The Presleys Recover
After moving over to Tupelo in 1946, Gladys went back to work at the Mid-South Laundry. If Vernon could not provide adequately for the family, then she must make up the difference. If Elvis wore overalls to school, she would see that they were clean overalls, properly ironed.
Soon after the move to North Green Street, Vernon’s mother, Minnie Mae, moved in with them. Her husband, Jessie, had simply taken off in 1946 and never came back. In 1947, he sued Minnie Mae for a divorce. In his usual bold and outrageous way, he claimed that she had deserted him. She refused to join him, he said. Consequently, he refused to send her any money. Minnie Mae told the court that Jessie had deserted her, but the court gave Jessie his divorce and did not require him to pay alimony. Jessie eventually settled in Louisville, Kentucky, became a night watchman in the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant, and married a schoolteacher. Much later, when his grandson Elvis became famous, Jessie attempted to put out his own record and become a singing star himself. He thought it was only right that he become rich and famous too. Jessie knew no modesty.
In 1947, the Presleys became relatively prosperous again, as their income tax return for the year shows. Vernon apparently worked about half the year for McCarty, earning $887, and the other half for another grocery company, D. W. Food Products, earning $756. Gladys worked as a seamstress at Reed Brothers, a department store, earning $269. Together, Vernon and Gladys earned $1,913, almost $160 a month.
The Presleys were definitely no longer poor, and their consumption rate went up. By February 1947, they had acquired a 1936 Chevrolet, and they paid for its repair in that month and again in April. In November, they bought a linoleum rug, a heater, a new mattress and springs, and an amazingly large number of pillows—eight pairs. They paid $17.30 down on the $77.50 price of these items. They made monthly payments until September 24, 1951, when the payments ceased. In October 1959, a letter requesting payment of the $22.76 balance was honored by Elvis’s Memphis accountant. In January 1948, the Presleys bought a Philco radio-phonograph and paid $9 for sixty quarts of buttermilk apparently delivered to their doorstep by the Carr-Myers Dairy. In February, they bought an oil stove. In the same month, Gladys took Elvis down to the town library and got him a library card.
CHAPTER FIVE
MEMPHIS
Elvis had hardly started the eighth grade at Milam in September 1948 before one Saturday night in early November his father and his mother loaded him and all their movable belongings into and on the top of their 1937 Plymouth and headed for Memphis.
Long after they left—almost fled—under cover of darkness, some people believed that the reason was that “the law” had its eye on Vernon again. He had been dealing liquor out of his delivery truck, they thought. Also, there was an impression that vagrant animals—livestock with cash value, like pigs—had disappeared in the wake of Vernon’s passing vehicle as it moved through the countryside. Suspicious-minded police officers might pick Vernon up and send him back to Parchman just because they didn’t like him, his looks, and his manner, deacon of the East Tupelo Assembly of God Tabernacle or not.
Vernon’s attitude did not help. As he grew older, he seemed to sink deeper into his sense of himself as persecuted and seriously undervalued in the world. He deserved more than he got. Whatever seemingly bad things he had done were justified by circumstances that were beyond his control.
In any event, Vernon and Gladys left Tupelo, where at least in 1947 they had enjoyed a very good income, and they went to Memphis, where they had no jobs and no place to live. There was no clear pull for them in Memphis, which implies that they felt a push to leave Tupelo and Lee County. Local people later recalled that L. P. McCarty fired Vernon sometime before he left Tupelo for reasons that are not clear. That probability is supported by the fact that Vernon began to borrow significant sums of money in April and May 1948. The amounts escalated in August and October. In April, Vernon took out a $120 loan from Tower Loan Brokers to be paid back in twenty monthly installments of $6 each. In May, he borrowed $63 to be paid back in twelve monthly installments of $5.30 each. In August, he borrowed $200 to be paid back in twenty weekly installments of $10 each. On October 19, he again borrowed $200 to be paid back in twenty weekly installments of $10 each. On Saturday night, November 6, he, Gladys, and Elvis left for Memphis. Probably portions of the $200 loans were used to repay previous loans. Probably the last loan also supplied the meager funds for Vernon to relocate his family.
