(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:
A personal meeting took place at or near Old Shanghae, some three hundred yards beyond the Mississippi line … yesterday morning at sunrise, between Major E. Freeman and Mr. Ed L. Hamlin, in which the latter was shot through the body and died a few minutes afterward. Of the causes which led to this melancholy affair it is not our province to speak. They were of a strictly private and personal nature …
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.”
Cotton
“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.
(photo credit 25.1)
Cotton was a magical fiber. It was white, like snow. It was pure. It was soft. It breathed. It could be spun into yarn or thread. Until the development of synthetic fibers, cotton was the first choice for clothing. Negro slaves poured out their hearts into music while picking cotton. Southern belles wore dresses and frilly bloomers made of cotton. Cotton was plucked, bartered, hoarded, sold, fought and died for. Cotton cut and bruised the hands of those who picked it, but cotton could also absorb the misery of tears. Cotton could buy women, and cotton could buy men. “King Cotton” was a phrase used by Senator James Hammond of South Carolina in the late 1850s. After the Civil War and into the twentieth century, Memphis grew into the largest spot cotton market in the world.
In the course of events, cotton also became the pivot point of the major social event in Memphis, the annual Cotton Carnival. The idea for the carnival was born in 1931. In the midst of the Depression, the price of a pound of cotton had plummeted from twenty cents to five and a half cents, about the price of a Coca-Cola. Businesses all over Memphis, dependent on cotton, were withering on the vine. To raise money for the dying Memphis Chamber of Commerce, a group of businessmen paid a visit to Herbert Jennings, manager of the Loew’s Palace movie theater and a business rival of M.A.’s. It was Jennings who came up with the idea of creating an annual carnival to promote cotton. Rumor has it that a week before the fateful visit, M.A. challenged Mr. Jennings to a friendly wrestling match after the two of them had watched a showing of Little Caesar, starring Edward G. Robinson. No one knows whether the contest actually took place, or the exact machinations of M.A., but Mr. Jennings was apparently converted to a charitable disposition, because he began sending my grandfather complimentary passes to his theater every year. Uncle Nate probably knows the real story connecting M.A. to the Carnival.
At any rate, as Jennings’s idea for a cotton carnival grew, it came to encompass a spectacular extravaganza, including a Cotton King and Queen, a Royal Court, Ladies-in-Waiting, Ladies of the Realm, young Pages, parades, floats, marching bands, vast quantities of food and alcohol, and nonstop parties held by secret societies in the Downtown hotels. A Maid of Cotton, chosen each year from a cat fight of a competition, toured the country for months and became a national ambassador for cotton.
Initially held in winter, the Carnival was transplanted to a dizzy seven days in late May, opening with the Crown and Sceptre Ball the first night and ending with the Grand Carnival Ball on the last
. At various times my family joined the Carnival. From the 1930s on, Cotton Carnival roared and ballooned until the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which cast a pall over Memphis and marked the beginning of the disintegration of Downtown. Later, the Carnival was resurrected as Carnival Memphis.
Everyone plotted all year for the Carnival. In January, women would get fitted for their new dresses, then face the unhappy prospect of dieting for the next five months. Houses were refurbished. Jewelry was taken out of the vault. Appointments were rearranged. In March, my parents and their friends would begin making little house calls on Sunday afternoons, visiting the homes of high society to try to talk their way into the impending parties. Most of the secret societies of Carnival, such as Osiris, Isis, Luxor, Sphinz, and RaMet, excluded Jews, but one or two, including the Mystic Society of the Memphi, did not. Unlike the older Mardi Gras in New Orleans, which was based on social pedigree, the Cotton Carnival gyrated around business, cotton business, and Jews were permitted to participate. Still, you had to be a member of one of the societies. Friendships were made and broken over who became a member where. In April, the identity of the King and Queen would be revealed in a long-awaited front-page article in the Commercial Appeal. The King was always an older, married man, usually a man whose family had been in business in Memphis for many generations. The Queen would be a college girl of twenty or twenty-one, the daughter of a man like the King. As soon as she was announced, the young Queen would scurry down to New Orleans to have her royal dress sewn and beaded.
