Fifties (74 page)

In 1991 he would read a book by a young writer named Nicholas Lemann about the great migration, and although he disagreed with some of Lemann’s conclusions, he was impressed by the authority and sensitivity of the book. Billy Pearson was intrigued that he, a man who cared so much about the past and about history, and who took such pleasure reading about it, had been part of so profound a social movement and had never even been aware of it. But he had realized at the time the vulnerability of the black people, of how little they got from so much hard work, and he had been disturbed by the rising anger he had felt among the white people in the years after the
Brown
decision.

During the Till trial in 1955, his wife, Betty, and her friend Florence Mars had gone into Sumner every day to watch the trial, and they had been stunned by what they saw; Clarence Strider had not wanted them to attend, but sheriff-elect Harry Dogan had given them both press passes for the local paper, the
Summer Sentinel.
They were shocked by what had taken place. It was like watching a community you thought you knew reveal itself as something else entirely.

Much later in his life, Billy Pearson’s thoughts often went back to a day during the Emmett Till trial when he had gone into town to take a look around. He had been appalled by the tension he had found in a small town he thought he knew well. Clarence Strider had hired a number of extra deputies, and they seemed to be bully-boys, young men with long sideburns and pistols who delighted in pushing people around, particularly the blacks. Pearson had gone there with Nathan Kern, who was a black employee Pearson admired greatly, and Kern had clearly been upset by what he saw: He said it was something new, this cruelty and violence toward black people. “Mr. Pearson,” Kern had said. “Those of us that are still here, we’re here because we chose to be here. We don’t have to stay. We’ve all got cousins and kin up north and all we have to do is send a postcard saying save me a room, and we’re gone. We stayed here because this was our home and now we wonder if it’s our home anymore.”

Gradually, over the years the number of black people on the Rainbow Plantation dwindled until Pearson was left with only eight full-time employees. It was, he thought, a world without easy answers—the forces of change had proved more powerful than any of them, white or black. Though his land was rich—as rich as any land in America, with the possible exception of the San Joacquin Valley, he thought—he was not a wealthy man except in the value of his land. The only way to survive was through mechanization, which of course required fewer field workers. But he had sensed the workers were
probably going to leave the land anyway—the machine merely accelerated the process. The one money crop for a long time was cotton, which was a wonderful crop but heartbreaking in some ways—for there was so much that could go wrong. Yet there was a special pleasure in doing it right, in fighting and coming up with a successful crop. Cotton farming was, he liked to muse when he reached the age of seventy, a bad business but a good life. The government now set strict limits on cotton acreage. There had been talk of soybeans, but for a long time it was not a valuable crop. Then in the mid-fifties, a new variety of soybean that did not shatter was developed. Some men he knew eventually went to rice as well and some finally turned to catfish, but he remained with cotton and soybeans.

During the fifties the race for dominance among the great farm-implement companies was on: There was the Rust machine, there was Harvester, and the John Deere people were said to be working on a machine that eventually many would consider the best of the three. By 1952 there were some ten thousand machines in use, and by 1955 there would be almost twice that number. Some estimated that by 1955, 25 percent of the cotton crop was harvested by machine, by 1960, 55 percent. In addition, it was believed that where it had taken 130 hours to pick a bale of cotton before the mechanization, it now took only 45 hours with it. In 1952 the National Cotton Council estimated that the entire operation of producing cotton, from sowing to harvesting, could be done with 15 man-hours of work per acre using machines, compared with 155 hours using hand labor and a mule.

The Pearson Company paid Rust $100,000 on the sale of the first one hundred machines, which allowed Rust to pay back his creditors at a rate of two dollars for every dollar borrowed. He died in 1954. John Rust, who had invented the cotton picker to help small farmers, did live to see the machine of his dreams roll off several assembly lines, and he did escape the grinding poverty that had dogged him for so long. His picker did not, though, become an instrument that helped small farmers; indeed, it predictably played a role in the trend that saw plantations grow ever larger as small farms fell by the wayside. His widow, Thelma, who did not share her husband’s Utopian dreams, managed to divert the royalties from a foundation he had established to her private estate and to buy a motel in Pine Bluff. In all, the Pearson Company paid some $3.7 million to the Rusts in royalties.

