The real guards at Parchman, the men who were liable to kill a man attempting to escape, were also convicts, designated as “trusties.” Trusties wore uniforms marked by vertical, rather than horizontal, stripes. Some of these were armed with guns and served as “shooters.” The trusties enforced discipline and prevented escapes. They were chosen for the job precisely because they were the most violent and vicious white men in the prison. They had already demonstrated to the state they were capable of mayhem and murder.
There would be several shooters for every hundred men. When the men were working in a field, the shooters would draw a “gun line” around the area. Any man crossing the line without permission from the shooters automatically became a target, at short range for a shotgun, at long range for a Winchester rifle. Any shooter who brought a man down, either dead or alive, would be rewarded, perhaps even with a full pardon from the governor.
The shooters also guarded the men at night. They were housed at one end of the long, one-story barracks, separated from other prisoners by the dining hall. At the other end of the building, ordinary prisoners like Vernon and Travis slept in bunks set at regular intervals in two long lines, heads to the walls with an aisle in between. Shooters did not fraternize with other inmates. At night, they patrolled the grounds around the building, deliberately making menacing noises so that the inmates always knew they were there, watching and ready.
Vernon in Parchman
This was the tight, violent, fear-filled cage that Vernon walked into on June 1, 1938. He could expect to be in that cage—with a token allowance for extra work, called “Sunday work”—into the spring of 1941. Before Parchman, Vernon had been able to indulge his penchant for low performance and suffer only the disapproval of his father or Orville Bean. Now he would work hard or else suffer lashes on his heretofore smooth and unmarked back. Apparently, he did not learn this lesson quickly enough. “The story went around that Vernon got bullwhipped,” his nephew Billy Smith, Travis’s son, said later, “and that’s why he never went shirtless after that.”
The workday for Vernon and everyone else at Parchman began at 4:30 a.m. when the steam whistle sounded at the power station in Front Camp. The shooters turned on the lights and moved noisily through the barracks, rousing the men. After a breakfast of biscuits and syrup, they marched to the fields to begin their tasks at first light. Each day brought its quota of work for each man, so many rows to plant or hoe, so much wood to cut, two hundred pounds of cotton to pick at harvest time. Laggards would be whipped while others were made to watch. The sergeant might decide to improve discipline by publicly and ceremoniously whipping a lazy, rebellious, or simply unfortunate inmate. The man would be stripped and held spread-eagle on the ground while the others were made to watch. The sergeant or one of his minions would lay on lashes with a three-foot by six-inch leather strap known as “Black Annie.” The severity of the whipping was arbitrary. “There is no telling what punishment will be used in this prison,” one convict said. “It all depends on how mad the sergeant is, as to whether you get fifteen or fifty lashes.” The whole camp might be disciplined by being forced to sleep outside the barracks at night regardless of the weather. Sometimes, when the sergeant was especially mad, they had to spend the night outside next to the open cesspools.
Crimes against property brought most men to Parchman, but there they joined Mississippi’s most violent criminals, who were well practiced in violence with guns, knives, clubs, and fists. A new convict who was a slow learner would be in trouble immediately, not only from the drivers and shooters but also from other convicts.
On one occasion a young newcomer casually sat down on the bunk of another prisoner. The man flew into a rage and stabbed him to death.
In Camp 5 Vernon was caged with men lifted out of their communities all over Mississippi precisely because of their proclivity to use force to take whatever they wanted—including sex. Travis Smith, with his own scars and tattoo, might evince a defiance and pride that would not endear him to prison authorities, but his appearance would say to other prisoners that he was not an easy target of abuse. In a fight his opponent might suffer more pain.
