by Rick Bragg
“Come on.”
Then he felt iron fingers on his arm and he was lifted up, up, forever out of his fear. He thinks now his daddy would have saved him; surely he would, would have dove into the suffocating black and pulled him free just in time. But what kind of boy would he have held there, squalling? “It wadn’t no easy place,” he says now. But it was here, at the river, that his people came to settle, to snatch once more at the good life after the high ground failed them for the last time.
“If you’re ashamed of where you’re from, then you’re ashamed of yourself,” he says of the years he lived in overalls, mud-bound. “I ain’t never been ashamed. Ferriday, Louisiana, is where I’m from. We lived a while at Black River, and lived a while down at Angola, when Daddy helped build the prison there. Daddy was up at four o’clock, and Mama was up five minutes after. Daddy followed carpentry work, so we moved all the time, moved three times in one week, to old shanty houses, mostly. He farmed cotton, corn, soybeans, split halves with my Uncle Lee, and he made some whiskey. Mama picked cotton. It was a small place, but it never seemed small to me, when I was a boy.” It is where his people, all of them, are buried, “so it’s home to me.” He has never been one of those poor Southern children who claim to have lived in blissful ignorance of their poverty and the life into which they were born; such a thing leaves no room to dream. “It kind of dawns on you after a while. It occurred to me pretty quick.” His mama and daddy never owned much of the bottomland when he was a boy, sometimes not enough to fill a teacup, but that only made it more precious. It was their last stand, this Concordia Parish, and even now, as he crosses the bridge from Natchez, he breathes easier, as if someone has lifted a heavy hand off his chest. He has to try to remember the bad of it; the good comes easy, “all good, good singin’, good eatin’, good—You know that song about the tree?”
I’m like a tree that’s planted by the water.
I shall not be moved.
People have been dying beside these waters a long time, hoping for a piece of the unsteady ground, hoping to grow something from it. Would he have been the same if he had come from a gentler place? “The talent would have come through,” he says, “even if I’d been born in some big city. But it mighta been . . . different.” It might have been, somehow, gentler. “I think my music is like a rattlesnake. It warns you, ‘Listen to this. You better listen to this.’” That essence, the toughness and meanness and maybe even a spike of savage beauty, he believes, crawled straight out of this mud.
In Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, historian Lee Sandlin identifies a quality that seems to have marked Mississippi River people from earliest days: “They all lived for the spontaneous, heedless surge of wild exuberance, the sudden recourse to violence with no provocation—the violence if not of act then of thought and language. They routinely did and said extraordinarily foolish things for no reason other than joie de vivre.” One such character was a Bunyanesque scalawag named Mike Fink. “He was a creature of pure impulse—and yet whatever he did, no matter how bizarrely random it might be, he did perfectly. He achieved without effort what nobody else could do in a lifetime of labor. His air of godlike grace, of what in classical literature was called arete, transcended everything about his personality—which was in all other ways appalling.”
Figures like Mike Fink “had a ritual game they’d play called shout-boasting,” Sandlin writes, “the point of which was to make up surreally violent claims about themselves, and then dare to fight anybody who challenged them.”
But it is not boasting, as Jerry Lee says, “if you really done it.”
The Spaniards came to the river in 1541. Hernando de Soto led men in iron helmets into the malarial jungles in a bloodthirsty search for nonexistent gold and was one of the first white men to die in the heat, damp, and mosquitoes thick as fog; some say his rusty conquistadores still ride in the mist. Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville et d’Ardillières, knight of the Order of Saint-Louis and founder of the Colony of Louisiana of New France, brought settlement and Bible and sword; soon the indigenous tribes were extinct. Flags would go up and down as white men fought over it all, till the Old World finally retreated from the yellow fever and floodplain.
In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase gave the mud to a new nation, and Thomas Jefferson sent naturalist William Dunbar to see what all the dying was for. Dunbar explored the Mississippi, Black, and Ouachita rivers by boat and horseback, and in his journals he made the land sound like paradise. “Vegetation is extremely vigorous along the alluvial banks; twining vines entangle the branches of trees [with] the richest and most luxurious festoons.” The result was “an impenetrable curtain, variegated and spangled with all possible gradations of color from the splendid orange to the enlivening green down to the purple and blue and interspersed with bright red and russet brown.” Dunbar saw endless oak trees, red and black, along with ash, pecan, hickory, elm, and persimmon; the soil was “black marl mixed with sand,” the riverbanks “clothed in rich canebreak.” The forest along the river would offer “venison, bear, turkey . . . the river fowl and fish . . . [along with] geese and ducks surprisingly fat, and excellent.”
