Screening Room (16 page)

“Hattie Mae was the only living creature could talk to Bob,” says Lennie, lighting one of her long, slim cigarettes. “I think that’s the main reason M.A. and Celia kept her. That and her cooking. When Hattie Mae sang ‘Amazing Grace’ to Bob, that ornery mule would get real quiet. Hattie Mae looked at you cross-eyed, like Bob, and she had a mouthful of gold-capped teeth. She also didn’t kowtow to white folks. I remember one year about two weeks before Thanksgiving, I was over at the house on Cherry. Lila and I were helping Celia with some decorating, but it was mostly me helping because Lila was in the powder room all day preening and fixing her hair. Celia called in Hattie Mae and said that she was having Thanksgiving dinner that year at her house and needed Hattie Mae to work for her that day. Hattie Mae could take off the Monday after, said Celia. Hattie Mae was none too happy about this assignment, as she had her own plans for Thanksgiving, but she didn’t say anything and went about her cleaning and sweeping. Later that evening, as Hattie Mae was getting ready to go home, Celia said that she’d like to have the turkey ready at four p.m. on Thanksgiving day. ‘Mizz Lightman,’ said Hattie Mae, ‘I fix Thanksgiving dinner for my own family.’ ‘Don’t you have a sister?’ said Celia. ‘Yes, ma’am.’ ‘Well, you can let her cook the dinner for your family on Thanksgiving. I need you here.’ Hattie Mae turned directly toward Celia and looked her right in the eye and said, ‘Mizz
Lightman, I been fixing Thanksgiving dinner for my family for twenty-five years. I’ll find somebody else to help you.’

“Hattie Mae had spirit. Another story I remember. M.A. and Celia had an old lawn mower that stayed in the garage, never used. One day Hattie Mae said, ‘Mr. Lightman, is you goin’ to use that lawn mower?’ ‘I don’t think so,’ said M.A. ‘Well, then,’ said Hattie Mae, ‘I got some grass at home that would be mighty helped with that lawn mower.’ So Hattie Mae had her nephew come over and get the lawn mower, and she kept it. About four years later, the machine broke. Hattie Mae took it to Sears and Roebuck to be fixed. She came to work the next day and said to M.A., ‘They’s askin’ fifteen dollars to fix that lawn mower of yours. Don’t you want it fixed?’

“Hattie Mae went to all the big family events. She went to Jeanne and Dick’s wedding and was the only black person there. After the wedding, she said to me, ‘I felt like a fly in the buttermilk.’ ”

“Hattie Mae was married to Willie, M.A.’s chauffeur, wasn’t she?” said Nate.

“How in the world did you remember that?” said Lennie. “I think the man’s name was Douglas.”

“No, Douglas was Dick’s chauffeur.”

“I never knew Dick had a chauffeur.”

“Everybody white had a colored chauffeur back then.”

I remember them both, Willie and Douglas. Both smelled of alcohol all day long, starting early in the morning. Douglas had several silver teeth and a white stubble of a beard and wore blue denim shirts. He showed up at our front door one day, after walking up the long driveway from the street, and said he was out of work and could do whatever we needed around the house, inside or out. Over his shoulder hung a cloth sack, which I think contained all of his worldly possessions. My father didn’t have any work for Douglas but hired him with some kind of
vague instructions about raking the leaves and keeping the automobile running well. As it turned out, Douglas was as little acquainted with internal combustion as my father was. But he could rake leaves, and he could help Blanche polish the silver. One of Douglas’s duties was occasionally to drive members of the family, and when he did so, he donned a back chauffeur’s hat. Douglas was clearly lower down on the pecking order than Blanche. However, once or twice a week when he drove, as soon as he put on his chauffeur’s hat he stood up taller, added a lilt to his gait, cracked a few jokes on his own, and bowed to no one. Douglas had a daughter who visited him once in a while. They would sit in one of the cars in the garage. The daughter didn’t want to come into the house. Eventually, my father had to fire Douglas because he was stealing the silver.

