not the good son, yet he could—if he did not fall to his death or drown in the Blue Hole or disappear on a freight car or get remanded to reform school—be a great one. He might be the one. But while this boy loved singing and, more important, noticed music, he was not yet a devotee of it, as his brother had been. There was too much of the other life out there to taste and conquer. He was a student of mischief, and even a lifetime later he relishes it almost as much as he relishes the early music, relishes any discomfort or awkwardness or devilment he took part in, the way he remembers the taste of his mama’s tomato gravy. Some men outgrow their boyish devilment. Others only polish it.
“Mama would wake me at seven thirty in the morning; school started at eight thirty. And I’d always say, ‘All I need is just one more minute, Mama,’ always just one more minute. She would come back in with a cup of cocoa and some vanilla wafers, and I’d eat it there in the bed and she’d sit with me. That was my favorite, that or tomato gravy and biscuits and a Coca-Cola. She was the angel in my life, my mama was. I had the best mama and daddy in the world, and I know everybody says that, but I believe it to be true. I know it is.”
The war raged, far off. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the one Uncle Lee Calhoun considered a sack of hot wind and a socialist, came on the radio after the double-dealing Japanese bushwhacked the sailors at Pearl Harbor, and he vowed, in that highbrow Yankee accent, that there would be a world of hurt in store. The next thing the poor people of Concordia knew, they were at war with Germans; if only Jerry Lee and the boys had paid attention in history, maybe that would have made some sense. But even before the war had reached the boys of Concordia Parish, people were beginning to feel it in their pocketbooks, as work bloomed in munitions plants and even in the fields, as parish cotton was suddenly worth something again.
Uncle Lee Calhoun had so many rental houses he could not collect for all of them in a single day and would have killed a good horse doing it. He made collections now in a raggedy prewar Chevrolet pickup and took off the driver’s-side door to save time on collection days. People here laugh about the time he ran a red light and crashed his truck into a man’s big Cadillac, how he stood there in his sweat-stained work khakis and told the man, a stranger passing through, how that ol’ truck was the only thing he owned in this sorry world and if he had to pay to get the man’s car fixed he would be ruined and maybe even have to go to prison, because when he failed to pay the damages and fine, the cold-blooded police would sock him in jail and his poor family would starve. The other man, almost in tears, patted him a little bit and drove away, his ruined car limping slowly along, happy that he had spared a poor man even more pain. The new prosperity made Lee no more generous with his own workers. One day, he promised workers in his fields some fish for lunch, and they worked all morning with their mouths watering, thinking about fried catfish, till Lee Calhoun showed up at noon with a sack full of sardines and some loose dry crackers.
Other members of the clan began to find a small prosperity of their own. Willie Harry Swaggart, the one called Pa, became chief of police. He was a craggy old man with steel-colored eyes who did not carry a gun, did not need to, because Pa had made his living in Ferriday in the swamps, trapping things that bit. But it was handy, for Jerry Lee and his cousins, to have an inside man in the department. The Gilleys opened small cafés, and others in the extended family put their names on doors and store windows. Elmo and Mamie found work in the war effort as carpentry took off again; munitions plants sprang up, other jobs appeared, and they had a grip on the here and now for the first time in their lives. “Mama sent me to the store,” Jerry Lee says, “with money.”
For working people, the boom did not extend to new houses or cars; Detroit had stopped producing cars, anyway, to use their assembly lines for planes and tanks. For the people who had been picking cotton or cutting timber, it came in the form of new overalls and food on the table at dinner and supper. His mama had the means, for the first time, to work true magic in the kitchen. “There has never been such a cook,” he says, “as my mama. Pork chops and gravy, beans and cornbread, beef, biscuits and gravy, cornbread dressing, okra, squash, tomatoes . . .” It was nothing they hadn’t had before, from the ground or the stores, but even such simple things had become so dear in the Depression. “We had hog killings, and we had fresh ham, and those pork chops, and cracklin’s.” There was money for new records, and for batteries so his mama’s radio could keep bringing in those songs by Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb.
There was even money left over for the matinee. The Arcade Theater was a place of such importance in Ferriday that the movies showed even during great floods, and men rowed their sweethearts to the entrance in canoes and bateaux, to see the outside world flash across the screen. It gave Jerry Lee’s imagination a place to grow, and he wondered, sometimes, what lurked in the dark woods on nights he walked home by himself from the double feature at the Arcade, after he watched Lon Chaney turn into The Wolfman one clump of hair at a time. He was not scared, just almost scared, “but then my imagination had been whipped up quite a bit.” But nothing drew Jerry Lee to the Arcade so relentlessly as a new Western, and no Western pulled him like those of the singing cowboy, Gene Autry. The actor had taken a sabbatical from shooting cap pistols out of outlaws’ hands to go fight the real war, in the army air corps, flying the Hump between Burma and China over the dangerous Himalayas. But he had already made so many black-and-white horse operas that there were enough to make do in the war years, and “if Gene Autry was at the Arcade Theater, then Jerry Lee Lewis was the first one in line. I liked the way he fought and I liked the way he shot, but mostly I liked the way he sang.”
One day, his cousin Jimmy approached his father and asked if he could take in a movie with his cousins. His father and mother began to cry, in disappointment. The movie theaters, they believed, were the devil’s playground, and while Jimmy went into the theater that day, he came right back out again, sobbing, convinced of their wickedness. Jerry Lee did not understand how a man in a white hat, who rarely even kissed the damsel in distress, who championed orphans and puppies, could drag a boy into the depths of hell. So, while Jimmy knelt and asked for forgiveness, Jerry Lee just ate some popcorn and sang yippy-ti-yi-yay.
The cost of the war—and of the local economic recovery—would not be known for some time, when the first casualties started appearing in the newspaper. “We had kin lost in the war,” Jerry Lee recalls. “Paul Batey got killed. A sniper got him,” in the Pacific. “My Aunt Viola never got over that. The war took a whole lot of people from here.” But for the children, safe in the low country, the war was a thing of adventure, where Germans could be killed with slingshots and Japanese fell from paper planes. The river was said to be a thing of great strategic importance, as it had since the Yankees took Vicksburg, but now it was said to be a target for sabotage, because of the freight it carried for the war effort. So the boys watched from the bank for saboteurs and submarines. It was what he did instead of going to school; it was a patriotic duty.
“Mama and Daddy seen their kid had school,” he says, but he did not always make it inside the door. He would walk off in that direction, till he was out of sight, then just go wandering, to fish or swim or throw rocks or sit and listen to an old man whup a guitar, because it was so hard to sit there in those little bitty desks and try to learn about fractions and what made the sky blue and the names of all those men in puffy pantaloons, when there was great time wasting to be done, pool halls to sneak into, barbershops to linger by. And so he just did not go often to Ferriday Elementary and hoped the teachers would just pass him through, something teachers have done since the advent of chalk. His daddy made the mistake of buying him an old motor scooter, which only increased his range. “It was a great time,” he says. “Every now and then a plane would fly over, and we’d go hide under the bridge.”
It was about this time, in the thin shadow of that distant war, he decided his own world was just too small.
“I don’t know why I did it. I just wanted to go.”
He looks as if he is searching for some kind of understanding of that, which is rare for him.
“Sometimes you just need to go.”
He had hitchhiked the dirt roads and blacktop in Concordia Parish and parishes up and down the river since he was old enough to realize what his thumb was for, sometimes just to see where the roads ended, the