Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(15)

That first night, the lot would not hold the people who came, and cars clogged the narrow street. Leona opened her Bible to Revelations. “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.” Law-abiding men and women listened with drunkards, gamblers, prostitutes, and thieves, and when she called them to the altar, they came by the dozens, confessing a litany of sins. One of the first to be saved was a Herron, and other kin in the great extended family would follow. Not long after, Lee Calhoun dug in his pocket, and there was a church. “Old man Lee built the church for them, for his kin,” said Glen McGlothin, who grew up in that time, witnessed the birth of the church, and later became mayor of Ferriday. “Built three more, I know of.”

The extended family would trickle in a few at a time, till it was as much their church as anyone’s, and they were there long after the Sumralls moved on. The people of the church would remember Mamie, her face alight, tears flowing down her cheeks, her arms raised to heaven. Son and Minnie Bell Swaggart, and Irene Gilley, others—the ones old enough to comprehend—all lived in the ecstasy of salvation. And through it all, Mamie’s boys sat wide-eyed, white shirts buttoned to the neck. People would often claim, writing from outside this faith, that Jerry Lee was tortured by an unfathomable religion, but it was not beyond his understanding, in time. He was raised on the Christian teachings of heaven and hell and particularly in his people’s belief in the existence and pervasive power of the Holy Ghost. The presence of the Holy Ghost, living inside of them, sometimes caused them to tremble and shake, or go into a trance and speak in tongues, in old language, the language of Abraham, which they heard as the voice of God. In their church, it was not a theory or possibility but something as fierce and plain as a burning hill.

“It took hold of them,” Jerry Lee says now, “because it was real.”

The Holy Ghost comes into a person “like a fire,” he says.

“I took hold of it,” he says, “because it is real.”

That does not mean he would grow up to adhere, to comply, just that he knew in his heart when he did wrong. Preachers at the tiny church came and went, but with one unwavering message, that the wages of sin is death. And while they preached on all sin, on a great, wide world of sin, they preached on no sin like that of woman laying with man. Only in the sanctity of marriage could such a thing be without eternal damnation as its consequence. It seemed even more vile than murder, than stealing, than anything, and preacher after preacher railed against it in the little church, so many and so regularly that it became clear, especially to the young people, that there was sin and then there was the sin, that of lust and fornication, and such a sin had to be held down by righteousness and smothered in prayer. The wages of sin is death. The cost of sin was to burn. In Ephesians, the Bible warns: “Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given Himself for us . . . but fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not once be named among you. . . .” Little Jerry Lee, sitting between his mother and his big brother, did not understand it at first, all of it, but it sank into his bones.

Lee Calhoun, despite his church-building and his efforts to distance himself from his whiskey business, would face federal charges not long after that, for conspiracy: having failed to catch him making liquor, they got him for thinking about it. Lee was offered a chance to pay $1,500 and avoid prison altogether, in that peculiar way that rich men always have more choices than poor men in situations such as these, but he was unmoved by the offer. “So,” he told the court, “I pay you fifteen hundred, or you’re gonna feed me and clothe me and give me a bed to sleep in and a roof over my head for six months, and I don’t have to do nothin’? Well, I’ll take six months of that,” and he headed off to federal prison, joining Elmo on his second stint. Elmo got word to Mamie that he was fine—that he could do his time, again, and they would start over as soon as he got out, again, and that he was done with the liquor business for good. At night, he and the ghost of Jimmie Rodgers sang about the wages of sin and the poor man’s burden, with the dope fiends and the perverts shrieking and cursing and crying for release.


In the late summer of ’38, when Elmo Jr. was nine and Elmo Sr. was still away, Mamie took the boys to visit her sister, Stella. They talked in the shade of the porch as Jerry Lee dug in the dirt and Elmo Jr. played at the edge of the road with his cousin, Maudine. Traffic was light on the road and drivers knew to slow down as they came through town, and the children knew to stay out of the road. They were walking down the edge of the road, Junior singing a song, when they came to a slow-moving farm truck pulling a trailer. The truck was just merging out onto the highway, and Maudine ran and jumped on back, laughing, to ride a little piece down the road, just as a car came roaring up behind the trailer. The driver of the car was so drunk he did not see the trailer or the girl till he was almost on them. He snatched at the wheel, swerved off the road, and ran down Elmo Jr. in midsong. The car came to a stop, engine screaming, on top of the child, and the man inside was too drunk to know.

The boy was dead when the police got him out from under the car. They brought the drunk driver to stand before Mamie, so the man could see what he had wrought, but the man, a stranger to them, was still too drunk to know where he was or what he had done, too drunk to stand, and he just reeled there, blabbering on and on, held upright by the police. The officers said they would see that justice was done.