And the river itself? Dunbar wrote of its unpredictability and moods, of whirlpools and crosscurrents where, “even in the thread of the stream, we can make no sense of it.”
Natchez would become the seat of civilization here, and it was a city of two faces. One was gentility itself, a place of plantations that set a standard for opulence, of cotillions and white columns, of high tea and fine saddle leather, London silver and Parisian gowns, all resting on a foundation of human bondage. On the other face was a leer, a wild gateway to the West peopled by gamblers, whores, pirates, riverboat men, trappers, no-accounts, swindlers, and dope fiends, where keelboats, riverboats, and oceangoing ships lined the docks; the river was so deep that the big merchant ships could creep all the way from the English ports to the whorehouses in Natchez Under the Hill. Sailors from around the world drank, fought, and cursed here in their language of origin. Beyond the lights, pirates used lanterns and bonfires to lure boats aground, robbed passengers, and rendered their bodies to the catfish.
Across the river, in Concordia Parish, in rich bottomland fed by centuries of flood, the land was hacked and burned into vast, gray-brown fields. Small towns like Vidalia, Waterproof, and St. Joseph bustled with commerce, as great steamboats tied up to take on unending cargoes of cotton and lumber. The Southern Belle, Princess, Magnolia, Natchez, and New Orleans served meals to rival any restaurant in New Orleans and had staterooms to rival the grandest hotels. The Indians called them “fire canoes,” and they routinely burned to the waterline. But every arrival in Natchez or Concordia Parish was a carnival, to see what the river would bring. Their captains became mythical figures, and poets told of them as the Greeks sang of Agamemnon:
Say, pilot, can you see that light?
I do—where angels stand.
Well, hold her jackstaff hard on that,
For there I’m going to land.
That looks like death a-hailing me
So ghastly, grim and pale.
I’ll toll the bell—I must go in.
I’ve never missed a hail.
It took muscle to power it all, and by 1860 there were 12,542 slaves in Concordia Parish alone, compared to 1,242 free whites—a cold-blooded economy wherein many plantations were controlled by absentee owners who saw the fields as a pure business venture. Life expectancy was so poor for slaves here that slave owners in other states used Louisiana plantations as a lash to keep their own slaves in line, saying if they misbehaved, they would be sold south. With populations in such disproportion and order kept by bullwhip and rope, it was a tense and brittle arrangement, prone to insurrection. One often-told story involves a slave, found guilty of murdering white men and kidnapping white women, who was burned on a pyre, or at least it was planned that way till he pulled his chains free of the post and staggered off—only to be shot dead, disappointing the
crowd.
Violence lay thick here, like the air. Duels were so common on the sandbars that they take up fifteen pages in Robert Dabney Calhoun’s History of Concordia Parish. Democrats shot at Republicans, husbands shot at judges in their wives’ divorce claims, and physicians and generals shot at senators, congressmen, and the commanding officer of the Mexican War. In 1827, Dr. Thomas Maddox challenged planter Colonel Samuel Wells to a duel over some forgotten thing. Both men missed their first shot and honor was satisfied, but their seconds decided to settle old scores and opened fire. Two men died. One of the combatants, the planter Jim Bowie—who would go on to die famously at the Alamo—stabbed a man to death with his knife. The two sides did not consider honor satisfied and would argue for years over who among them was the biggest lout, rogue, skunk, and low-bred. Most affairs were not so bloody, as those smoothbore pistols were notoriously inaccurate, and most gentlemen would accept a clean miss as providence and pull a cork. With Concordia Parish in mind, the Constitution of 1845 tried to curtail dueling, warning its practitioners that they risked being “deprived of holding office of trust or profit.” (It is lucky, say some, that the practice was outlawed before the arrival of Jerry Lee.)
