,” he says, showing a toothless grin. Though retired from channel fishing for the past three years, Willis has never been inactive.

  If you were in West Memphis this morning, you may have seen him. If you were there this afternoon, you may have seen him. Every day, Ernest Willis is outdoors: six- to eight-mile walk in the morning, four- to six-mile run in the evening. He runs in races and fund-raisers. People offer the old man physical assistance. He politely refuses. They are shocked when he passes them in the race.

  Running is a triumph for Ernest Willis. In 1911, when he was four years old, his right leg was severely burned in a fire. The doctors told him he would never walk again. Though the scar still covers his thigh today, Willis has been proving the doctors wrong for more than seventy years.

  He was a Golden Gloves boxing champion in the 1920s, then he began training as a runner. He excelled. “I was one of the greatest athletes of my time,” Willis says. He competed with the national team and wa
s primed for the 1936 Olympics when a dog bite on his calf prevented him from running. “It like to broke my heart,” he says. Willis was in the hospital looking at the stitches in his calf while Jesse Owens was in Berlin taking all of the honors.

  Ernest Willis in his younger days. (Courtesy of the Center for Southern Folklore)

  Running has been just one way that Willis has kept his body in good shape. His life as a fisherman was active and full of adventure.

  His typical day began with a cup of coffee at four A.M. After that, if he was fishing in the Mississippi River, he would haul his motor down the bank to his boat, load all of his gear, and set out. If he was fishing elsewhere, he would carry everything to his truck and drive to his location.

  In good times, he ran his nets twice a day. In flood times, his lines were laid closer to his home and he checked them four times daily. In lean times, he ran his nets only once.

  He knows fish and knows how to catch them. “Fish is kind of like hogs,” Willis muses. Hogs in a field will follow a certain path. “Sometimes fish will hit a point here, then they’ll cross the river. Just like hogs go through fields, fish go in paths.”

  In a typical day of fishing, Willis traveled up to twenty-five or thirty miles in his boat. Eight to twelve hours later, the fishing done, the first half of Willis’s workday was over. At his trailer, Willis ran a dock and sold his fresh catches. He returned with his fish, set up shop, and earned his keep.

  People from as far as Pine Bluff, a hundred fifty miles away, were his regular customers. Fish were weighed in a big washtub that hung on a scale from the roof of his shed, which floated in the water. He primarily sold catfish, buffalo, carp, and drum.

  He started his business the day he arrived, and continued until the day he retired. He never advertised. In the beginning, his business was slow, but word spread. After four months, he built his dock. After four years, he bought a trailer. After thirty-three years, he had many friends.

  Fishing kept Willis busy. Besides catching the fish and running the dock, he weaved his own nets and built his own boats. He’d learned to fish from his father, who also taught him these crafts.

  “I used knitting blocks and needles. I made the blocks out of cedar.” The blocks are small, very smooth rectangles with one curved edge. “They have to be smooth so you can slide these meshes off them.” Using three blocks and a needle whittled out of pecan, Willis weaved nylon nets. “It takes me a day to knit a net.”

  In the center of his nets, Willis wove a large mesh. Toward the outside, the mesh became smaller, “to catch smaller fish.” Thus, his nets brought him a full catch. “I make them so much better than you can buy them.”

  The boats that Willis made were also much better than those made in factories. He recalled once buying an aluminum boat. Every time Willis used it, the boat rocked in the wind, making it difficult for him to work. Upset, Willis would strike the boat with the paddle. “I broke so many paddles,” he says, smiling. “When I finally gave that thing away, it had a big U-shaped dent in the back of it.” His arm makes a U in the air and he laughs. His gums show and his eyes shine. “Them boats in stores just don’t work for commercial fishermen.”

  Had it not been for his handmade sturdy boats and his physical strength, Willis could never have brought in some of his catches. “I caught one in Pine Bluff that weighed 137 pounds, a blue cat. Ooo-wee. I weighed exactly what the catfish weighed. I carried him over my shoulder and his tail drug the ground.” A 137-pound fish was not easily coaxed into a boat. Willis fought him. “That fish got so tired pulling that line and weight that he wore himself out. Then I just rolled him in on top of me.”

  Willis brought the big cat back to his dock, where he showed him off. He sold him to the Pine Bluff jailhouse. Big fish were not unusual in Willis’s yard. “I’d have alligator gars laying around here like cordwood.” He sold a 212-pound gar for five cents a pound.

  Willis looks at the cottonwood tree in his front yard. “I dug it up and planted it there. It was thirty-six years old the Fourth of July.” When the tree was first big enough, Willis put a table under it. At the table, he sometimes conducted business. Sometimes he sat there with girlfriends. Sometimes he climbed up onto the table and napped in the cool shade of the tree that he had planted with his own hands.

  The river has not always been the friend it could be. Ernest Willis has had many arguments and battles with the Mighty Mississippi. Some battles he won.