Before he died, Sheriff Clarence Strider did not come around on
the issue of integration, and he left a piece of his own plantation to be used for an all-white academy, which was named after him, the Strider School. His nephew Jesse was also a big man—about six feet four inches and 250 pounds—and was known, deservedly enough, as Big Daddy Strider. Elected sheriff of nearby Grenada County, Jesse Strider changed with the laws of the land. He helped rescue his county from the Klan, and he hired black deputies. When a young black man named Mike Espy was running for Congress in that part of Mississippi, Chuck Robb came down from Virginia to speak at an Espy rally in Vicksburg. Robb suggested to Espy that he could help defuse the race question by getting a big old redneck sheriff to come out for him. Espy said, he knew just the man. So Espy’s television people shot a commercial of Big Daddy Strider leaning against a tree saying that he was for Mike Espy, and it turned the election around and helped send Espy to the House.

THIRTY-ONE

T
HE SUPREME COURT RULING
on
Brown
v.
Board of Education,
which occurred in the middle of the decade, was the first important break between the older, more staid America that existed at the start of the era and the new, fast-paced, tumultuous America that saw the decade’s end. The second was Elvis Presley. In cultural terms, his coming was nothing less than the start of a revolution. Once, in the late sixties, Leonard Bernstein, the distinguished American composer and conductor, turned to a friend of his named Dick Clurman, an editor at
Time
magazine. They were by chance discussing political and social trends. “Elvis Presley,” said Bernstein, “is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century.” Clurman thought of the sultry-faced young man from the South in tight clothes and an excessive haircut who wiggled his body while he sang about hound dogs. Bernstein’s statement seemed a bit much.
“What about Picasso?” he began, trying at the same time to think of other major cultural forces of the century. “No,” Bernstein insisted, and Clurman could tell that he was deadly serious, “it’s Elvis. He introduced the beat to everything and he changed everything—music, language, clothes, it’s a whole new social revolution—the Sixties comes from it. Because of him a man like me barely knows his musical grammar anymore.” Or, as John Lennon, one of Elvis’s admirers, once said, “Before Elvis there was nothing.”

If he was a revolutionary, then he was an accidental one, an innately talented young man who arrived at the right place at the right time. He had no political interests at all, and though his music symbolized the coming together of black and white cultures into the mainstream in a way that had never happened before, that seemed to hold little interest for him. Though much of his music had its roots among blacks, he, unlike many young white musicians, seemed to have little interest in the black world and the dramatic changes then taking place there. Indeed, he often seemed to have little interest in music at all. What he really wanted from the start was to go to Hollywood and be a movie star like James Dean or Marlon Brando, a rebel up on the screen. It was almost as if the music that shook the world was incidental. Brando and Dean were his role models, and when he finally got to Hollywood and met Nicholas Ray, who had directed Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause,
he got down on his knees and started reciting whole pages from the script. He had, Ray realized, seen
Rebel
at least a dozen times and memorized every line that Dean spoke. If he would never rival Brando and Dean as a movie actor, he learned from them one critical lesson: never to smile. That was the key to their success, he was sure. He was sure he could manage the same kind of sultry good looks they had. As a teenager he spent hours in front of a mirror working on that look, and he used it to maximum effect, later, in his own appearances.

Sam Phillips, Memphis recording man, enthusiast of black music, had been looking for years for someone like Elvis—a white boy who could sing like a black boy and catch the beat of black music. Elvis, Phillips later said, “knew I was there a long time before he finally walked into my studio. I saw that Crown Electric Company truck that he was driving pull up a number of times outside the studio. He would sit in it and try to get his courage up. I saw him waiting there long before he got the nerve to come in.” Elvis Presley walked into that studio in the summer of 1953. He had been sent there by another talent scout, who had not wanted anything to do with him—and those awful pegged pants, the pink and black clothes.
He was an odd mixture of a hood—the haircut, the clothes, the sullen, alienated look; and a sweet little boy—curiously gentle and respectful, indeed willing and anxious to try whatever anyone wanted. Everyone was sir or ma’am. Few young Americans, before or after, have looked so rebellious and been so polite.

