by Rick Bragg
Lee was glad to have Elmo back. He was the same kind of whiskey man as he was a carpenter and farmer. He chopped wood like a fiend, cooked whiskey round the clock, ran off hundreds of gallons a week, and hauled it himself around the river parishes in his old truck, under a tarp, taking all the risks, as demand grew and grew and production jumped.
“There was whiskey running in the ditches two feet deep,” says Jerry Lee, who grew up on the stories of his uncle’s magical still. “I mean, ever’body was drunk. It was the best whiskey in Louisiana.”
Mamie choked down her fear and went to the store with her head up, because whiskey money was green as any and the only real shame was in standing there in line with no money at all. Then in spring of 1938, Elmo was stopped by federal men at a roadblock. He was not even working that day, not even hauling liquor, but he was guilty nonetheless. “They caught Daddy with a single gallon of whiskey in his truck,” says Jerry Lee. “One gallon. He wasn’t sellin’ nothin’.”
He was sentenced to five years. He kissed and hugged his boys—Jerry Lee too small to know what was really happening, and Elmo Jr., going on nine years old, not sure himself—and left for New Orleans in chains, again. Mamie took the boys back to their borrowed house with the same assurances she and her husband had received the last time, that Lee Calhoun would make sure she and her boys lacked nothing, which in an odd way made it easier when Elmo was in prison than when he was out, if you didn’t mind the loneliness. People patted her, said they would pray for her.
Having a husband in jail for liquor was almost an honorable thing then, not any more shameful to her neighbors or her kin than digging a ditch. Frank and Jesse James and the Younger boys said the same thing about robbing banks and trains: it was the times that done it. Moonshine was a shadow, a hidden stream that ran through the congregants and piebald sinners alike, and so was insidious and harder to preach against. It was the reason a man could make liquor on Saturday and sing in church on Sunday with head held high, in one of the great contradictions of the age: Pentecostals, working people, desperate now, absorbed the reality of illegal liquor into their houses of worship in a way they would never have tolerated other sins. It was survival, a sin but their sin. They owned it. For men like Lee Calhoun, churches were good for business; they railed against the store-bought liquor and fought to keep things dry, at least as a matter of law, no matter what the federal government did.
As Jerry Lee neared his third birthday, Elmo Jr. was already writing and singing his own songs in church, or in the tent meetings that passed for churches here in those days. It looked more and more to Mamie like her husband’s passed-down dream, of one day seeing a Lewis on the stage, was coming true, and it was more than blind love and parental pride. The boy was gifted—people with no blood ties to Elmo Jr. swore it, in church and around town—and Mamie knew that such artists made a good living singing about Jesus and did not have to worry at the end of the day about their immortal souls. Her boy would live and sing in a world without jail, without the reek of liquor legal or otherwise, in concert with the Lord, and might even travel the country singing his music in a gilded ministry, with her in the front row. For now, his voice was enough, a balm for the pain and loneliness.
“They say I can’t remember him, but I do,” says Jerry Lee. “I was in the yard one day, digging in the dirt with a spoon, and I heard my mama call out, ‘Junior, you watchin’ that baby?’ And I heard him say back, ‘Yes, Mama, I got my eye right on him.’ We’d play under them old houses, me and him. . . . I was in my diapers. Them old houses must have stood six feet off the ground—they built that way, for when the high water came—and we’d play under them old houses, digging in that soft dirt. I can see him, see his blond hair and see his overalls, see him clear, see him just like I’m looking at you right now.” By the time the boy they called Junior was big enough to sing his first solo in church, there was a permanent House of the Living God to sing it in, a thing of boards and blocks instead of brush arbors and ragged canvas. But the church—a simple thing floating above the mud of Texas Avenue on piers of cinder block—might not have ever been built, if not for Mamie’s boys and their cousins, all prophesied to become mighty talents. It was built, as people here tell it, because it was ordained by God, Who spoke to two women as they knelt on the floor of a boardinghouse two states away in Mobile, Alabama. He told the women to go to this place called Ferriday and lead a great revival, because it was a wicked place, and there were souls there, jewels in that colorless ground, that needed to be brought to Him.
About the time Elmo was being sent off for the second time, a woman named Leona Sumrall and her mother, whom everyone just called Mother, were planning to go to St. Joseph, Louisiana, to start a church. The Sumralls were Pentecostals, a relatively new sect born in the twentieth century but spreading quickly through desperate work camps and factory towns in the bleak landscape of the Depression. Leona would later describe what happened here in her own book, in great detail. As she prayed in the Mobile boardinghouse, she heard God tell her to abandon her original plans and go instead to this place called Ferriday:
“God spoke to us through prophecy of the Holy Spirit: ‘I have valuable treasures in this town. They are hidden from the view of man. These jewels will be carefully shaped by My Spirit. Their dedication will surpass those around them. To salvage this treasure you must dig with caution. Your patience will be tried but I will bring them forth as pure gold. Your lives will display My love and I will draw them to Myself. They will see that your dedication is not shallow and will seek to pattern their lives according to your Christian living.’”