It is easy to imagine thirteen-year-old Elvis crowded into the back seat of the car in the dark hours of Saturday night and Sunday morning with bundles of clothing and bedding, the car loaded on top and in the trunk with every household effect they could carry, the dash lights dimly lighting the faces of his parents, the headlights reaching up the white concrete highway. “We were broke, man,” Elvis would later say earnestly to his friends in describing those times, “and we left Tupelo overnight.” Finally, Elvis might sleep curled up in the back seat and then wake up early Sunday morning parked on a broad street in downtown Memphis, hearing the rich tones of the tolling bells of the old and elegant downtown churches—Calvary Episcopal Church on Second Street and the Presbyterian Church nearby. The Catholic Church was farther up Third Street—really the “Main Street” in Memphis—and across the street from the large apartment complex that was Lauderdale Courts.
On Sunday morning, only a week before, he had heard the bells of the African American churches at the top of the hill on the north side of Tupelo where he lived.
Roaming Lovers
Vernon knew Memphis well enough, and he knew what to do. He rented a room in a rooming house for $11 a week for his family at 370 Washington Street very near downtown. Travis Smith and his wife and two little boys, Bobby and Billy, also came to Memphis around the same time and moved into the same rooming house. Vernon and Travis took to the streets looking for work. Family tradition says that they actually wore holes in the soles of their shoes and had to stuff them with newspapers before they finally found jobs at Precision Tool. The plant was some two miles south on Kansas Street, and getting to work and back in Vernon’s aging car was a challenge.
On Monday, November 8, 1948, Elvis began the eighth grade at Humes High School several blocks northeast of the rooming house on Washington. Gladys soon got a job sewing at Fashion Curtains nearby on Poplar Avenue. In February 1949, Vernon found employment closer to home. He got a job moving buckets at the United Paint Company, an easy walk to the north at Concord and Winchester Avenue. His pay was 83 cents an hour. With overtime, he could make up to about $40 a week at United Paint. By mid-June, the family had moved into one room of a large, red-brick Victorian mansion at 572 Poplar Avenue, several blocks northeast of downtown.
The Presley quarters in the rooming house on Poplar were much worse than at 1010 North Green Street back in Tupelo and close to on par with Shake-Rag. Their room, number 7, on the first floor, had a sixteen-foot-high ceiling and was one of sixteen rented rooms in the house. They cooked their meals on a hot plate and shared a bath down the hall with several other families and roomers and a colony of cockroaches. The rent was only $9.50 a week. A white man could hardly have found cheaper or worse housing for his family in Memphis. From time to time, Minnie Mae came up from Mississippi to join this already crowded household, living in a single room; at other times, she stayed with her other children.
Getting into Lauderdale Courts
On Friday, June 17, 1949, Ms. Jane Richardson called on the Presleys in their room at 472 Poplar. Ms. Richardson worked for the Memphis Housing Authority, where the Presleys had applied for an apartment in public housing, a highly desirable commodity in postwar Memphis. She had come to interview the family, observe their surroundings, and make a recommendation. It was a life-shaping event for the Presleys. Fortunately, Ms. Richardson’s notes from her visit have been preserved.
Minnie Mae was absent on this occasion. Vernon was also absent, presumably at work. Gladys and Elvis were there. He was
then fourteen years old. Mother and son would be scrubbed clean, plainly and neatly dressed, waiting in a room also carefully cleaned and neatly arranged. Gladys, representing the Presley family, introduced her son and answered the lady’s questions. Elvis sat quietly by, attentive to the proceedings between the two women.
Ms. Richardson had power. She could provide Gladys the kind of housing her family so sorely needed. Gladys’s skill in dealing with authority to save her family was on trial again, much as it had been when she secured the suspension of Vernon’s prison sentence.