Sam Phillips immediately liked Presley’s early greaser style. The clothes came from Lansky’s, a store more likely to be visited by flashy black men about town then by young white males. “And the sideburns, I liked that too. Everyone in town thought
I
was weird, and here was this kid and he was as weird as I was,” Phillips recalled. There is some dispute as to whether Sam Phillips was in the studio the day that Elvis first walked in. Marion Kreisker, Phillips’s secretary, believes he was not, and in her account she takes credit for his first recording. Phillips insisted that he
was
there, and that while Ms. Kreisker may have spoken to him first, he actually cut Presley’s first disc. “It’s a very expensive piece of equipment and I wasn’t about to let a secretary use it,” he noted. “What do you sing?” Marion Kreisker asked. “I sing all kinds,” she remembered him answering. “Well, who do you sound like?” she prodded. “I don’t sound like nobody,” he replied. He told her he wanted to cut a record for his mother’s birthday, which was still several months away.

So he sang into Sam Phillips’s little record machine, getting his three dollars’ worth. He sang two Ink Spots songs, “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.” Presley himself was disappointed with the results. “Sounded like someone beating on a bucket lid,” he said years later. Sam Phillips later said that he heard Elvis sing and thought to himself,
Oh man, that is distinctive. There is something there, something original and different.

Sam Phillips listened to Presley a few times and was sure that Elvis had some kind of special talent, but he just wasn’t sure what it was. He was not a particularly good guitar picker, but there was a sound almost buried in there that was distinctive. Part of it was Elvis’s musical promiscuity: He did not really know who he was. After one frustrating session, Phillips asked him what he could do. “I can do anything,” he said. He sang everything: white, black, gospel, country, crooners. If anything, thought Phillips, he seemed to see himself as a country Dean Martin. “Do you have any friends you woodshed with?” Phillips asked him. Woodshedding was a term to mean musicians going off and working together. Elvis replied, no. Phillips said he had two friends, and he called Scotty Moore at his brother’s dry-cleaning shop. Moore was an electric-guitar player and Phillips suggested he and Bill Black, a bassist, work out with Elvis.
They were to try to bring forth whatever it was that was there. Elvis, Moore thought—that’s a science fiction name. After a few weeks of working together, the three of them went to Phillips’s studio to record. Phillips by chance entered the date in his log: July 5, 1954. For a time the session did not go particularly well. Elvis’s voice was good, but it was too sweet, thought Phillips. Then Elvis started picking on a piece, by a famed black bluesman named Arthur Crudup, called “I’m All Right, Mama.” Crudup was a Mississippi blues singer who had made his way to Chicago with an electric guitar. He was well known within the narrow audience for black blues. He had recorded this particular song seven years earlier, and nothing had happened with it. Suddenly, Elvis Presley let go: He was playing and jumping around in the studio like all the gospel singers, black and white, he had watched onstage. Soon his two sidemen joined him. “What the hell are you doing?” Phillips asked. Scotty Moore said he didn’t know. “Well, find out real quick and don’t lose it. Run through it again and let’s put it on tape,” Phillips said. They turned it into a record. Having covered a black blues singer for one side, it seemed only fitting to use Presley’s version of bluegrass singer Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the other.

Country blended with black blues was a strain that some would come to call rock-a-billy, something so powerful that it would go right to the center of American popular culture. Crudup, one of the legendary pure black blues singers of his time, was not thrilled by the number of white singers who seemed to make so much money off work he had pioneered. “I was makin’ everybody rich and I was poor,” he once said. “I was born poor, I live poor, and I’m going to die poor.” Bo Diddley, the great black rocker, was more philosophical. Someone later asked Diddley if he thought Presley had copied his style. “If he copied me, I don’t care—more power to him,” Diddley said. “I’m not starving.”