Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(7)

Then his daddy reached for him, lifted him high in his arms, and threw him out of the boat.

The water closed over his head. He thrashed toward the light, sank, and clawed his way up again, in panic. He kicked at it with his legs as if it was filled with devils, all twining around his skinny body, dragging him down. It was not a cruelty, he knows now, it was just his turn. It did no good to wait till a boy was older. The terror only grew with the child. You threw them both in the river and took what came out.

“Get with it, boy!” his daddy yelled.

Jerry Lee drank the water in, breathed it, choked.

“Swim,” his daddy yelled, “or float!”

“Help me!” the boy hollered.

But his daddy only knelt in the boat, his arms outstretched.

“Come on, boy!”

“Help me!”

“Come on.”

Then he felt iron fingers on his arm and he was lifted up, up, forever out of his fear. He thinks now his daddy would have saved him; surely he would, would have dove into the suffocating black and pulled him free just in time. But what kind of boy would he have held there, squalling? “It wadn’t no easy place,” he says now. But it was here, at the river, that his people came to settle, to snatch once more at the good life after the high ground failed them for the last time.

“If you’re ashamed of where you’re from, then you’re ashamed of yourself,” he says of the years he lived in overalls, mud-bound. “I ain’t never been ashamed. Ferriday, Louisiana, is where I’m from. We lived a while at Black River, and lived a while down at Angola, when Daddy helped build the prison there. Daddy was up at four o’clock, and Mama was up five minutes after. Daddy followed carpentry work, so we moved all the time, moved three times in one week, to old shanty houses, mostly. He farmed cotton, corn, soybeans, split halves with my Uncle Lee, and he made some whiskey. Mama picked cotton. It was a small place, but it never seemed small to me, when I was a boy.” It is where his people, all of them, are buried, “so it’s home to me.” He has never been one of those poor Southern children who claim to have lived in blissful ignorance of their poverty and the life into which they were born; such a thing leaves no room to dream. “It kind of dawns on you after a while. It occurred to me pretty quick.” His mama and daddy never owned much of the bottomland when he was a boy, sometimes not enough to fill a teacup, but that only made it more precious. It was their last stand, this Concordia Parish, and even now, as he crosses the bridge from Natchez, he breathes easier, as if someone has lifted a heavy hand off his chest. He has to try to remember the bad of it; the good comes easy, “all good, good singin’, good eatin’, good—You know that song about the tree?”

I’m like a tree that’s planted by the water.

I shall not be moved.



People have been dying beside these waters a long time, hoping for a piece of the unsteady ground, hoping to grow something from it. Would he have been the same if he had come from a gentler place? “The talent would have come through,” he says, “even if I’d been born in some big city. But it mighta been . . . different.” It might have been, somehow, gentler. “I think my music is like a rattlesnake. It warns you, ‘Listen to this. You better listen to this.’” That essence, the toughness and meanness and maybe even a spike of savage beauty, he believes, crawled straight out of this mud.

In Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, historian Lee Sandlin identifies a quality that seems to have marked Mississippi River people from earliest days: “They all lived for the spontaneous, heedless surge of wild exuberance, the sudden recourse to violence with no provocation—the violence if not of act then of thought and language. They routinely did and said extraordinarily foolish things for no reason other than joie de vivre.” One such character was a Bunyanesque scalawag named Mike Fink. “He was a creature of pure impulse—and yet whatever he did, no matter how bizarrely random it might be, he did perfectly. He achieved without effort what nobody else could do in a lifetime of labor. His air of godlike grace, of what in classical literature was called arete, transcended everything about his personality—which was in all other ways appalling.”

Figures like Mike Fink “had a ritual game they’d play called shout-boasting,” Sandlin writes, “the point of which was to make up surreally violent claims about themselves, and then dare to fight anybody who challenged them.”

But it is not boasting, as Jerry Lee says, “if you really done it.”


The Spaniards came to the river in 1541. Hernando de Soto led men in iron helmets into the malarial jungles in a bloodthirsty search for nonexistent gold and was one of the first white men to die in the heat, damp, and mosquitoes thick as fog; some say his rusty conquistadores still ride in the mist. Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville et d’Ardillières, knight of the Order of Saint-Louis and founder of the Colony of Louisiana of New France, brought settlement and Bible and sword; soon the indigenous tribes were extinct. Flags would go up and down as white men fought over it all, till the Old World finally retreated from the yellow fever and floodplain.

In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase gave the mud to a new nation, and Thomas Jefferson sent naturalist William Dunbar to see what all the dying was for. Dunbar explored the Mississippi, Black, and Ouachita rivers by boat and horseback, and in his journals he made the land sound like paradise. “Vegetation is extremely vigorous along the alluvial banks; twining vines entangle the branches of trees [with] the richest and most luxurious festoons.” The result was “an impenetrable curtain, variegated and spangled with all possible gradations of color from the splendid orange to the enlivening green down to the purple and blue and interspersed with bright red and russet brown.” Dunbar saw endless oak trees, red and black, along with ash, pecan, hickory, elm, and persimmon; the soil was “black marl mixed with sand,” the riverbanks “clothed in rich canebreak.” The forest along the river would offer “venison, bear, turkey . . . the river fowl and fish . . . [along with] geese and ducks surprisingly fat, and excellent.”