In such an order, smooth-skinned and unscarred Vernon Presley would not stand very high. Strikingly handsome and twenty-two years old, he would be a target. Travis would defend him, but ultimately his protection would have to come from the authorities, and Vernon would need it. His good looks, the very quality that caused women to follow him with their eyes and caused Gladys to adore him when he was only sixteen years old and to marry him when he was barely seventeen, was a liability in Camp 5. Moreover, he was vain about his looks, a penchant he was not likely to shed with his incarceration. Other prisoners would see Vernon as unmanly, but their words for him would be much less kind than that.
Vernon must have been terrified as he lay in his bunk at night, hearing the scurrying sounds and seeing the dim shapes of men moving around him. If half of the men in Camp 5 engaged in homosexual relations, the usual proportion in prison, he must have heard whispered conversations and sometimes curses, slaps, grunts, and the sounds of men forcing themselves upon other men. He must have despaired as he thought about the next three years of his life.
Later, when Vernon had become Elvis’s “business manager” at Graceland, he was harsh and callous to his employees. Elvis would reply to the complainers, “You just don’t know what Daddy’s been through.” Elvis knew very well what his father had been through, but he never told. It was only after Elvis died that the tabloids exposed the fact that Vernon had been a convict in Parchman.
Elvis and Gladys at Parchman
The first and third Sundays of every month were visiting days at Parchman. Sunday, June 5, 1938, would have been a visiting day, but it seems unlikely that Gladys and Elvis would have come to Parchman so soon after Vernon’s arrival. They came on Sunday, June 19, or Sunday, July 3, or both. Certainly, Vernon and Gladys were writing back and forth. A penny postcard that Vernon wrote to Gladys on Friday, July 8, suggests that Gladys had already found friends and relatives upon whom she could rely to drive her and Elvis to Parchman for those visits. On the postcard, Vernon urged Gladys to come on the third Sunday in July, the seventeenth.
friday
Dear gladys
I will right you a few
lines to let you no I am
alright hope you all
the same I was glad
to here that the baby
was better I hope
he is alright now
you all come this
3 sunday if you can
and tell Mr. powel
to come to I want
to tell him something
well i will
close answer
soon
with love
from Vernon
Among those who drove Gladys and Elvis to Parchman for those visits on the first and third Sundays was F. L. Bobo, the man who owned the hardware store in Tupelo. Vernon’s uncle Noah Presley, Rosella’s oldest son, was another. He opened a grocery store in East Tupelo in the 1920s, and in 1936, when the village was incorporated as a town, he became its first mayor. Under his leadership, the little town got water, sewer, and power lines. It was, in fact, the first town in America to receive power from the New Deal’s Tennessee Valley Authority.
Gladys, according to custom and in the phrase of the time, would offer to pay the friend or relative for “the gas and oil” if she could afford it or promise to pay later if she could not. Gladys would sit in the front seat with the driver. Elvis would stand or sit in the back, listening to his mother talking to the man, always filling the silence with her voice, working to knit up the raveled fabric of family life, making everything whole by stringing out words and weaving the strands together. She is grateful for the ride, she says, and worried to death.
Elvis would look out at the rolling land, cotton plants raising dark green leaves to the sun, the new white concrete highway unfolding ahead, riding from east to west through t
he Sunday morning quiet of the main streets of the little towns along the way. If they took the fastest way and the best roads, they followed what is now Highway 278. They went through Pontotoc, where Vernon and Gladys had married five years earlier, then on to Oxford, where forty-year-old William Faulkner lived in his rickety and almost barren antebellum mansion on the south side of town.
Approaching Oxford’s courthouse square from the south side, Elvis would see the Confederate soldier carved in stone atop the impossibly high pedestal gazing steadily southward down the town’s main street. They would turn right and drive counterclockwise around the square, which Faulkner’s fictional Benjy Compson had circled every Sunday afternoon. Almost surely, they never visited the University of Mississippi just blocks away.
They would drive west out of Oxford, cross the Tallahatchie River on a bridge near Batesville, and roll out onto the marvelously flat and seemingly endless expanse of the Delta. Turning south at Marks, they passed through the hamlets of Tutwiler, Rome, and Minot and came at last to Parchman, having traveled some 115 miles in a few hours.
There would be cars ahead of them, parked on the right shoulder of the road outside the prison gate, people inside waiting for visiting hours to begin. They would take their place at the end of the line, shut off the engine, and wait. Elvis, looking out the windows on the right side of the car, would see no walls, no bars, only a high wire fence, a gathering of buildings at Front Camp, and the towering smokestack of the powerhouse.
At the given hour, the prison gates would swing open. Drivers down the line would start their engines and begin to roll forward. One by one, they would swing right and stream through the stone pillars and iron gates of the entranceway. They would not be stopped by the guards there. Elvis, his mother, and the driver would ride by the huge Victorian house in which the superintendent lived and drive out across the flat land to Camp 5.
Camp 5
At Camp 5, visitors would be screened for contraband and then allowed to pass into the area. On cold or rainy days, they would visit in the dining area of the barracks. On good days, they could visit in the yard, walking around or sitting on benches at long tables used for outside meals. The camp did not look like a prison and lacked bars, walls, and even fences.
On the first visit, Vernon would have been in prison garb, horizontal black and white stripes, loose top and baggy bottom. The meeting must have been emotional, and Elvis probably carried the whole scene of their first meeting in Parchman the rest of his life, the memory not only of Parchman prison and his father in stripes, but also of his sense of his father’s fear that the Presleys would embrace. The driver would shake hands with Vernon. Travis, Gladys’s brother, would be there too. Then they would sit and talk, in the Southern way, about the more comfortable subjects, putting the best face on things, knowing by tone and body language that there were harsh things underneath that should not be pushed into words. After a time, Vernon and Gladys would rise and move away from Travis and Elvis. They needed to talk privately, to be together. Eventually, they probably had sex, a practice allowed and even encouraged by the authorities. Vernon’s survival virtually required Gladys’s attention. Gladys made Vernon a man—especially inside Parchman.
Parchman was one of the few prisons in America where male prisoners were allowed “conjugal visiting.” It began when the administration allowed whole truckloads of black prostitutes to visit the black camps on certain Saturdays and Sundays. In time, the prisoners in each camp, using leftover materials, constructed houses with separate rooms to provide a modicum of privacy for couples. These structures were painted red and called “Red Houses.” Later, white prisoners also erected Red Houses. White female visitors were more carefully screened than black, and as the institution matured, white prisoners were allowed to take only their legal wives to the Red Houses. By the time Vernon got to Parchman, conjugal visiting was fine-tuned to protect the sensitivities of all parties. A numbered key to each numbered room in the Red House was placed on a key board discreetly located.
Prison officials said sexual visitation cut down on homosexual activity and the fights that grew out of that activity. It kept families together and preserved outside ties. Inmates, they thought, were generally more contented. Also, it was a privilege that could be taken away to punish the unruly.
While his parents were gone, Elvis might have sat at the picnic-like table with the man who had driven them over, and maybe his uncle Travis. Everyone always said that Travis was like Gladys, outgoing and friendly, but also that he suffered no insult lightly.
Finally came the drive home, four hours or so, the windows of the car rolled down to catch the slightly cooling air, the sun setting bright orange behind them. As night came on, Elvis would crawl into the front seat and curl into his mother’s lap, his head resting against her breast, feeling her heart beat, hearing her talk to the man again.
He would drift off to sleep. Then he would wake slowly. The car was motionless, making the clanking noises of connected metal cooling. Strong arms were lifting him up carefully, holding him against a broad chest, and then lowering him to the bed. He felt his weight melt onto the mattress, his clothes being pulled gently off, his mother crawling into bed beside him, holding him close.
Friends and neighbors remember this time well. Soon after Vernon went to jail, Gladys and Elvis would sit on the front porch of their little two-room house. Elvis could not do enough for his mother.