Mother Sumrall in the same instant heard the same words in her head.
“Did God speak to you?” Mother Sumrall asked.
“Yes,” her daughter said.
“Is it Ferriday, Louisiana?”
“Yes!”
They arrived in long, white dresses, with no money and no place to stay. Leona, in her teens, was a revival preacher in a time when you did not need much besides a bare spot of earth to get such a thing going. She asked people if they knew of a spot in Ferriday where she could hold revival, and they pointed her to a patch of weeds on Texas Avenue, near the American Legion. They cut and stripped branches from trees and built a brush arbor, and laid boards across stumps for pews, and used donated lumber to build a platform to preach from. The owner of the lot, a Ferriday businessman named Perry Corbett, told them he would donate the land to them in a ninety-nine-year lease if they pushed through with plans to build a more permanent church. In a city with as much sin as Ferriday, people figured, they would take all the religion they could get. “The wives were crying for the Lord, because it was such an evil place,” said Gwen Peterson, whose mother, Gay Bradford, grew up in the church.
The Sumralls were Assembly of God missionaries, one of the most demanding of sects. Women wore no makeup, and did not cut their hair, and dressed plainly, in long skirts, without lace at their cuffs or necks. The tenets forbade public swimming, and dancing. The sect denounced gambling, moving pictures, tobacco, and alcohol—though that one was complicated—as sins of the flesh. But the rewards would be great if a person could only last. This was a religion working men and women could wrap their minds around, and their hearts. The Assembly of God believed in healing, in miracles. It was a faith a man could see, see it take hold of a person and shake them half to death, and hear, in unknown tongues. “God wants to change this town,” Leona exulted, and some people wondered if she might be mad. At the end of the day, after walking the streets, she sat on the stoop of her donated room and poured blood from her shoes.
Lee Calhoun, being the head knocker here, met with the women as they readied the bare lot for the first revival. He was not a churchgoing man but was for churches in general. He said hello to the ladies, accepted their invitation to revival, and wished them luck.
That first night, the lot would not hold the people who came, and cars clogged the narrow street. Leona opened her Bible to
Revelations. “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.” Law-abiding men and women listened with drunkards, gamblers, prostitutes, and thieves, and when she called them to the altar, they came by the dozens, confessing a litany of sins. One of the first to be saved was a Herron, and other kin in the great extended family would follow. Not long after, Lee Calhoun dug in his pocket, and there was a church. “Old man Lee built the church for them, for his kin,” said Glen McGlothin, who grew up in that time, witnessed the birth of the church, and later became mayor of Ferriday. “Built three more, I know of.”
The extended family would trickle in a few at a time, till it was as much their church as anyone’s, and they were there long after the Sumralls moved on. The people of the church would remember Mamie, her face alight, tears flowing down her cheeks, her arms raised to heaven. Son and Minnie Bell Swaggart, and Irene Gilley, others—the ones old enough to comprehend—all lived in the ecstasy of salvation. And through it all, Mamie’s boys sat wide-eyed, white shirts buttoned to the neck. People would often claim, writing from outside this faith, that Jerry Lee was tortured by an unfathomable religion, but it was not beyond his understanding, in time. He was raised on the Christian teachings of heaven and hell and particularly in his people’s belief in the existence and pervasive power of the Holy Ghost. The presence of the Holy Ghost, living inside of them, sometimes caused them to tremble and shake, or go into a trance and speak in tongues, in old language, the language of Abraham, which they heard as the voice of God. In their church, it was not a theory or possibility but something as fierce and plain as a burning hill.
“It took hold of them,” Jerry Lee says now, “because it was real.”
The Holy Ghost comes into a person “like a fire,” he says.
“I took hold of it,” he says, “because it is real.”
That does not mean he would grow up to adhere, to comply, just that he knew in his heart when he did wrong. Preachers at the tiny church came and went, but with one unwavering message, that the wages of sin is death. And while they preached on all sin, on a great, wide world of sin, they preached on no sin like that of woman laying with man. Only in the sanctity of marriage could such a thing be without eternal damnation as its consequence. It seemed even more vile than murder, than stealing, than anything, and preacher after preacher railed against it in the little church, so many and so regularly that it became clear, especially to the young people, that there was sin and then there was the sin, that of lust and fornication, and such a sin had to be held down by righteousness and smothered in prayer. The wages of sin is death. The cost of sin was to burn. In Ephesians, the Bible warns: “Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given Himself for us . . . but fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not once be named among you. . . .” Little Jerry Lee, sitting between his mother and his big brother, did not understand it at first, all of it, but it sank into his bones.
