P.S.

With all due respect given to Norbut Putnam, he was incorrect. Words matter; they have consequences. Before speaking, know what you're talking about first. 3 more parts are coming.

"But those little birds they don’t have no legs at all and they live their whole lives on the wing, and they sleep on the wind, that’s how they sleep at night, they just spread their wings and go to sleep on the wind like other birds fold their wings and go to sleep on a tree…. They sleep on the wind and… (His eyes grow soft and vague.)

Never light on this earth but one time when they die!"

Orpheus Descending

Tennessee Williams, 1957

_____

The modified drawing is of a Pillory from the 17th century. We have devolved as a civilization, pillorying those who are different, who believe they are free, those who ever err or who might offend anyone's delicate sensibilities particularly by resisting conformity.

©Robin Markowitz, 2021. All Rights Reserved.

©Robin Markowitz, 2021. All Rights Reserved.

Elvis Presley lived IN black neighborhoods, particularly the black Park Hill neighborhood in Tupelo. The litlle family lived on the commercial fringes of the "'cross the tracks" famous black ghetto called Shake Rag but not in the residential part of it. They lived behind a Shake Rag business, basically in a shed - just one payment from homelessness.

Juneteenth, 1956, at the Memphis Fairgrounds

And then - and no one knows how, they somehow found their way to "The Hill." There were about 3 or 4 "dogrun" style two-family houses designated "white" and they rented half of one of them. It had hot and cold running water! A first for Elvis and his parents. Only one unusual white boy visited him there, ever. Elvis' little running buddies "on The Hill" were all black. 11, 12 and 13 year-old little boys. They went to the movies together (and SAT together! Elvis literally "jumped Jim Crow" by jumping over the railing that separated black and white: he'd sit on the floor with the sticky soda and candy all over it.) They played baseball together, played marbles, wrestled, gently teased each other, had nicknames - totally different from his less than happy school experience with the white kids - but he had to go there. He couldn't go to the school his friends went to. It was against the law then.

Elvis at 12, when he lived on The Hill

The first time Elvis Presley ever played piano was in a house in the Park Hill section. He knew a little girl named Janice Scales whose family invited him in. He was drawn to the piano like a magnet and tried to play it. Elvis went to black gospel tent revivals when he lived there and listened to live blues at the black Elks Club on The Hill. He learned a lot also on the porch of Mayhorn's Grocery which now has an official city plaque noting that Elvis and his little guitar were there. It's still standing but is no longer a grocery. And he snuck peeks through the windows at Saturday night fish frys and juke joints in Shake Rag according to local musician, the late Charles "Bo" Clanton. None of the other boys were with him; it was forbidden.

Several kids who lived there went on to be community leaders. Willie Pooch was a very talented bluesman who remembered playing baseball with Elvis, Robert Jameison - who had happy memories of playing marbles with Elvis, became a prominent minister and was involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Walter A. Zuber was a well-known black medical doctor in that area of the state. His daughter, Dr. Etta Zuber Falconer¹ went on to much greater fame. She made history as one of the first black women to get a Ph.D. in Mathematics, among her many other accolades.² She was just a couple of years older than Elvis and had to have known him at least for a brief time because her dad treated the family as a physician. She sadly was stricken with pancreatic cancer and passed away at only 68.

Another friend, probably Elvis' bestie there, was Sam Bell, who is kind of the unofficial historian of the historic Park Hill neighborhood. It's gone now, torn down and grown over for an Interstate highway. There's a log that marks the spot where Elvis and his parents lived. Nothing is written on the log. It might have been a happy accident of nature. Or someone may have placed it there.

The Presleys had to move because Elvis' daddy was running white lightning to make the rent money. He had to get the heck out of Mississippi. They then moved to Memphis. Quickly.

There's an old blues phrase that went "the only thing I did wrong/Was stay in Mississippi a day too long." Another story for another day. His daddy always did what he had to do to feed his little boy and his wife. From the beginning it wasn't easy.

--

¹Dr. Etta Zuber Falconer went to college at age 15. So she would have known him only briefly. She was obviously very studious - and a girl. She wasn't playing baseball and marbles at 14. She was studying trigonometry.

²https://www.maa.org/programs-and-communities/member-communities/maa-awards/lecture-awards/awm-maa-falconer-lectures/etta-zuber-falconer

Much credit to Giacomo (Jay) Viviano for many details. ©Giacomo Viviano, 2020-2021, All Rights Reserved.

Current piece written by

©Robin Markowitz, 2021, All Rights Reserved.

UPDATED POST IN LIGHT OF NEW RARE PHOTO. THANKS TO GIACOMO "Jay" VIVIANO @facebook.com for this rare find! 😃

Alberta Holman and Gladys Presley were co-workers at Britling Cafeteria in Memphis, Tennessee when outrageous fortune suddenly swept the struggling working-class Presley family into a fine house in exclusive East Memphis during 1956. Their only child, Elvis Presley became a singing star at only 19 years old. The money soon bought them this fine upper middle class ranch-style house. (They couldn't stay there long, though, for several reasons - which we'll discuss at another time. It gets complicated and deserves a full treatment.)

This all happened during the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. Elvis Presley bought Alberta Holman a car - a very precious thing at that particular moment in American history because she then didn't need to ride the segregated busses to East Memphis. Sure, later on, other cooks were given multiple cars and one lady also got A HOUSE. So yes, yes: Elvis gave away cars like other people brush their teeth: very, very often!

But this car was far more important  than any other to Alberta Holman in 1956.

A car to an African American domestic worker - a cook - relieved an enormous burden in a southern city. He gave her freedom.

-------

Please see this photo of Ms. Holman with a beautiful history of the relationship between the Presleys and the Holman family at this Facebook address - author Giacomo Viviano, June 7, 2021. All Rights Reserved: https://www.facebook.com/groups/197327014069344/permalink/1169405980194771/

Alberta Holman at Audobon Drive home

"To Elsie

1962

William Carlos Williams - 1883-1963

The pure products of America

go crazy—

mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of

Jersey

with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves

old names

and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken

to railroading

out of sheer lust of adventure

and young slatterns, bathed

in filth

from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night

with gauds

from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them

character

but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags-succumbing without

emotion

save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry

or viburnum-

which they cannot express—

Unless it be that marriage

perhaps

with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate

so hemmed round

with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an

agent—

reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in

some hard-pressed

house in the suburbs—

some doctor's family, some Elsie—

voluptuous water

expressing with broken

brain the truth about us—

her great

ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap

jewelry

and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet

were

an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners

destined

to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains

after deer

going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September

Somehow

it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that

something

is given off

No one

to witness

and adjust, no one to drive the car

Copyright © 1962 by William Carlos Williams. Used with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of this poem may be reproduced in any form without the written consent of the publisher."

Listen to it read aloud here: