Jerry Lee Lewis - Rick Bragg

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man,” he says. His father had almost no schooling, “but he was a smart man,” a capable one who could not read a book of literature but could look at a machine and tell you how its pieces fit. In a less desperate place, a more prosperous time, he might have been anything, maybe even been successful, but in the bad years he was what he had to be. It was not a good age for gentle men in Concordia Parish, when men clawed at scraps and fought each other in desperation and drunkenness and sometimes just to prove their worth, when there was no other way it could be. “Daddy didn’t walk around no man,” says Jerry Lee. “His hands were so big he’d just slap people, just slap ’em about, and he never lost no fights.” A lot of people do not see why a man had to fight. “All of that, all that of not being able to do for your family, it’ll get to you, and it got to him. I saw him knock men off the porch,” men who came collecting, or threatening. “He knocked one man off the porch and he fell so hard he broke his leg, just popped him off like he was nothin’, with his left. Wasn’t nothin’ could take my daddy down. He could beat anything, but one thing. He couldn’t beat the Depression.”

      The busy town had proven no great salvation, after all. Jerry Lee was too small to recall the worst of it, when cotton wasn’t worth the muscle or diesel it took to plow it under, and construction jobs dried up, no matter how far a man drove or rode a boxcar to chase the work, but he remembers how his mama and daddy spoke of it, like it was a war. Elmo could have gone to his brother-in-law, Lee Calhoun, and begged for a little extra, but that was not in him, so he walked downtown to the grocery and threatened the storekeeper, backed him up against the wall. “He demanded food,” says Jerry Lee. “He told ’em, ‘You got a store full of food here, man, and my family, my wife, my boys, ain’t got nothin’. And he walked out of there with the food he asked for, and when he could, when he got money, he’d pay the man back. All I know is, my daddy never let us go without.” His daddy cleared swamps, dug stumps, and stood in line with other men to do any job that came along, and their families waited and prayed, even the backsliders, for things to ease. It had to ease. How could a man’s labor be worth so little as this?

      There was only one man hiring. After the raid that sent Elmo and Lee Calhoun’s other in-laws to prison, Lee was out of the whiskey business . . . for about a week. He found a new place to set up in the trees and had another still constructed of even newer copper that gleamed like new money, and in no time his kin were running off good liquor again, for it was one of the certainties of hard times that a man could not be so poor he could not find money for liquor. But the consequences of getting caught were serious now. Elmo and the other in-laws, once convicted in federal court, had lost all the grace they would receive. Mamie asked him not to go back to it, but there was no denying that liquor money was better than the bare subsistence he made in the field, and they were already beholden to Lee Calhoun, already living in his house on a farm that grew only debt.

      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

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