Willie. I think it was Willie White. Willie’s people had been sharecroppers in Alabama, and he had learned about engines of all kinds by watching his father drive a tractor. He was one of the gentlest men I ever met. When he spoke, his voice sounded like a quiet song. Willie loved children and animals, but he was timid around adults, especially white adults, and he would not look my grandparents or parents in the eye. He was most comfortable around machines and automobiles. On the occasions I remember riding in a car Willie was driving, he shifted the gears so smoothly that you couldn’t even notice unless you were watching his hands. He wore black gloves when he drove. I once heard him actually talking to my grandfather’s car, as if it were a person. When Willie married Hattie Mae, he wanted her to move away from the little space attached to M.A.’s garage, but Hattie Mae said she didn’t want to move, she felt safe there, so Willie lived with her there. Sometime in the early 1970s, Willie developed Alzheimer’s and had to move to a home for the mentally ill. “I won’t see the man I knew again in this lifetime,” said Hattie Mae. “The Lord does what He does.”

“M.A.’s first theater in Memphis was the Linden Circle. That was before my time. Ha ha.”

Lennie takes a bite from her barbecue ribs and pats at her mouth with a napkin. Lennie, my brother David, and my Aunt Lila are having lunch with me at the Rendezvous. From the outside, the place is not much to look at, located in the basement of an alley with exposed steam pipes tangled around the front door like veins in an autopsy. But diners routinely wait a half hour for a seat at the little tables with the red-and-white-checkered tablecloths. Frank Sinatra, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, and the Rolling Stones have gotten their fingers sticky at the Rendezvous. Rumor has it that the only person who knows all thirty-four ingredients that go into the barbecue sauce is John Vergos, the owner and a former high school classmate of mine.

The restaurant was started in 1949 by John’s father, Charlie Vergos. According to the stories, one day Charlie discovered a coal chute in the basement of his diner, allowing him to set up a vent for a charcoal grill. These days, the Rendezvous grills 1,650 pounds of meat every week. You can get barbecued chicken or barbecued beef or barbecued pork. You can get your beef in shoulders, in ribs, and in slabs. You can get it on the bone or pulled. You can get accompaniments like coleslaw, barbecued baked beans, peppers, and rolls. Desserts are not served at the Rendezvous. “This is awfully fine meat,” somebody groans from
the next table. At another table, a large man in a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off is pouring a half bottle of barbecue sauce on his two rolls.

The sauce. It is red sienna in color. It is thick. It is sweet and sour at the same time, tangy. It is known that the ingredients include minced onion, dry mustard, cayenne pepper, tomato paste, brown sugar, vinegar, olive oil, and garlic. Customers have conjectured that the Vergos family, being Greek, have surreptitiously added cardamom and anise.

Aunt Lila is attempting to eat her ribs with a knife and fork. My brother and I use our fingers and teeth and are biting and chewing as if we were hunter-gatherers on the African savannah. The black waiters move through the room with large pitchers of beer as if they are offering holy communion. “Yes, sir,” somebody says softly. There’s not a lot of talking at the Rendezvous. Some of the waiters will linger at the tables in that slow southern way and try to strike up a conversation. “You need more sauce? More water? You don’t look like you’re from around here. How do you like Memphis? You been to the Peabody yet?”

Lennie seems to have taken a rest from her food. “M.A.’s second theater was the Memphian,” she says. The Memphian was built in the mid-1930s in the Art Deco style. It was three stories high with three sets of double doors in the front. Not a single window. The ground level was orange; the top level was a great pink slab like the side of a mountain. The front of the building consisted of three walls at funny angles with a neon marquee on the top of each wall. “As I remember,
Mutiny on the Bounty
was the big movie at that time. All the family got free admission and free food. In the summer, I used to go there with a friend and eat popcorn until I was ill. I didn’t care. I just wanted to sit somewhere cool and dark. I would go home with a laundry bag full of popcorn. Your Uncle Ed went to the Memphian with his girlfriends, impressing them right off the bat that he could get in
free. He and his girlfriends would argue all through the movie and then make up and kiss before the lights came on.” Lennie pauses; her eyes become misty.