The war dismantled the old society. Ulysses S. Grant took Vicksburg midway through the war, and Natchez followed. Natchez became a gracious occupied city, while in Concordia slaves walked off the fields and headed to occupied New Orleans, some to fight for the Union, and some to bring their own music to town, where they blended it with local Creole sounds and bent it into a new music called jazz. The bottomland fell hard into a puzzling time when black men wore badges, carried guns, served in the statehouse, and stood in judgment of whites on juries and from the bench itself. Reconstruction brought carpetbaggers, night riders, and Jim Crow, but it was still cotton that swung fortunes for rich and poor. Poor whites, who survived dysentery and grapeshot and suicide charges against the high ground, came to skin logs out of the woods; ex-slaves came to work the dirt, old stripes on their backs. The twentieth century brought the levees, so tall a man had to walk uphill to drown, but the river was indifferent still, and when hard rains came, it washed over and through and drowned the poor men’s dreams anyway, and fish swam in the streets of the river towns.
But it does not take much dry ground to hold up a train track, and that is where a relative prosperity—and for some poor men and women, a promise of salvation—took hold. The Texas & Pacific and Iron Mountain railroads decided they needed a terminal in Concordia Parish to service trains that hauled wood and cotton. It would be a corporate town, drawn up by an investment company on the site of an old plantation and named for the owner of the plantation, J. C. Ferriday. It was incorporated in 1906, and for passersby it was as if a town appeared overnight. Author Elaine Dundy called it “a town with no natives,” a wide-open place with a cotton compress mill, a sawmill, a lumberyard, and a large compression plant on the pipeline from the Monroe gas fields to Baton Rouge. By 1920 there were 2,643 whites and almost 10,000 people of color in the parish, and on payday they came to Ferriday to spend their money.
Ferriday, Louisiana, would become known as one of the wickeder places on earth, a place where brothels, gambling dens, and saloons ran around the clock. “Not only a bad town . . . the baddest town,” as Dundy wrote in her biography of the place. Men beat each other to death in the street over wives or cards, or even if someone kicked a deer hound. Hogs and cattle roamed Main Street, and in winter, when forage was lean, men knocked the limbs off the trees so livestock could get at the moss. Railroads would come and go, but by the 1930s, as the Depression sucked the life out of much of the country, the Texas & Pacific, the New Orleans & Northwestern, and the Memphis, Helena & Louisiana all made the village a destination. Drummers and gamblers and oil speculators arrived a trainload at a time, bound for the King Hotel, and hoboes came off the boxcars like fleas.
It was busy, and busy meant work.
“The Lewises come from Monroe” to Ferriday, said Jerry Lee, and their history was not always one of cotton sacks and shanty houses. His great-great-grandfather was Thomas C. Lewis, a landowner who became a parish judge in Monroe. His son, John Savory Lewis, Jerry Lee’s great-grandfather, was a fearsome, powerful man, a prosperous slave owner, but when the Yankees came, that dynasty fell, too. Some of his children would prosper, but one, Leroy Lewis, Jerry Lee’s grandfather, drifted in and out of professions till he settled on farming, for which he had no aptitude. His talents were in making music. He fiddled like a man on fire, fiddled as the old century gave way to the new. He passed that love of music and talent to his children, with a kind of perpetual grin that defied everything the broken South had left him. He was also prone to drink hard and often and then just disappear for a while, leaving his wife, Arilla, to wonder if he was dead. “You drunk, ain’t you?” Arilla would ask when he reappeared, wobbling. “No,” he would say, “I am intoxicated.”
In 1902, a son was born in Mangham, Louisiana. Elmo Kidd Lewis was one of eleven children, a good-looking boy with crow-black hair and that squared-off face and a permanent, inked-on grin. He was what his blood had made him, a man of great physical strength with a lovely voice and flair for music, and the thirst of generations. But there was no cruelty in him for smaller souls, say his son and others who remember him, no meanness for women or children, a lowness other men who liked a drink could not always claim. By the time he was born, there was nothing of the old family left to him but a name, so in daylight he dragged a cotton sack and swung a hammer, and in the nighttime he picked guitar and sang. He did not fight other men; never had to, just slapped them down to the ground, “quick as nothin’,” says his son. He wore that badge of honor Southerners bestow on good men who drink, if they “didn’t bother nobody” and “never missed a day of work.” To the landowners, he was a cotton-sack-pullin’, nail-drivin’ machine. Elmo had his dreams, of someday playing music onstage, but there was such a vast distance between that and his waking life, across rows and rows of cotton that wasn’t going to pick itself, that he seldom talked about it till he was older and the dream had gone to seed, after which he talked about it all the time. Like many working-class Southerners, he felt something deep inside when he heard Jimmie Rodgers sing of lost love, shantytowns, lonesome whistles, and chain gangs, and could see himself yodeling on the radio like his hero, before tuberculosis choked him to death in a New York hotel at thirty-five.
