my head and picked me up by the nape of my neck, and I was looking right into his face.” The last time that had happened he had been a little boy, in Haney’s Big House. This was different. His daddy’s eyes were calm, flat.
He remembers one blow, maybe two, then his mother’s voice.
“Don’t hit him again! Don’t hit my baby again.”
“I remember he picked me up like I was a straw, and I knew that I had been conquered.”
The year 1948 began with a crime wave in Concordia Parish, or at least as close to such as anyone there could recall. All kinds of things were turning up missing, including some items that left police bewildered as to why anyone would want them. It was just Jerry Lee and his cousin Jimmy, who had temporarily backslid, creeping around at night, stealing scrap iron from their Uncle Lee and selling it back to him the next morning, and breaking into warehouses that held things most people would not take on a scavenger hunt. Jimmy, in his own biography, wrote that the cousins stole a roll of barbed wire; they did not need a roll of barbed wire, and Jerry Lee was against taking it, but Jimmy figured if they were going so far as to break and enter, they dang sure were going to leave with something. He left carrying a roll of wire, but it got heavy, so he threw it in a ditch. The boys had better luck with stores, and by the summer of ’48 they had a nice pile of loot. “It’s a whole gang,” said Chief Swaggart, when asked about the rash of thefts, but the crime wave mysteriously flattened to nothing when Jimmy rededicated himself to the Lord and Jerry Lee, his family, and his piano vanished on the two-lane to Angola, where Elmo had found construction work on a hospital for the infamous prison there.
Home to some of the worst human-rights abuses in American penal history, Angola was a for-profit prison in its beginning, where men and women could be leased from the state, whipped and worked to death, then replaced like parts on a car. They worked the cotton fields and endured systematic torture, rape, and murder. The state took it over in the twentieth century, but not much changed, and inmates just vanished, buried in unmarked graves or sunk into the river, which formed a great crescent around the prison. In that year of 1948, Governor Jimmie Davis promised to make Angola humane, and his reforms created the new construction that brought Elmo and his family here. But it was not his reforms that got Davis elected; one does not get elected in the South by promising to make prison nicer. Davis, a country singer in the Jimmie Rodgers vein, had had a country hit a few years before with a song called “You Are My Sunshine,” and he sent out campaign trucks rigged with loudspeakers, blasting the song even in places where only the armadillos were likely to hear it. Sometimes, surreally, the speaker trucks would get stuck behind the truck carrying the state’s electric chair, which was hauled around the state so people could execute their condemned right close by. And the trucks rolled on, in a macabre caravan.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.
You make me happy, when skies are gray.
In this haunted place, Jerry Lee fell in love, or something like it. The Lewis family moved into a workers’ camp outside the prison, and Jerry Lee went to the public school. He even went to class, because he had discovered football. He was skinny but fast, and he could catch a football and run like a water bug, and he made the girls act all gushy when he pulled off his helmet and slicked back his hair, which he knew to do a lot. But then a tackler the size of an International Harvester combine hit him low and separated his thighbone from the rest of his body, leaving him in a cast from his navel to his big toe. So he went back to being a piano player.
The girls, he quickly discovered, liked a good-lookin’ piano player even more than a football hero. He started caring about his clothes, hair, and the kind of car he could get to date in, though he was still only thirteen. Driver’s licenses, like most other forms of government interference, had nothing to do with him, and he had already discovered that many people were foolish enough to leave keys in their cars, so they could be borrowed.
As for girls, “I could take ’em or leave ’em,” he says. “Take ’em, mostly.”
Then he saw her.
She had a lovely name, a name from the Bible.
“Ruth,” says Jerry Lee.
She was slim, with dark brown hair, and prettier than string music.
“I think about her, a good bit.”
The problem with being Jerry Lee Lewis is all the sharp edges on things in his memories. In the Tennessee Williams play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the domineering family patriarch describes his own life in similar terms: “All of my life I been like a doubled-up fist. . . . Poundin’, smashin’, drivin’!” You leave a lot of splintered and broken things, a lot of jagged things, in a life like that.
“But sometimes,” Jerry Lee says, “there ain’t no sharp edges.” It is that way, just like that, when he thinks about Ruth. This was back when only Cecil Harrelson called him the Killer, not yet the whole wide world. He was not a gentle boy and never had been but was gentler around her then, and as he thinks about her now. Not even Jerry Lee Lewis could be a driving fist all the time.
“Now I’m going to loosen these doubled-up hands,” Tennessee Williams also wrote, “and touch things easy with them.”
He already had one girlfriend, of course—a lovely girl back in Ferriday named Elizabeth. “A brunette doll,” he says. “I thought I loved her, a little bit. I loved the way she walked, the way she talked. Took her to her prom in a ’49 Chevrolet. A doll. Her ol’ mama stood on the porch and just watched us, watched us leave and watched us come in, and I didn’t care, I kissed her anyway. But then we moved out to Angola, and I got with Ruth.”
She was working behind the counter in a little store. “I was still thirteen, and she was sixteen, a good-lookin’ girl, and filled out, reasonably well. I said, ‘How much is this candy bar?’ and she just gave it to me. Next thing I knew, we was laying in the sun on the banks of the ol’ Mississippi.”
Jerry Lee knew about romance. He had heard it in songs. But he could have been smoother, he concedes now. They lay by the river for hours at a time, just talking.
“Look at those clouds,” she would say. “Are they telling you something?”
“Naw,” he said. “You can make anything out of clouds you want.”
She found all manner of things there, ships and houses and islands in the sky.
“I don’t know,” said Jerry Lee. “They just look like clouds to me.”
He lets his mind drift a bit, quiet for a while.
“She was a sweet girl.”
He was still in his cast when they first started seeing each other. When he was finally free of it, he and Ruth danced in her room to the record player. “We danced, and we cut up. One day her daddy caught us, but we wasn’t doin’ nothing. He whipped her pretty good. We just kept right on. Then she heard me play on the piano, and it was just over. She was in love.
“I had been a man for quite some time,” he says, by way of explanation. “Been driving since I was nine.”
She seemed content to just curl up with him, in the shade, by the river, or on a couch when her mama and daddy were away. “But I never was much of a cuddler,” he says. One day, they found a secluded spot on the bank and put out a blanket. “Right there on the sandy banks of Little Creek. Couldn’t have been a more perfect spot. . . . You know, you spend a lot of time in your life seeking some kind of perfection, but we’re a long way from gettin’ there. But this seemed like it, that there. I had spent a lot of time, thinking about things like this.”
They kissed, and Jerry Lee started asking.
“No,” she said.
He asked some more.
“No,” she said, but weaker.
He talked her into it; he had talked himself into it, he believed, already.
“I