Gladys played her cards superbly. Ms. Richardson was appalled to learn that mother, son, and father “cook, eat, and sleep in one room.” They shared a single bath with other roomers and had “no privacy.” Of course, they had no phone, and their car, probably the 1937 Plymouth, in which they had trekked to Memphis, was barely operational, which impacted Vernon’s ability to get to his job and earn a living for the family.
Ms. Richardson came to understand that Vernon was a steady, willing, and even eager worker. He earned 83 cents an hour at the paint company, which translated to $33.20 a week before taxes and withholding. Moreover, Ms. Richardson learned that Vernon was a diligent breadwinner who put in so much overtime that he brought in $40.38 a week. Vernon thus earned a very respectable $2,100 a year, which put their income well over the minimum required for public housing, but also kept it safely under the $2,500 that would have made them too prosperous to qualify.
Gladys apparently did not tell Ms. Richardson that she had worked at Fashion Curtains and might do so again, or take another job that might put their income above the limit. Also, she did not tell her that Minnie Mae had been a part of their household and might be so again. Instead, Ms. Richardson learned that every month Vernon sent $10 to his mother, who lived in West Point, Mississippi, and was dependent on him. Soon, Memphis city directories would reveal that Minnie Mae was back in the Vernon Presley household. They described her as a “widow,” a more comfortable category, it seems, than “divorcée.” Thus, Vernon emerged as a man who labored long, hard, and faithfully not only to provide for his wife and son but also to help support his dependent mother. The family had fallen into dire circumstances, but not from any dereliction of duty on his part.
Ms. Richardson bought what Gladys sold. By the time she wrote her report, sympathy had turned to respect if not indeed admiration. She remarked particularly on Mrs. Presley’s son. “Nice boy,” she wrote of Elvis. “They seem very nice and deserving,” she concluded. Ms. Richardson even went so far as to recommend housing the Presleys in Lauderdale Courts if it were possible, rather than another complex farther away from the center of town, because it was “near husband’s work.”
Had Vernon walked into the room at the end of the interview, Ms. Richardson would have been at first favorably impressed. He was a fine figure of a man. He was intelligent and could appear mannerly, particularly to women. Had they talked for a while and had she begun to question him she would have perceived that self-pitying, whining, dodging character that marked his life and marred the lives of his wife and son. Vernon was not a steady worker, and he did not want to be a steady worker. During eighteen months in 1942 and 1943 he was either fired or quit work nine times. He did not like being under the eye and thumb of a boss. In the language of the day, he was “shiftless.” He developed illnesses, and he missed days of work. Vernon apparently simply preferred to stay at home and do whatever he wanted to do or do nothing at all. In 1949, he turned thirty-three years old and was doing nothing to improve his income to support his family. In the early 1940s, he had been employed as a carpenter and for a time had paid dues to the carpenters union. In 1955, Elvis told an interviewer that his father “didn’t have no trade.”
Back in business-minded and progressive Tupelo, friends and relatives were doing better materially than ever before. Indeed, all over the South people had not done so well since before the Civil War, and—relatively speaking—they were doing better than any other region in the nation. During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had declared that the South was “the nation’s number one economic problem.” In the 1950s that was decidedly not the case. Yet the best that Vernon had been able to do for his family after nine months in Memphis was to put four people (including extended visits from Minnie Mae) in a room with a hot plate for a stove and a cockroach-infested bathroom down the hall they shared with several other rooms full of people.
Even as a boy, Elvis more than made up for Vernon as a model man. In getting the family into Lauderdale Courts, he did so just by sitting there clean and well dressed, quiet, polite, and attentive while his mother painted an appealing family portrait for Ms. Richardson, who could give her the one thing she most wanted in this world, a decent place to live with the two people in the world she most loved. Her husband and her son were and always would be the center of her life, but especially Elvis.
