“I don’t know why I did it. I just wanted to go.”
He looks as if he is searching for some kind of understanding of that, which is rare for him.
“Sometimes you just need to go.”
He had hitchhiked the dirt roads and blacktop in Concordia Parish and parishes up and down the river since he was old enough to realize what his thumb was for, sometimes just to see where the roads ended, the same way he wondered how deep the Blue Hole was, that place in the backwater where cold-blooded killers were said to dump the bodies of their victims, wired to a truck part or a cinder block. The world was wide and mysterious and rich and dangerous, and he lived in only a little bitty corner of it. The river only went north and south but roads went everywhere. He had made it as far as Vicksburg, across the dull, flat green and rolling land, had some ice cream and a candy bar, then, his head humming with sugar, hitchhiked home. One day, without a sack lunch or change of clothes or a dime in his pocket, he walked down the road till he was out of sight of his mama and daddy’s house, sprinted for the highway, and stuck out his thumb.
“Mama,” he says, “would have had a heart attack.”
The first car to stop was a ’41 Ford. The old man inside looked him up and down.
“How far you goin’, boy?”
“New Orleans,” he told him.
He made up a plausible, heart-tugging story as to why; it evades him now, but he knows it must have been a good one or he never would have gotten out of Concordia Parish. A few hours and stories later he was standing on Decatur Street, with the Crescent City hunkering at his feet. He looked at the curve of the river, crowded with ferries and tugboats and big freighters, so many vessels he could almost walk from the French Quarter to Algiers, but it was the same brown river he had at home, so he did not waste much time on the docks. He wanted to see a city, see a real one, and all that it implied. “I wanted to go somewhere big,” he says, “and New Orleans was the biggest place I could think of.”
He walked the traffic-choked, narrow streets in wonder. This was the New Orleans of Tennessee Williams, dark and rich and dangerous. He saw the old iron streetcar, rumbling and clanking and spitting sparks, crowded with people rich and poor. Ladies, some half-dressed, reclined on the balconies, just languidly wasting the day. He passed the grand hotels and the tap dancers who banged against the old bricks with bottle caps on the soles of their shoes, and the mule-drawn carriages with their velvet-fringed rooftops, and a great, cream-colored church, the one the Catholics called the cathedral of St. Louis. He peeked into cafés where the rich smell of coffee drifted down the streets till it bowed to the stronger scent of a hundred kinds of liquor, pouring from bars already going strong in the stark light of day.
“Well,” he said to himself, “this is a place.”
But he was also hungry, and beginning to think, at least a little, about the commotion that would arise when suppertime came and his mama and daddy noticed he was gone.
“I wound up in front of this Italian grocery,” he says. “I guess I looked lonesome.”
The grocer, his accent so thick Jerry Lee could barely understand him, asked the boy who he was and what he was doing there, standing around. He did not look like a New Orleans street urchin; he looked lost.
“I have been kidnapped,” Jerry Lee said.
The man just looked at him, sternly.
“And I’m hungry,” Jerry Lee said.
He may not be buying this, he thought.
Then a thickset, middle-aged woman came out of the grocery, apparently the man’s wife, and said something in Italian that seemed to be laced with smoke and fire, then in English that he could understand told the man that he should be ashamed of himself for leaving this baby to stand in the street. “Give this bambino something to eat right now,” she said. He ate enough bologna to kill a normal man.
Around one o’clock in the morning, he found himself sitting on a straight-back chair in a New Orleans police station, or perhaps Juvenile Hall; he cannot really say. A police officer, calling every place in Ferriday with a telephone, had finally gotten somebody to fetch Elmo to a phone, so the officer could tell him to, please, sir, come and get his boy, because New Orleans had enough trouble as it was.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with that boy,” Elmo told him.
Mamie was saying “Thank you, Jesus” in the background.
“I don’t know, either, sir,” the officer said.
“I mean, I got him a motor scooter,” Elmo said.
“Just please come and get him, sir,” the officer said.
Elmo drove into the night. It was no pleasure trip in those days, on those roads. When he finally got there, he just looked at his son for a moment, his face cloudy with fury, and sighed.
Jerry Lee said he would have been home sooner, but, “Daddy, it’s hard for a little boy to get home.”
Elmo sighed again and drove his son back to Ferriday.
“There stood Mama,” he says, remembering.
She ran to the car and grabbed his shoulders. “Boy,” she said, “I should kill you.” Then she snatched him to her chest. “I love you so. Come here, baby.”
He knew then that he would get away with just about anything.
“They loved their boy,” he says, again. “They were just glad to get him back.”
He is not certain, anymore, exactly why he left.
“I just knew that a motor scooter was not what I was looking for.”
Elmo had long since decided the boy was special and not always in a good way. He knew quickly that he was never going to be a farmer or a carpenter; he refused to pull his own weight around the house and might have been the sorriest cotton picker who ever put on a sack. He not only came in light, he came in almost empty, and he could tear up a tractor in no time, just disappear with it down a road, plowing up the asphalt. And he had accepted that the boy was no scholar. He had hoped, at least, to keep his son out of reform school or prison, but even that was looking grim. Before he was able to see over the dashboard, he had stolen Elmo’s Ford and gone joyriding down the roads of Ferriday and Black River, whooping. The first time it happened, Elmo had looked up to see his car rolling out of the driveway, ran up to see who was driving. It appeared to be nobody. Then he caught a brief flash of just the top of a blond head, and cursed, and considered praying. The car went sliding out of the driveway wide-open and roaring down the dirt road, and Elmo watched and listened for the sound of great tragedy. All he heard was the roar of the engine, roaring, roaring. There was something wrong. It finally hit him. “Oh Lord,” he said, “the boy ain’t changing gears.” Jerry Lee must have been pulling about four thousand RPM, the engine smoking, before he finally turned around and headed home.