(photo credit 25.2)
My Aunt Lila was a Duchess of the Mystic Society of the Memphi in the 1960s. “To be honest, dear, it was all just an excuse to have seven days of parties.” Memphi rented the Skyway Ballroom of the Peabody Hotel for the week. “We started drinking at eleven a.m. and continued all afternoon and into the night, quitting around two a.m. Then we’d fall into bed for a few hours and get up at ten the next morning and do it again. The only interruption was in the late afternoon, when the women retreated for an hour or two to bathe and change dresses and shoes. People took rooms at the hotel so they wouldn’t have to go home.” For the week of Carnival, children and businesses were left to fend for themselves. “A group of tall men, all wearing Egyptian headdresses and white dinner jackets, would escort the ladies to their tables. Everyone wore the most fabulous evening gowns. That was the best fun, seeing what other people were wearing. We danced and ate and drank and listened to the big bands. Of course, there were all kinds of silly ceremonies and costumes, bowing and what-not. The year I was Duchess, the crowd asked the band to play ‘Dixie.’ It was some band from New York. Either they didn’t know the tune, or they refused to play it. Several men got extremely bent out of shape and hopped up on the stage. Somehow, part of a trombone ended up on the floor. And these were gentlemen from very good families, dear. This kind of behavior was just not acceptable. I walked over and said, ‘You gentlemen simply cannot behave in this way.’ Eventually, things settled down.”
One of the highlights of the week was when the King and Queen and all the Royal Court loaded themselves up on the Royal Barge, along with numerous big bands and gallons of Jack Daniel’s, and floated down the Mississippi to the front of Union Street at night. Tens of thousands of people stood on the bluff on Riverside Drive and watched the Royal Barge come down the river, lit up like a gambling casino, the bands blaring. Others ventured out onto the river on their private boats, half crocked, and followed the barge into port. “Hubert Lewis and another friend of the family, with no boating experience beyond a floating lounge chair in the club pool, once rented a motorboat for the big night at Carnival,” says Lennie. “We tried to talk Hubert out of it, but he was hell-bent. Nothing shilly-shally about Hubert. All was well until they passed under the Mississippi Bridge. Then the fireworks started. Evidently Hubert became highly excited, took a wrong turn, and ran aground on some shrubby sandbar of an island. They could hear the bands playing and see the lights of the barge in the distance, but they couldn’t be seen themselves, and no one heard their cries for help. I believe Hubert and his crew ended up spending an itchy night among the bushes and sandy weeds.”
The Cotton Carnival celebrated white society. Running parallel to Carnival, like an underground river with a fierce energy of its own, was the Cotton Makers’ Jubilee, all black. The Jubilee, started in 1935, was the brainchild of a Beale Street dentist named Dr. R. Q. Venson. As Venson and his friends recalled later, they felt it would be a good thing to “see black folk coming down the street looking pretty.” The Jubilee had its own floats and parades, its own dueling marching bands from Douglass and Manassas and Booker Washington high schools. Music bellowed and jived from a WDIA radio float, carrying a group of black guys in suits singing into the mike. The floats and parades would boom down Main Street, then turn the corner onto Beale, passing pawnshops and rundown hotels and restaurants selling barbecue with neon signs in front.
(photo credit 25.3)
Jubilee appointed its own black King and Queen and its black Royal Court, with everyone dressed to the hilt. Instead of a Royal Barge, the Jubilee had a Royal Coach, in which rode the King and Queen in all of their splendor. As in the white Carnival, the black Princesses were usually young college women of polish.
Many of Memphis’s white families were not pleased by the black Jubilee. In the mid-forties, after a story in Time magazine on the Cotton Carnival with a picture of the black royalty, Time published a letter to the editor written by one Franklin S. Kimborough of Memphis:
Why … did [you picture] the Negro king & queen of the Cotton Carnival? Anyone in Memphis five minutes would know the whole carnival centers around the duly selected [white] king and queen.… You delight, it seems, in trying to hold the South up in ridicule.… It’s rather a pity that the whole country at this sad hour doesn’t have more of the sound and conservative fundamentals of Southerners.