Listening to Lennie, I am ten years old again, climbing the stairs into the projection booths at the Memphian and the Malco and the Crosstown. It is the late 1950s. I loved the booths. They were tiny rooms, with two movie projectors, each mounted with a giant reel of celluloid film three feet in diameter. Like a fish tank, the front wall of the booth was glass. An intensely bright “carbon arc lamp” provided a powerful light, which shined through the film, then through a focusing lens, then through the glass wall and out into the theater, finally landing on the movie screen two hundred feet away. I was fascinated by the carbon arc lamp. It consisted of two pointed rods of graphite a couple of inches apart. The rods were first brought together so that they touched, and an electrical current passed between them. Then the rods were slowly separated. The ionized air and carbon vapor kept the electricity flowing. You couldn’t look directly at the burning rods, the light was so extremely bright. However, the rest of the booth was dark, so as not to distract the moviegoers.

While the movie was being shown, a projectionist would stand in the booth and operate the equipment. I remember some of the projectionists. They wore colored T-shirts under their outer shirts and had keys dangling from their belts, and they casually threw around “shits” and “fucks.” For long movies, requiring two reels, the projectionists had to load up the second projector with the second reel and get it operating just when the first reel was finished. Another of their jobs was to make sure that the film didn’t catch on fire from the heat of the carbon arc lamps. When a fire started—which I once witnessed—the film would break and make a flapping sound. Of course the movie would stop, to the great annoyance and boos of the moviegoers, while the projectionist respliced the film. This took a few minutes.

From the projection booth, I watched such films as
The Bridge on the River Kwai, Some Like It Hot, Ben-Hur
, and
North by Northwest
. For me, the projection booth was a secret cave. The moviegoers couldn’t see into the dimly lit booth. The projectionist would work his magic with the huge reels of film and the amazing carbon arc lamps, creating another world on the screen, while he and I huddled invisibly in our little control room like the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain.

The projectionists were friendly men and skilled at their job. They didn’t mind my being there and even welcomed the company, speaking to me in whispers so that our voices wouldn’t be heard. One of the men complained to me that he didn’t make enough money as a projectionist to support his wife and children and had to work a second job as a security guard at an automobile dealership. He was always tired and sometimes dozed off. I was terrified of an accident, but he always woke up just when it was time to change reels. Some of the men occasionally brought their girlfriends into the booth. I once saw one of the girlfriends sitting on the lap of the projectionist, a small wiry man who had been especially friendly to me. The two of them seemed unconcerned that I was there, six feet away. She kept kissing him on the mouth, more and more urgently, and soon his hands disappeared beneath her clothes. I strained to see more, but the light in the booth was too dim.

What? How long was I gone? Lila’s voice brings me back.

“… that was it. Alfred rented out the Rendezvous for his fortieth. Years ago. He’d hired a musical group from Mississippi to play. I don’t know why Alfred had to go all the way to Mississippi—those people can hardly put a sentence together, but apparently they can do music. The guitarist had some kind of car trouble and didn’t show up, so Alfred, who was an amateur guitarist himself, insisted on filling in. At first, the musicians
humored him, and people listened politely, but then they begged him to stop, which he didn’t. Then the other musicians refused to play anymore, and Alfred was going solo. Eventually, everyone wrapped up their barbecue in brown meat-packing paper and left. Alfred moped around for weeks.”

The movie business is one magic trick after another. Making the movie, each actor pretends to be somebody else. Capturing scenes on celluloid film or silicon chips is another trick. Before digital technology, the film of a movie, containing a couple of miles of one-inch still photographs, was whisked through the projector at twenty-four frames per second. With these photographs racing by, the logical question is “Why don’t moviegoers see an actor’s head fly up from the bottom of the screen to the top and then abruptly appear at the bottom again as the next frame comes along?” Because of another magic trick. A shutter on the projector opens and closes at lightning speed, perfectly timed so that a blackout occurs while one frame is moving away and the next is coming into position. What actually appears in front of the eye is a still photograph, then a black screen, then a new still in the same position as the first, with the objects in it slightly shifted. But the human nervous system is such that the image of the first photograph persists in the brain for a split second after it’s gone, lasting through the blackout, until the next image appears. The resulting impression is lifelike movement on the screen. A projectionist once explained these miracles to me between reels of
Elmer Gantry
.

Another technological trick transformed silent movies into talkies. The main obstacle to talking movies was accurate synchronization of sound with image, almost impossible when the two
were recorded and played with different devices. Then some inventors discovered how to photographically record sound on film, so that each film frame contained both an image and the sliver of sound that went with that image.