When he pulled up in the driveway and killed the motor, his daddy was standing there aghast, his big hands on his hips. He could smell gaskets melting, metal smoking.
Jerry Lee decided to act like he was supposed to drive.
They stood there looking at each other.
“Well,” Elmo finally asked, “how’d you do, son?”
“I did pretty good, Daddy,” said Jerry Lee, “but I couldn’t figure out how to get it out of low gear.”
Elmo knew he should lock the boy in a pen, but he was one of those animals who would kill himself against the wire.
“Well,” he said in defeat, “maybe I better show you.”
By the fall of ’43, he was becoming more enamored of music, so that a song on the radio, or at a clothesline, or in the fields, could freeze him midstep. Music, black and white, blues and hillbilly, swirled around him, and as he sang it back, his own voice grew richer, till he sounded less like a freckle-faced kid. He knew something about the purity of music, the unvarnished beauty of it. It was among the first sounds he heard as a baby, even before Elmo Jr. was sent to heaven and Elmo Sr. was sent to New Orleans, and it would never desert him. “It was beautiful,” he says, “when Mama and Daddy sang their duets. They sang ‘I’ll Fly Away,’ and ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken?’ and ‘Old Rugged Cross,’ and they sang ‘Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?’” And sometimes when they sang, it looked like their hearts were breaking, but to Jerry Lee then it just sounded like the soul of music itself was laid bare, when he heard them sing the songs from church. “You simply,” he says, “cannot beat them old songs.”
He would never improve on that beauty; never wanted to sing with more heart. He just wanted to make it move faster, harder, and for that he needed an engine, but the only pianos in his world all belonged to someone else. His daddy had a guitar and encouraged him to play it, but there was just a limit to the thing—he had always despised limits—and it seemed like the strings were designed to hold him, not set him free. “I learned to play guitar, could play it pretty good,” he says, but “a guitar just has six strings.” He says it like a man would say his dog just has three legs, with dejection and pity. In church he heard the future on those old pianos, battle-scarred from all those crusades against the devil one big tent at a time. But only the rich people had one in their house, or at least, people richer than they were.
He was playing in the yard when he saw his father’s old truck lumbering up to their house on Tyler Road. The better times, the carpentry work and cotton prices, had allowed Elmo a little breathing room, and for the first time in his life he had purchased his own land. It was the first dirt he had ever put his name on.
“He had a piano on his truck,” he says, “and my eyes almost fell out of my head.”
He started hopping, like old man Herron used to hop when Elmo lifted him over a fence.
“I found out later he mortgaged his farm to buy it for me,” he says. “I tol’ you. I had the best mama and daddy in the world.”
Elmo backed the truck up to the porch and undid the ropes. Together, they lifted it into the house.
“There it is,” Elmo said. “Now play it.”
It was an upright, paneled in dark wood, manufactured by the P. A. Starck Piano Co., of Chicago, Illinois—a unique manufacture, according to the advertisements, with a bent acoustic rim that gave it a fuller, richer tone, more like a grand piano—and “well adapted for concert use.”
His daddy bought it in Monroe, Louisiana, for how much he cannot recall.
It was used, certainly. “It looked new to me,” he says now.
He let his fingers run down the keys.
“Thank you, Daddy,” he said.
Mamie stood in the doorway. She had never completely forgiven him for going to prison that second time, leaving her alone with the boys and her grief. Women can be hard on a man that way.
“You done good,” she told him.
“And it wasn’t long,” he says. “I was playin’ piano about as good as I play now.”
You have to forgive him for dismissing a lifetime of influence, of adaptation, of study—not in any traditional sense, like paid-for lessons, but in the way he learned his art, by simply listening, always listening. He will always believe that, while he did learn, did soak up the music from the outside world, the great bulk of his genius came from within, where God placed it.
The piano would come to be called the wisest investment in the history of rock and roll.
“It’s sittin’ in there,” he says now of his first piano, motioning beyond the door to where the old upright leans tiredly against the wall in the darkened hallway. “I thought it was the greatest thing in the world.”
The boy played, played every moment he was not obligated to be somewhere else, and stopped only to bathe and sleep; sometimes he even ate at the thing, chewing on a sandwich, thinking about melodies, rhythms, songs. It is not like he had anything better to do. He had never seen a great deal of value in school, at least before he discovered girls, and now knew it was totally unnecessary. Now, in the cursed classroom, he would stare at the top of his desk in abject misery and itch to be set free of this foolishness. “I was sittin’ on Ready,” he says, “and pumpin’ on Go.” There was no bell at Ferriday Elementary to mark the end of the school day, but “the band started practicing at three o’clock sharp,” and that meant the last period was finally over. He almost turned his desk over getting out, cleared the front steps in one leap, snatched up his bicycle and pedaled home, where he banged through the door and slid onto the piano seat like he was sliding in at home. He played “Blessed Jesus, Hold My Hand” and “He Was Nailed to the Cross for Me” and every other hymn he could think of, all of it by ear; the notes meant nothing to him, and the sheet music and hymnals just a waste of a good tree.
I will be a soldier brave and true and firmly take a stand
As I onward go and meet the foe, blessed Jesus, hold my hand