Screening Room (13 page)

And then we find the place, the two headstones, M.A. Lightman and Celia Sapinsley Lightman. And the damp ground below. Here. I stare in shock at the ground, at the spot. I can hear my breathing. Clouds of mist shimmer in the beam of the flashlight. Is this all? It seems a joke that this patch of earth pretends to encompass the remains of M.A. I imagine looking down through the wet soil, deeper, until I reach the bones—there, only a few feet below me. His bones. They are only bones, only bones.

Driving back, we take a detour through Downtown. Restaurants have closed, and the streets are empty. Neon lights silently flicker on and off. Through the glass window of a hotel reception area, we see a night clerk sitting at the desk.

At the corner of Adams and Third, we stop at St. Peter’s Catholic Church, with its two Norman Gothic towers looming in the night sky like the guard posts of a European fortress. Ronnie, who works in the neighborhood and has always been the most clever of the four brothers, miraculously produces a key and lets us in a side door. Are we breaking the law? We talk in whispers. Using our flashlight to find our way, we walk single file down dim aisles, past the elaborate altar with the two disciples standing below Christ on the cross, past the stained-glass windows. We sit in a dark pew. Sections of a filigreed brass gate gleam
in the low light like the eyes of little forest animals. The place smells of linseed oil. Ronnie tells us that across the street, at the old LaSalette Academy, the Dominican sisters treated victims of the yellow fever epidemic in 1878. Three years before Papa Joe arrived in the South. People called it the “black vomit.” Seventeen thousand Memphians were infected and five thousand died. Dead bodies piled up faster than undertakers could bury them. Some people expired so suddenly they literally dropped in their tracks. Other victims managed to crawl into this very church, to pray in their last hours or to receive final rites. Twenty-five thousand souls fled the city on railroads. “
Men climbed over women and children to force their way through the windows of overloaded escape trains,” said a publication at the time.

I conjure the scene: Sleep-deprived doctors and nuns in their wrinkled white habits fighting a demon whose nature was unknown. Hemorrhaging patients were carried in on stretchers and laid on the floor of the academy across the street. Perhaps brought here for their last rites, in this wooden pew. Suddenly standing, dizzy, I run down the dark aisle, out the side door, into air. It is night, it is night, and the stars are quiet lights in the sky.

Well after midnight, the car deposits me at my father’s house. My brothers offer a sleepy goodbye and head off into the night. At this hour, my father has long since gone to bed, and the only light visible is the lamp outside his front door, its glow muffled by the humid southern air. I reach in my pocket for the two keys, one to the outer iron-grated door and one to the inner wooden door—all the houses here in East Memphis being heavily barricaded against break-ins and robberies. Slowly, I walk up the long driveway, past the large oak around which my brothers and I played cowboys and Indians, past the lawn that meanders about the trees and flower beds moving up from the street to the house
like a beckoning sea and sweeping all the way to M.A.’s house next door. My father was proud of this lawn and used to have it fertilized and reseeded several times a year.

Walking toward the dim eye of the lamp, I suddenly remember a story my mother told me just before she died. I had forgotten it until now. One day in the mid-1950s, M.A. stopped here on his way home from the office to deliver a package to Dad. Although he lived next door, M.A. rarely visited. For family gatherings, we went to his house. It was just before dinner. My father, then in his mid-thirties, would have been sitting in his wingback chair in the living room, alone, reading the newspaper while my mother did battle with four young children elsewhere in the house.

The package brought by M.A. that day may have been a collection of business papers to sign, or perhaps the copy for a movie advertisement Dad had designed and M.A. had edited. Afterward, my grandfather evidently thought he would take a shortcut to his house next door. Instead of driving down our driveway, right on Cherry for fifty feet, and then up his own driveway, M.A. drove his car straight across Dad’s lawn, destroying the grass and leaving deep ruts in the ground.