Lee Calhoun, despite his church-building and his efforts to distance himself from his whiskey business, would face federal charges not long after that, for conspiracy: having failed to catch him making liquor, they got him for thinking about it. Lee was offered a chance to pay $1,500 and avoid prison altogether, in that peculiar way that rich men always have more choices than poor men in situations such as these, but he was unmoved by the offer. “So,” he told the court, “I pay you fifteen hundred, or you’re gonna feed me and clothe me and give me a bed to sleep in and a roof over my head for six months, and I don’t have to do nothin’? Well, I’ll take six months of that,” and he headed off to federal prison, joining Elmo on his second stint. Elmo got word to Mamie that he was fine—that he could do his time, again, and they would start over as soon as he got out, again, and that he was done with the liquor business for good. At night, he and the ghost of Jimmie Rodgers sang about the wages of sin and the poor man’s burden, with the dope fiends and the perverts shrieking and cursing and crying for release.
In the late summer of ’38, when Elmo Jr. was nine and Elmo Sr. was still away, Mamie took the boys to visit her sister, Stella. They talked in the shade of the porch as Jerry Lee dug in the dirt and Elmo Jr. played at the edge of the road with his cousin, Maudine. Traffic was light on the road and drivers knew to slow down as they came through town, and the children knew to stay out of the road. They were walking down the edge of the road, Junior singing a song, when they came to a slow-moving farm truck pulling a trailer. The truck was just merging out onto the highway, and Maudine ran and jumped on back, laughing, to ride a little piece down the road, just as a car came roaring up behind the trailer. The driver of the car was so drunk he did not see the trailer or the girl till he was almost on them. He snatched at the wheel, swerved off the road, and ran down Elmo Jr. in midsong. The car came to a stop, engine screaming, on top of the child, and the man inside was too drunk to know.
The boy was dead when the police got him out from under the car. They brought the drunk driver to stand before Mamie, so the man could see what he had wrought, but the man, a stranger to them, was still too drunk to know where he was or what he had done, too drunk to stand, and he just reeled there, blabbering on and on, held upright by the police. The officers said they would see that justice was done.
“No,” Mamie said.
Her iron jaw was locked, and her eyes were dry as stone.
“Ma’am?” one officer asked.
Mamie told the officer that was not their way, that there was a higher justice, a more awful one, than man’s.
“God will punish him,” she said.
She said the man would pay for his sins, all his sins, and his punishment would be much more terrifying than anything that would happen to him in the hotbox or forced labor of a prison farm. The police took their handcuffs from the man’s wrists, and he staggered off, free. It is said that Mamie walked into the yard and wept and screamed. Jerry Lee cannot remember that. If his mama did show weakness, he is sure, it was not for long.
The Lewises, Calhouns, Herrons, Swaggarts, Gilleys, Bateys, and the rest of them assembled in black, most of the men in their one good suit of clothes, some with an ancient suit coat covering their patched and faded overalls. The women carried wildflowers; almost all of them, like Mamie, stood with babies or toddlers on their hips.
The extended family had already all gathered around the grave when the prison truck rolled up and two armed guards helped Elmo out. He was in street clothes, but bound in handcuffs and shackles. They walked him to the graveside, Elmo taking baby steps because of his restraints, and left him with his wife, still in chains. The guards stood just a few feet away, their 12-gauge shotguns pointed at the ground. Elmo tossed a white flower onto the casket of his oldest son and wept. Then, with his second son in his arms, he stood with Mamie and the members of his tribe, and sang of the King of Kings.
Will there be any stars, any stars in my crown?
When at evening the sun goeth down
When I wake with the blest in those mansions of rest
Will there be any stars in my crown?
Then the guards linked Elmo’s handcuffs and shackles with a piece of chain, and hustled him into the prison truck and drove off to the federal pen in New Orleans, Mamie begging them to let him stay, just a little bit. And the toughest man in Concordia Parish, the snake killer, went back to the sweltering cells and the dark and dragging days. Mamie’s children would sometimes wonder if she let the drunk driver go free because she knew what it was like to live with a man in prison, knew what it was like in the quiet of the nights. Years later she would get a letter from the man, telling her how he had suffered since that day, begging her forgiveness. She threw it in the trash.
The headstone, when it was finished, was a simple one, but Elmo would not see it for some time.
NOV. 11, 1929
AUG. 6, 1938
Budded on earth to bloom in heaven.
The stone would never tilt, never lean, a rare thing in the unsubstantial dirt of Louisiana.
Lee Calhoun had purchased a place for his people to rest, in a community called Clayton, in one of the most peaceful places on God’s earth, under lovely trees, with the fields stretching off in the distance. Clayton was good, high ground, a place where the river could not rise up out of its channel and wash them out of the soil. Home from prison, he paid for everything, even paid for the stone in a time when the babies of other poor families were buried under crossed sticks and rough piles of rock. Death had not much visited the extended family by then, and the grass of the small graveyard was not yet crowded.
The child had been a kind of antidote to the worst of what was out there, plugging the gap of her missing husband with his voice. It was a family that could almost live on songs. Jerry Lee would carry his one recollection of his big brother around with him all his life, Mamie’s call to the boy, and the boy’s answer; he always liked that idea, how a brother was watching over him. It is not enough to grieve on, barely enough to hold to, to keep a person from slipping away altogether.
“Sometimes a memory ain’t enough,” he says, thinking of a song.