It worked. Gladys divined what Jane Richardson and her superiors wanted and needed to see and hear, and she gave it to them in a superb performance. The authorities decided that the Presleys were among the “deserving” poor—to use Ms. Richardson’s most significant and highly charged word. On Tuesday, September 20, 1949, they moved into apartment number 328 at 185 Winchester Avenue in Lauderdale Courts. Elvis had his own bedroom, Vernon and Gladys theirs. The Presleys had a full kitchen, a private bath, and a separate living room. With 689 square feet of floor space, with plumbing, electricity, and heating all managed for them, it was a palace in Memphis for the Presleys. Moreover, they were paying 10 percent less rent than they had paid for the single room on Poplar Avenue.
Gladys and Elvis played their deferential roles as white people of the lower orders to the hilt. Ms. Richardson was absolutely convinced that the whole family was “nice and deserving.” All Vernon needed to empower fully his innate capacity as an excellent provider was decent housing within walking distance of his job. To the latter end, Ms. Richardson recommended specifically that the Presleys be assigned to Lauderdale Courts, the most desired public housing in Memphis.
Lauderdale Courts was a world unto itself—almost. The qualifier is necessary because the property was managed by Southern-born federal authorities who ruled from outside and “by the book.” They kept the buildings in very good repair and the grounds neat and attractive. They also made regular announced inspections inside each apartment. Elvis would always remember his mother—not his father—preparing for those inspections, scrubbing the floors on her hands and knees, cleaning the stove and the toilet, and putting things in order, after working so hard all day at the hospital down the street. It was, in part, the image game again, making an appealing face to show people with power over her life. This game, however, was well worth the trouble. In her whole life, Gladys never lived in one place longer than she lived in the Courts, and before that she had never lived so well. In the sense that she knew what the rules were, she had never lived so securely.
Lauderdale Courts contained about four hundred apartments. Some were in single-story buildings, but most were in three-story structures, all surrounded by lawns, trees, and connecting concrete walkways. The Presley apartment was in the building in the northwest corner of the complex. The building faced on Winchester Avenue to the north and sided on Third Street to the west, a major north-south thoroughfare in the city. In the Presleys’ building each of three entranceways led to nine apartments, three on each of the three floors. Their apartment was near the center of the building on the first floor, to the right of the north-facing entranceway. Elvis’s bedroom window looked out on Winchester, the walkways, and the grassy yard.
A jog to the left from the front door of Elvis’s building was North Third Street. Several blocks south on Third was the elegant Peabody Hotel, and two blocks farther was Beale Street, the core of black life in Memphis and for more than a hundred miles all around. Elvis had easy access to the center of the city, to the very hub and heart of the whole Mid-South. Only New Orleans rivaled it to
the south, Atlanta to the east, St. Louis to the north, and nothing at all to the west.
In that it was all white and relatively classless, living in Lauderdale Courts was for Elvis somewhat like going back to East Tupelo. But this federal initiative in public housing was totally new and revolutionary in Southern culture. The race issue was quickly and simply sidestepped by strictly segregating apartment complexes. In Memphis, Lauderdale Courts was carefully created as all white and working class. African Americans eligible for public housing dwelled exclusively in Dixie Homes several blocks to the east.
In the white South in the twentieth century, an individual’s place in the pyramidal social hierarchy was indicated by numerous markers, including church membership, residence, style of dress, use of language, body language, circle of friends, and a certain use of titles in talking to one another. Blacks ordinarily would be called by their first names, plain white men would be called by their family names, and upper-class white men would be addressed by their titles—Mister, Professor, Reverend, Judge, Doctor, Colonel, Major, or Captain. There were rewards for keeping one’s place in the societal order and punishments for transgressions. In Tupelo, a man’s employer, minister, the mayor, the sheriff, and his landlord knew all about him, and they knew all about his relatives, “his people.” For example, Dr. Green, a prominent Tupelo physician, owned the house at 1010 North Green Street that the Presleys lived in before going to Memphis. Dr. Green had put them into the house, and he could put them out, just as he pleased.
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