Screening Room (12 page)

There were few people M.A. could talk to about his vast ambitions. Few people would understand; not even Celia, as intelligent as she was. He had plucked her out of the University of Kentucky in Lexington when she was only twenty. She was refined and cultured and well educated. But her aspirations were
grains of sand compared with his. She read her art and her history books, she attended the symphony with her friends. And minded the children. That was just as he wanted. On Sunday evenings, they listened together to the Chase and Sanborn comedy show. They especially loved Edgar Bergen and his dummy. After the hour was up, M.A. would go up to Lila’s room and make a voice for each of her stuffed animals, ignoring Celia’s pleas not to act silly, and sometimes he would don one of the costumes he kept for the Memphis Little Theater. M.A. was a ham, a trait that came out ever so slightly but devastatingly in his bridge tournaments, when his facial expressions sometimes conveyed just the opposite of the cards he held. His bridge opponents feared his extraordinary tactical skills, but they feared his unpredictable and impulsive theatrical ability even more.

Before the comedy hour, M.A. and Celia would often have lunch at Britling’s cafeteria on Union. This was their favorite place to eat. Although M.A. had many business meals in fancy restaurants, he actually preferred simple food for himself, and he could get it at Britling’s. Baked cod without much seasoning, turnip greens, black-eyed peas. He and Celia were usually joined by their friends—Will Gerber, Milton Binswanger, Ike Myers, Hank Davis, Douglas Jemison, and their wives. Will was city attorney. Milt was president of the Memphis Natural Gas Company. Ike underwrote arts productions in Memphis and was president of the board of the Memphis Art Academy. Hank and Doug were fishing buddies. The same crowd went dancing to swing music at the Peabody Hotel and the Rainbow Terrace Room on Lamar, where pretty young women sometimes came without male partners.

Hank Davis, who owned a clothing store on Third Street and had a glass eye from World War I, was the only white person M.A. knew who was Baptist. In the Christian religions, M.A. must have observed, Baptists were at the bottom of the totem pole,
mostly because most Baptists were Negroes. Methodists were next up the ladder. The Methodists were the most evangelical and sang at every opportunity, whether the occasion called for it or not. Next were the Presbyterians, then the Episcopalians. The Episcopalians were the financial and power elite. FDR was Episcopalian. Boss Crump had married into an Episcopalian family. Mayor Chandler was Episcopalian. The Boyles were Episcopalian and attended Grace St. Luke Episcopal Church. Being a Jew, M.A. couldn’t have understood the Gentile religions too deeply, but he endeavored to grasp the social distinctions to do business in Memphis.

The Sterick Building, on Third and Madison downtown, was where M.A. had many of his business meals. Here is where he would reserve a private room and talk to Mayor Overton, and later Mayor Chandler, about what was happening in the city, whom he should look out for, and whom he needed to help. During the war, M.A. held meetings of the War Activities Committee, which he chaired, in the Sterick Building, as well as meetings of the United China Relief campaign, which he also chaired, and the Jewish Welfare Fund, of which he was president. When it opened in 1930, the Sterick Building was the tallest building in the South. It was called the “Queen of Memphis.” The Gothic-style tower housed two thousand workers on twenty-nine floors, who were whisked up and down in high-speed elevators operated by uniformed female attendants. The exteriors of the lower floors were made of granite and limestone, and the massive chandelier in the lobby cost more than a new car. M.A. took visitors from Chicago and New York to lunch at the Regency Room of the Sterick Building. He would give his northern guests a tour of the building and then say, “This is Memphis, gentlemen.”

Ten miles east of Downtown, where M.A. and Celia lived, it was quiet. In fact, their house on Cherry was a mile beyond the eastern edge of the city. Much of the area was farmland and
open fields. For relaxation, M.A. liked to drive down the dusty little streets with hardly any traffic lights to slow him, past the churches, to Perkins and Poplar, where there was a little pharmacy and an ice-cream shop, and sometimes as far east as Davis White Spot, a restaurant that looked like a private farmhouse in the country, sometimes out the county road to the Lausanne school for girls on Massey. M.A. must have needed the serenity of East Memphis, far from the river and the noise of Downtown and the high-voltage sparks of the rest of his life.