Lennie: “You are positively wilting, my dear. You’ve been in Boston too long. Did you know that M.A. and Celia had a mule named Bob? Kept him out in the barn behind M.A.’s house. Seventy years ago and more.”

Me: “I did know that. I thought …”

Harry: “Lila said he smelled like a pile of fresh manure and looked at you cross-eyed. Wasn’t there some story about Bob and Celia?”

Lennie: “Bob had a fascination with Celia’s hats. He nipped one of them right off her head, a wide-brimmed sun hat. Chewed it to shreds in ten seconds flat. Celia acted like nothing had happened. She went back into the house and came out with a different hat, a beautiful thing with a ribbon. I think Celia put ribbons on everything. She used ribbons for bookmarks. Every book in the house was hers, except for M.A.’s crime novels. Anyway, Celia had a whole closet full of hats. She began to gently scold Bob about the first hat, but gently you know, Celia was the most gracious person in the world, and that mule lurched sideways and took a bite out of her second hat, and a clump of Celia’s hair with it. After that, M.A. got furious and wanted to sell Bob to a work farm, but Celia wouldn’t let him. She tried to get on Bob’s good side by feeding him rye bread, which he gobbled up. But whenever she wore a hat, he took a bite out of it. Anybody else
could wear two hats at once and Bob wouldn’t show the slightest interest.”

Harry has gotten himself going now. A little-known fact, says Harry, is that Memphis was once
the mule capital of the world. Before the Civil War, the first mule pens were on Jefferson, and then they moved to Third Street, where the converging railroad tracks allowed the loading and unloading of a dozen stock cars at the same time. A stockyard on McLemore, just west of Third, could hold four thousand mules. In the 1890s, auctions sold as many as a thousand mules per day. Mules from Memphis went to the Spanish-American War and then on to South Africa for the Boer War.

According to a historian named Paul Coppock, says Harry, the most fabulous mule auctioneer in Memphis was M. R. Meals, called the Colonel. Meals, who weighed in at three hundred pounds, hurled out his patter in a high-pitched chant that charmed both buyers and animals. The Colonel could sell two mules a minute.

Some of the buildings that once housed the old mule barns stood well into the mid-twentieth century. One was on the north side of Monroe, east of Fourth, the establishment owned by H. T. Bruce. Now the space is occupied by an apartment complex. Not far away are the old buildings of the cotton trade on Front Street, many still standing. There is the F. G. Barton cotton factors building. At number 56, you can still find the old Fulton & Sons Cotton building of red brick, with semicircular windows bordered by Gothic-like stone. As I listen to Harry, I realize I was right there at 56 Front Street two days ago, on Sunday. Next door is an ancient wooden building with crumbling shutters, boarded up. On a quiet Sunday morning, with no people or cars, Front Street feels as if it has slept through the last hundred years. As I walk past the old buildings with the Mississippi in view, I

am
alone in this comfortable old glove, dusty side streets, glass storefronts, the whistle of steamboats, the
clop-clop
of horse hooves, the shouts of the bidding from open windows of the cotton exchange, smells of the oil from the railroads, magnolias and the perfumes of southern ladies.

(
photo credit 24.1
)

That was the era, says Harry. Mules. And duels. Just ten miles south of the mule barns on Third Street, two Memphians had it out with each other in the early morning of August 26, 1870. The altercation was over a beautiful woman, of course. The duelists were Edward L. Hamlin, a lawyer, twenty-five years old, and Edward T. Freeman, an accountant, thirty years old. The two young men followed the code exactly. Their seconds paced out a distance of fifteen yards. Each belligerent had a long-barrel smoothbore pistol with a single load, an oversize ball of lead “
more likely to knock down than to penetrate.” According to the
Memphis Daily Appeal
, the spot chosen for the duel was “well
known in the annals of Memphis dueling, several hostile meetings having occurred there.” As reported the next day:

Before dying, Hamlin told his doctor that he had a “strange feeling at the wound” but denied any pain. Then he said: “Tell my father that I die as I have lived—a gentleman.”