  “In 1963, that was the worst fishing. Fish, shrimp, everything died.” Living on the river, Willis saw the pollution levels getting out of control. “It was terrible. The bank was lined with shrimp, dead. Everything was trying to get out on the bank.”

  After being quoted in a newspaper article about pollution, Willis was contacted by the government. He began the river cleanup. Although the water today is still too dirty for Willis’s liking, he is proud and pleased of the work he has done to save the river life.

  Some battles, he knows, cannot be won. Every spring, the river rises and floods. Every spring, Willis’s yard is submerged, sometimes in twelve feet of water. Hence, every spring for the past thirty-six years, Willis has hitched his trailer (or packed his tent) and moved to higher ground.

  He recalls the first flood. “I was living up above the bridge in a tent. I woke up one morning and the river was rising. I started to get out of bed, and I put my feet in the water. You ought to have seen me getting out of there!”

  To escape the water, Willis moves to the paved highway behind him. Sometimes, the river chases him from there. Willis moves. The river wins.

  Willis suffered one loss to the river that was mightier than them all. In the winter of 1937, he was living in Pine Bluff with his father and stepfamily. While Willis was helping his father haul cotton from an island in the river, the boat overturned.

  Ernest Willis works the river. (Courtesy of the Center for Southern Folklore)

  “I went down in about twenty-feet of water, and the only thing that saved me was I sat on the bottom and got my boots off. I got my feet under me and I kicked real hard. I came up right by a sack of cotton. I threw my arms onto the cotton sack, kicked my feet, and went over to a sandbar.”

  He was rescued on the sandbar, and then he went to look for his father and stepsister. He found the girl. She was floating in the water, drowned. The next day, sick with pneumonia, Willis got back in a boat and dragged the bottom of the river with a trotline. He found his father. “That hurt me worse than anything that ever happened.”

  Willis was the last person to pass through the Tennessee Chute. The Corps of Engineers built a dam that would prevent that branch of the Mississippi from washing away a peninsula that could—and did—become a slack water port and industrial area. Willis was out running his trotlines. He did not see “the engineer people waving red flags, trying to get me to stop” until it was too late. “I done started in there, and there wasn’t no way in the world I could start back.”

  Willis survived the waves by using the river to his advantage rather than fighting it. “This is where your experience comes in.” He shifted all of the weight to the back of the boat, let the waves break under the boat, and rode through it. “They thought I was gone,” he says.

  “I’ve had some narrow escapes. I’ve been in storms out there. I was almost took under by a big whirlhole.” Whirlholes, he explains, suck from the top to the bottom, the opposite of tornadoes. “I’ve seen logs shooting out of whirlholes like bullets.”

  The Mississippi has made him many friends, but it attracts all kinds of people. “This river was full of thieves.” He recalls one man who “would steal the nickels off a dead man’s eyes.” He continues, “I’ve had them steal my trammel nets, my barrel nets, my run nets, everything else.”

  He has had a few trespassers. His trailer was broken into once when he was away from home. Another time, a man on a dune buggy tried to run him over. That man wound up in the hospital. The loud noises from the bridge have never bothered him,
but “if you step on a stick outside,” he says, “I hear that.”

  While there are some inconveniences, Willis likes the piece of river life he now occupies. The Island Queen blows her whistle for him, and Willis comes out and waves to the tourists. Visitors stop by to meet him. Newspapers from all over the country—New York, Los Angeles, and Canada—call and visit him. Sports Illustrated recently contacted him.

  Willis sacrifices many amenities for his perch on the river. For one, he has no running water. He always keeps a supply of drinking water in the trailer. When he wants to bathe at home, he must haul in water and heat it on the stove.

  Hauling water means going to town. Going to town means driving on his driveway. Driving on his driveway makes Willis think of this past winter. “Oh this last winter, I’m lucky I got in and out of here.”

  To get from his trailer to the highway, Willis must travel a dirt road that winds along the bridges. Farm vehicles also use the dirt road and they tear it up, sometimes leaving it treacherous for travel. In warm weather, the road is bumpy. In rain, it becomes a mud hole. In winter, it is too much. “Sometimes I’d get stuck. I’d have to get out and jack my car up and build under the wheels. I like to froze my hands. The hide come off all on the end of my fingers. I’m lucky I got the feeling back in them.”

  In recent years, Willis has been required to make more frequent trips to town. Besides getting supplies, he has had to visit doctors. Some years back, an anchor tore through the scar on his burned leg. “It wouldn’t heal. That went into skin cancer.” After two months in the veterans’ hospital and several skin grafts, he was cured.

  Three years ago, he was told he had cancer of the bladder. After an operation and continued treatment, he is today cured. The cancer has, however, kept the doctors concerned. In recent years, he has had another operation and several stays in the hospital. He will have more doctors’ appointments.