“Mama, would you like a glass of water?” he would ask. He would sit at her feet and rest his arm on her knee. He would stroke her face, smooth her eyebrows, and pat her head. “There, there, my little baby,” he would say. Elvis was there, and he was only three years old.
Elvis felt deeply his mother’s anguish—and his own. People recalled him sometimes “bawling so hard he couldn’t catch his breath.”
The Assembly of God
On Sundays when they did not go to Parchman, Gladys and Elvis went to the Assembly of God Tabernacle at the bottom of the hill below their house in East Tupelo. One neighbor recalled that they “went every time the door was open.” They went Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and during the week when there were prayer meetings or revivals. Gladys’s uncle Gains Mansell, the minister, had built the little church with his own hands and led the congregation of some two to three score souls who worshipped there. Gladys might well feel that she had a special place, a refuge, in a church built and led by one of her own people. Both Smiths and Presleys belonged to the Assembly of God.
Throughout his life, Elvis’s fundamental religious beliefs were the beliefs he had acquired through the Assembly of God. He thought that the true believer could achieve an exceedingly intimate and mystical relationship with God. True believers were few and far between, but God gave them miraculous powers that other people did not have. They could heal the sick, prophesy, and perform miracles. Elvis knew that he was a true believer.
The Assembly of God was organized as a denomination in 1914. It grew out of the Pentecostal and Holiness movements that surged through the South in the previous decade’s spiritual rebellions against the materialism of modernity. Consciously devaluing worldly possessions, the Assembly of God focused on the blessings of the Holy Spirit and on a very personal closeness to God in this life and the next.
Pentecostals believed that they each had a “crisis” experience, a moment when they faced the sinful lives they had lived and the Holy Spirit miraculously came down upon them and changed their lives forever. They could name the exact date and circumstances of their conversion, the time and place that they came to know God intimately. Pentecostals asserted that the saved person possessed special powers. By prayer and a “laying on of hands,” they could heal the sick. They might “speak in tongues,” that is, stand with their body quivering, raise their open hands to heaven, and speak words in a holy language. The Holiness movement came mostly out of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, formed by Southern Methodists who had seceded from the national church in 1844 over
slavery. More specifically, the Holiness impulse grew out of Wesleyan Methodism, a purist tradition within Methodism. Holiness people felt that the conversion experience produced a person who would not only possess the Holy Spirit but would also by the grace of God undergo “sanctification,” a purification. The sanctified person manifested the Holy Spirit by abstaining from smoking, chewing tobacco, drinking alcohol, dancing, mixed swimming, wearing jewelry, and a long list of other things that varied somewhat from one congregation to another. Women were to dress modestly, not wear makeup, and not cut their hair short. More positively, Holiness people believed that the converted experienced marvelous things of a mystical nature, such as visions, prophecies, and awarenesses.
Flowing with and into the Pentecostal and Holiness movements was the conviction that the believers were restoring the primitive Christian church. In effect, the restoration of the primitive church bypassed materialism and modernity in all of its forms. It carried one directly back to a powerful intimacy with Jesus and through Jesus to a communion with the Holy Spirit and the possession of holy powers. The Pentecostal, Holiness, and Restorationist movements all took strong hold in the rural South in the early decades of the twentieth century, particularly among those who were losing out in the race for material wealth in the modern world. As displaced rural folk—often having moved down from farm owners to farm tenants to farm workers—they migrated into towns and cities, as they did to Tupelo and Memphis. They brought their beliefs and their churches with them. Also, rural migrants who had been Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians in the country often did not feel comfortable in the mainline uptown churches dominated by an affluent, educated, and worldly-minded elite. Many deserted the church into which they had been born and joined the new denominations—the Assembly of God Church, the Church of God, the Pentecostal Holiness Church, and the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church. They did so as whole families and clans. Many others, like the Presleys later in Memphis, became virtually unchurched in the move from country to city.
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