“Wasn’t Hamlin related to the Snowdens?” says Lennie.

“That I wouldn’t know. How would I know something like that?”

“I wouldn’t know all the things you don’t know, Harry. Many of the old Memphis families are related, that’s something I know. I believe that Hamlin had a daughter by the name of Fayette Hamlin Snowden. The Snowdens go back to a Civil War colonel named Robert Bogardus Snowden, who married Annie Overton Brinkley—that’s Overton as in John Overton, the founder of Memphis. Bride and groom received the Peabody Hotel as a wedding present. And the Boyles, of course. The Norfleets came here from Holly Springs about the same time as Boss Crump and started Sledge Norfleet on the Memphis Cotton Exchange. Swimming in capital. God knows who they’re related to.”

“Certainly not us.”

“I never thought Edward would die,” says my father, his fine white hair neatly combed even at eight o’clock in the morning. “I thought he would live forever. Edward was like Dad. When we were in the Boy Scouts, Eddie had so many merit badges they had to give him an extra sash to display them all. I had one merit badge, something I got for starting a fire without a match.”

My father retired a quarter century ago. One day he walked out of his office at the new Ridgeway Malco in East Memphis and never went back. Dad’s office has remained vacant, just as he left it, gathering the dust of the years. While I am visiting Memphis, at this moment, my father has asked me to clear out his desk. He’s ninety years old, after all.

Warily, I unlock the door. The room smells like a closet of mildewing clothes. Inside Dad’s desk, I find a risqué poster of Marilyn Monroe, ticket stubs to orchestral performances several decades ago, keys, letters, photographs of my mother from the 1950s, bank statements, brochures of boats my father sailed in his dreams. In one drawer, I am astonished to find a group of yellowing pencil drawings my father must have made in the 1950s when my brothers and I were young children—illustrations of classic children’s stories, including “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and “Humpty Dumpty” and “The Pied Piper.” I have never seen these before. The various characters are alive, with
wonderful expressions of dismay and confusion on their faces. I
must
have seen these drawings as a child, but I cannot remember.

On the wood-paneled wall is a print of a painting by William Powell,
Discovering the Mississippi
. It depicts the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto’s “discovery” of the Mississippi River in 1541. The painting shows Chickasaw warriors coming ashore in canoes, bearing gifts for de Soto. The conquistador himself sits proudly atop his white horse on the banks of the river, wearing a silver breastplate, a rich fur coat, and a white-rimmed hat punctuated by a white feather. Soldiers wrestle with a heavy cannon. Other weapons lie casually about: muskets, crossbows, an ax. Bare-breasted squaws hold out their arms toward de Soto in supplication and submission.

I remember sailing with my father on the Mississippi. We would launch the boat at McKellar Lake, then go around several bends, then out to the river, sometimes not by choice. Depending on the season and the rainfall, the river could be up twenty feet or down twenty feet. We would see powerboats, tugboats pushing commercial craft, long metal barges loaded with mounds of fertilizer or barrels of petroleum or bales of cotton.

Memphis sits high on a bluff rising from the river, making the site ideal for settlement. The region was first called Chickasaw Bluffs. From this disembarking point on the river, a trail of more than 160 miles meandered through forests and fields to the various Indian villages. In 1819, the modern city was founded by Andrew Jackson and a lawyer friend named John Overton. They named it Memphis after the ancient capital of Egypt, another transportation center perched on a great river. The Mississippi and its tributaries, which run the entire north–south girth of America, became the veins connecting Memphis to the rest of the country. And the stuff that flowed through those veins was cotton. Sunshine, long frost-free seasons, and moderate rainfall made the Memphis area an ideal place to grow cotton. For many
years, a third to a half of all farmers here grew cotton. The cotton economy, in turn, required vast amounts of cheap labor, and Memphis developed a sizable slave market.