To manage that high-voltage life—his movie theaters, his bridge tournaments, the many boards and committees he chaired—M.A. required his home to run smoothly, and for that he had a domestic staff (in addition to Celia): his cook, Hattie Mae; his housecleaner, Lucinda; his chauffeur, Willie; and his yardman, Eli—all Negroes and all grateful for the work. In the late 1930s, Hattie Mae moved into a little room attached to M.A.’s garage. She had been living in Orange Mound, a Negro neighborhood between Lamar, Southern, and Semmes, but after some white folks rode through in a Buick one night and threw raw eggs at her and her friends, she no longer felt safe there. She didn’t mind so much leaving Orange Mound, but she grieved moving away from Mount Moriah Baptist Church, which she had attended every Sunday since she was seven years old.

Even at a young age, Hattie Mae had enormous buttocks. Evidently one was larger than the other, because she listed to one side when standing or walking. She loved turnip greens cooked in mounds of pork fat and heavily buttered biscuits, and she had frequent gallbladder attacks. One day in the mid-1940s, her pain was so bad that she decided to get her gallbladder removed. There being few hospitals that treated Negroes, she went to Collins Chapel Hospital, which had been founded by the Collins Chapel Church and was staffed by Negro physicians and nurses. A few days later, M.A. went to visit her at the hospital, a
two-story red clapboard building on Ashland Street. “I jes wants to come home, Mr. Lightman,” said Hattie Mae. “They fixed me up, now I wants to come home.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I feels good, Mr. Lightman.”

M.A. was impressed with the quick success of Hattie Mae’s operation. Following his usual modus operandi, he immediately asked to meet the director of the hospital, a Dr. W. S. Martin, and was led to a tiny room next to the kitchen. There he was surprised to see another Negro, sitting at the desk and wearing a nice coat and tie. M.A. introduced himself. He was visiting Hattie Mae Harris, he explained, who was in his employ. Dr. Martin nodded. M.A. walked over and looked at the diplomas on the wall. LeMoyne Institute, Meharry Medical College, Bellevue Hospital in New York. “I never saw so many colored doctors,” said M.A. “I didn’t know there were
any
colored doctors.”

“Did you think we were all shoeshine boys, Mr. Lightman?” said Dr. Martin.

M.A. sat down. He had made a mistake, he realized. You learn from mistakes. “I like what I’ve seen here,” said M.A. “I’d like to help. I’d like to help raise funds for the hospital. You need funds, don’t you?”

“We take care of ourselves,” said Dr. Martin, gazing steadily at M.A.

“I want to help,” said M.A.

“You’re the owner of Malco, aren’t you,” said Dr. Martin.

“Yes.”

Dr. Martin paused. “OK, you can help us. Thank you.”

And M.A. Lightman, a white man, became head of fundraising for the Collins Chapel Hospital. And that, too, became part of the ripple he would leave in the cosmos. From time to time over the next decade, he got telephone calls at home, from strangers, saying, “Why are you helping those jigaboos?”

“
Somebody with that kind of
power
,” says Nate, “the creation of a
phasma
was
inevitable
.” We’re driving east on Walnut Grove, passing Baptist Hospital. “It’s a miracle he didn’t burn himself up sooner,” says Nate. “But he had his fishing. That’s where he relaxed. Bridge was not really a hobby for M.A. Bridge was a blood sport. His hobby was fishing.”

Once a month, M.A. and Hank Davis and Dougie Jemison drove out to Horseshoe Lake, in Arkansas, about thirty-five miles southwest of Memphis. They owned a little marina shack there, built on stilts at the edge of the lake and surrounded by ancient cypress trees, and they kept a beat-up metal boat with a five-horsepower engine. Most seasons, they fished for largemouth bass and panfish, but sometimes they could catch crappie and catfish. Catfish was M.A.’s favorite. He would bread it with white cornmeal, then fry it in hot peanut oil. When the fish was a golden brown, he sprinkled on just a tad of lemon pepper. He and Hank and Dougie cooked the fish on a propane stove, best accomplished within a few hours of hauling the catch into the boat. The shack had three cots, where they slept some nights so that they could go out on the lake before dawn the next day. They fished in the rain, in the heat of the summer, in the cold of winter, once while it was snowing. On rare occasions, they didn’t feel like fishing, and they would sit out on the deck, Hank and Dougie drinking beer, M.A. lemonade, and listen to a country music station in Tunica. M.A. didn’t much care for country, but Hank and Doug didn’t much care for catfish.

