Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(14)
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.