Jerry Lee Lewis. Rick Bragg

not, but maybe—if someone had just had the good sense to lock up the piano.

      The student body waited respectfully in the pews, not one painted fingernail or undone button among them, some five hundred souls humming, but quietly so, with school spirit, and alight in the love of the true gospel. The male students at Southwestern Bible Institute wore coats and ties and starched shirts to class, and the women wore long skirts and did not cut their hair, some for so long that it swung against the backs of their legs when they walked across campus in their flat-heeled shoes. Makeup was forbidden; lipstick was contraband. The young women were required to wear stockings at all times, but fall came late to East Texas that season and it was too hot to breathe, so some of the coeds drew a line down the back of their bare legs with black shoe polish, for relief. That was the year the editor of the yearbook cropped the pictures of the students so tightly that all you could see was a circle of their faces, because some of the young women had sinned against God and styled their hair. When one of the boys, Billy Paul Branham, went walking through campus after dark one evening, eating an ice cream cone and lustily singing “The Old Rugged Cross,” the dean of men gave him ten demerits.

      It was not a place that rewarded individuality. “Apparently not,” says Jerry Lee.

      The school offered courses in church business, missionary organization, Bible study, and of course, Pentecostal history and prophets. But there was not a lot of shouting here in the chapel on Sunday mornings, in a sanctuary sealed tight in stained glass, and no one got happy, very much, in the middle of a song. Just off campus, Victorian mansions and gingerbread architecture fronted clean, quiet streets, with not a mud-hole or a black racer or an armadillo anywhere in sight. Here in this unforgiving place, Jerry Lee sat at his piano, looked over the student body, and decided it was time for a change.

      The boy had always had the power to win people over, had a personality like an industrial magnet. He would be a formidable evangelist. Still married to a young woman he had no intention of keeping, he finally bowed to his mother’s wishes and decided to use his God-given talents as a singer and piano player to bring people to the Lord. He enrolled at a place called Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas. The name of the town means “cow creek” or “buffalo creek” or “fat wildcat,” depending on which linguist you believe. Waxahachie was a 380-mile, dusty bus ride from Ferriday. He chose the school there in part because it had a junior college division that was content to overlook small matters such as prerequisites and even high school diplomas. Aunt Stella and Uncle Lee helped with the tuition and bus fare, thinking he might make a preacher after all but certain he needed to get out of Ferriday before a jealous boyfriend or irate daddy caught him from behind with a pine knot or a pipe wrench—or before some car dealer had him arrested or shot him from the dark. Mamie kissed him good-bye and told him she was so proud of him, and cried a little. Elmo shook his hand like a man, and as the big Trailways pulled out from Ferriday, it carried a whole busload of unreasonable expectation.

      “I really could preach,” he says, and he did plan on giving the place a solid try, at least at first. Almost immediately, however, he was stultified. The classes were as dull and irrelevant to his life as the ones he had dodged before. He did not see the point, in a school in which he was purportedly readying himself to be a preacher, of immersing himself in a library of thick, dusty books. The Bible was the Word of God, the Rock, the Great Speckled Bird, and a man preached from it, period. The Bible was all a man needs to know, he says even now. The rest was just fluttering paper and wind.