M.A. didn’t have to watch his back with Hank and Dougie. Hank owned a clothing and shoe store, inherited from an uncle, and Dougie sold life insurance. Both were older than he, both on their second marriages; Hank was completely bald and overweight, Dougie stumbled more every year from advancing multiple sclerosis. It must have been amazing to M.A. that he could pass hours in the boat with Hank and Dougie talking about nothing
more than the trips they had made to visit their children, the crazy bets they had made with friends, their wives. They were sweet men, M.A. must have thought, and he probably loved them. They were simple men. When they went home, they had their financial problems and their health problems and the complications of their lives, but they did not suffer great defeats, or great victories, because they lived on a small stage. They did not reach for what was outside of themselves, as he did. In a way, M.A. must have envied them. But only a little. He would never give up what he had, that thing he couldn’t talk about to anyone. M.A. nourished, he cherished, he
celebrated
that sleepless biting animal that lived in his stomach and left him no peace.

My second week home. Uncle Ed’s funeral was ten days ago. Or maybe twelve.

We’ve been driving for hours, passing through neighborhoods I faintly recall—a cousin, two brothers, Lennie squeezed into the backseat. It has been raining.

“Where are we?” I ask. “Wasn’t there a defense depot here?”

“Torn down. Bros, you have been gone long.”

As I remember it, Memphis, like Gaul, was divided into three parts: Downtown, butting against the Mississippi River on the west; Midtown; and East Memphis. In the 1920s to 1970s, before its revitalization, Downtown was home to many of the city’s black residents, except those who lived in Orange Mound, south of Southern Street between Midtown and East Memphis. Beale Street was downtown. The Peabody Hotel was downtown. All the old clubs and hotels and music houses lodged themselves downtown. Today Midtown is a mix of working-class and affluent families. In this area, you also have High Point Terrace and Berclair, northeast of the university, with homes built in the 1940s and 1950s for returning GIs. East Memphis, near Poplar Avenue, has always housed well-to-do white families in neighborhoods like Belle Meade and Hedgemore, as well as shopping malls and office buildings. Go just a mile south from Poplar and you see Hispanic and black families living in shacks, with their laundry on clotheslines.

In the mid-1960s, in high school, I dated a girl from Whitehaven, a working-class neighborhood in South Memphis. Suddenly, her name comes to me. Sandra. We met at a community theater. She was a good actress, and she had curly brown hair and long eyelashes. I visited her house in Whitehaven many times, but she felt uncomfortable coming to mine in East Memphis. And she could never understand why I wanted to go away from Memphis for college. I remember the roundness of her face.

The neighborhoods merge like the hours. Somehow night has fallen. Lennie rolls down the window and lights a cigarette. “Your father is the most generous man I ever met,” she says between drags. “He used to give away thousands to charities—the International Red Cross, poor people in Appalachia, Save the Children, Save the Whales, environmental groups. And the Democratic Party. He got on everyone’s list. When your mother complained that he was being too generous, he promised to cut back, but he couldn’t. One day, his accountant called him up and told him that he had completely plowed through his capital and couldn’t afford to give away another penny. Even that wouldn’t have stopped him. What stopped him was going deaf. He can’t hear people on the phone asking for money anymore.”

“He never knew how much money he had in the bank,” I say. “Maybe that’s why he was so generous.”

“Richard is just
generous
,” says Lennie.

Now, we’re driving on dark little streets, lost somewhere south of Downtown. At the edge of our headlights, rabbits scamper across the road.

“I think it’s a few streets up on the left. Maybe not.”

“When was the last time you were in this area?”

“Twenty years ago.”

We turn down a street, hit a dead end, back up. Sweet smell of magnolia. On the next street, lights go on in a brick house, then off, like a summer firefly. A lone car passes. Then another street.

Finally, we see the sign on a wrought-iron gate: Temple Israel Cemetery. A small building, a chapel, dark silhouettes. In the distance, the gray nubs of gravestones in a line, like vertebrae. This is what I have come to find, the grave. Perhaps this is what I’ve been searching for, perhaps this will put an end to my confusions about him, my grandfather. We park our car and wander down the gravel paths. Ronnie has brought a flashlight.

“Over there.”

“Who are all of these people?”