Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(13)

His daddy could not have been any other kind of man, not weak or goody-goody or ordinary; the boy’s memory could not have endured that. He has forgiven him all the rest. “He was a man. He was a magnificent 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.