I’m gon’ buy me a pistol, just as long as I’m tall
I’m gonna shoot poor Thelma, just to see her jump and fa-all
The great flood of 1927 drowned the fields and made hard times worse, as powerful men of the state tore apart the levees to flood the land upriver and save New Orleans. It was a bitter time in Louisiana, a historically corrupt place that proudly carried those traditions into the twentieth century. In ’28, ragged and angry voters put in power a kind of half-mad puppeteer, a song-leading dictator named Huey P. Long, known as the Kingfish. He swore to redistribute the wealth of giants such as Standard Oil and to make every man a king. He preached reform from the towering state capital, built by poor men on relief, and lived lavishly in a suite in the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. He had ambitions to claim the White House and scared rich people to death. From the eve of the Depression, as governor and senator, he built 111 bridges and thousands of miles of roads, and he promised to end the plight of hungry children, the soul-killing darkness that enveloped them, if desperate men like Elmo would just give him a little more time.
In the heartbreak of that moment, in Richland Parish, Elmo met a dark-haired girl named Mary Ethel Herron, whom everyone called Mamie. She was a lovely girl, if a little serious, and devout, which scared off the lesser rascals, but good women are naturally drawn to a rogue. She saw in the grinning, rawboned Elmo one of the most striking men she had ever met. On weekends in those days, the country people would congregate at an abandoned house, sprinkle cornmeal on the plank floor to slick it up, and dance. Elmo played his guitar and sang
, and won her heart from the lesser rascals. She was a good woman, which in Southern vernacular usually means long-suffering, but Mamie was different. She was gentle on the outside but had iron in her jaw. She understood that all men have in them a certain sorriness, and she was willing to run the train if other hands were unsteady. Elmo and Mamie were married in 1929, when she was seventeen and he was ten years older, as the Depression settled on the land. He farmed other men’s dirt, and she picked cotton beside him, when they could find work.
Mamie’s mother’s people, the Foremans, were prosperous, but her mama, Theresa Lee, married a poor farmer named Will Herron, and the prosperity had died at the bottom of that lover’s leap. The only legacy the Foremans passed on was a thing in the blood, a kind of darkness that dropped across the mind and left a person to wander, haunted, till they found a way out. There are names for it now, clinical explanations of dementia and depression, but not so much back then, in the low country. No one—at least no one Jerry Lee can recall—ever refused to pick cotton or frame up a house because they felt depressed; people walked inside it, lived next to it. “I guess I get it from both sides,” Jerry Lee says, and he will not talk about it much beyond that. It is just a thing that rides across the generations, landing where and when it chooses, and a man could blame all his actions on it, all his mistakes and miseries, if he chose; he chooses not to do that, any more than he blames—except in the rarest of circumstances—the whiskey, the drugs, or the devil. He owns his mess.
Elmo’s father-in-law, Will, was a hot-tempered, stumpy little man who raised excellent deer dogs and was said to be quick to pull a knife. “Kill you,” says Jerry Lee, “at the drop of a hat.” When Will and Elmo hunted together and came to a fence line, Elmo would just pick the little man up like a child and set him down on the other side, recalls Jerry Lee. That sometimes made Will Herron so mad he hopped like a small, agitated bear, but it was hard to cut a man like Elmo, who smiled at you without even a trace of fun. Herron was “four-foot-somethin’,” says Jerry Lee, but the old man was a crack shot and could bring down deer even from the saddle of a horse. “He’d say to Daddy, ‘You don’t get none of this deer,’” if he was mad at his son-in-law, but Herron seldom stayed mad for long. Elmo had that gift, too; he was a magnet for forgiveness.