Our dear Blanche attended Jubilee every year and sometimes sang with her church choir on a float covered with purple satin. I remember one spring in the early 1960s when Blanche’s niece Georgina was chosen as a Princess of Jubilee. Georgina was a small girl, not much over five feet, with delicate features and long, straightened hair. For several years, Blanche had been gushing about her niece, who had been second in her class at Melrose and was now one of the few black students enrolled at Memphis State University. When Georgina got elevated to Royalty, Blanche practically sailed around the house. One evening about a week after Jubilee ended, Georgina came to our house in tears to pick up Blanche. It turned out that one of her white professors had made some belittling remark about her being in the Jubilee, “dressed up like Cinderella,” and the white students jeered. As a result, Georgina had decided to drop out of college.
My mother, visibly shaken, suggested to Georgina that she transfer to Lemoyne College, where she might be “more comfortable.”
“No, ma’am,” whimpered Georgina. “I’ve got to get a job.”
Then one of my mother’s friends, who happened to be visiting that evening, muttered under her breath: “What’s a colored girl going to do with a college degree anyway.” It seems that everyone overheard this remark. Georgina broke down crying again, as did Blanche. Mother tried to comfort Blanche. But there was nothing to be done. Blanche and Georgina drove away in a rusted old Ford, the red eyes of the taillights trailing down our long driveway to the street and then out along Cherry until they were faint dots in the distance.
Phasma II
“Did your Aunt Lila ever tell you how she was anointed Duchess of Memphi?” asks Nate. He takes a forkful of kosher lamb from his Tupperware container—which he brings like a first-aid kit to meals at the impure Lightman houses—stares at the food with his protruding bullfrog eyes, mutters a bracha, and swallows. “So, it’s one night in the mid-1960s, more than five years after M.A. died, and Lila dreamed that she was attending a royal ball in a palace. Her escort was M.A. In the dream, she and her father were the same age. H
e wore a white tuxedo with tails. She wore a long, emerald-colored gown with a daisy pearl tiara on her head. All the guests, dressed and jeweled, applauded the two of them. That was the dream. The next day, one of the Memphi secret ‘contacts’ telephoned Lila and informed her that she had been chosen as a Duchess of the Mystic Society of the Memphi. When she got fitted for her various costumes, what would you guess but she was given a tiara exactly like the one in her dream. What would you say to that, my friend?”
I have nothing to say to Nate’s fantastic stories.
“Being Duchess transformed Lila’s life. Before Memphi, Lila was one of the most timid Jewish women on the planet, one hundred percent shemevdik. The year she was Duchess, she met all the high muckety-mucks of Memphis, some of whom I wouldn’t care to break bread with, but that is not the issue. She and Alfred were invited to all the parties, and she absolutely blossomed. Naturally, she remained the soul of southern charm and good manners. Later, she was invited to join the Memphis Garden Club. Can you imagine that? The Memphis Garden Club. She became head fund-raiser for B’nai B’rith, yada yada yada. You know all the rest. Within a month after Alfred left her, a half-dozen men were on their knees. Lila being Lila, she wouldn’t consider any suitors for another two years.”
A Fly in the Buttermilk
For Every Action, an Equal and Opposite Reaction (Newton)
Today, I am visiting my brother John in Collierville, about twenty miles southeast of Memphis. Several years ago, a live-in girlfriend persuaded him to buy this huge house, large enough for her and her two dogs, for her several children, and for their boyfriends and girlfriends. After John and his lady had a spat, she and her entourage moved out, and now John lives in this huge house alone. Although he misses feminine company, he actually prefers solitude. John has my father’s natural inclination to crawl into a hollow tree trunk and not be disturbed. Some of the other sons inherited my mother’s sociability, or at least her nervousness and volatility. From my mother I also received a compulsive need to make to-do lists and a general impatience with the world. From my father, a reflective side, an interest in books.