Screening Room (8 page)
Authors: Alan Lightman
On a rainy day in 1960, I got on a bus at the corner of Cherry and Poplar. I was eleven years old, and I was headed downtown. As usual, the white passengers occupied the front seats and the black passengers the rear. There were no empty seats in the front of the bus, so I took a seat in the back, where there were plenty of vacancies. After a few moments, the bus driver pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the bus. He walked back to where I was sitting and gently informed me that I was sitting in the “colored section” of the bus. “But there aren’t any seats up there,” I said, confused. The bus driver stood his ground, waiting patiently for God to make things right. Eventually, one of the white passengers in the front moved over and sat on the lap of another white passenger, creating an empty seat for me.
When I returned home, I told Blanche. She looked up from her ironing board, her face moist and puffy from working all day, and sighed. “Sometimes, people jez acts crazy.”
Brown v. Board of Education
had done nothing to stop the craziness in Memphis. Blacks and whites not only had separate schools. They had separate toilet facilities, separate drinking fountains, separate lunch counters in the department stores. Blacks and whites were not allowed to visit the Memphis Zoo on the same day. In 1956, at the state’s first grudging gesture toward desegregation at a public high school in Clinton, the demonstrations were so violent that the National Guard had to be called in.
Blanche had two pleasures in life: smoking Pall Malls and singing in her church choir. She attended a Baptist church on Spottswood. When dressed in her Sunday clothes, she was a bountiful sight, wearing a billowy dress of thick fabric, rings on her fingers, bright red lipstick, blue eye shadow, her hair done up and shining with gel, high heels, and a feathered hat. Blanche had quite a collection of hats because Mother bought her a new hat every year to wear on Easter Sunday. On Saturdays, Blanche would move about our house with a little more vigor than usual, singing black gospels when she thought no one was listening. I grew up on those gospels.
All of Blanche’s friends went to her church; all of the things she talked about she learned in church. Every month, Blanche spent a weekend at church cooking meals for homeless people. One year, her church was closed for a month to repair water damage, and Blanche walked around in a daze, disoriented, as if a parent had suddenly died. She got absolutely nothing done around the house, and finally Mother told her just to take the month off as a paid vacation.
Actually, Blanche had one other pleasure. She liked to watch and rewatch movies. Her favorite was Alfred Hitchcock’s
Vertigo
. I remember several occasions over the years when
Vertigo
was shown on television, and Blanche would set up her ironing board by the TV set, screaming every time at the scene where Kim Novak is about to jump from the clock tower.
Blanche never had any children of her own. For several years, she took care of the three children of a niece who had died at age sixteen of a drug overdose. In the 1950s, Blanche was briefly married to a man named Quentin. She said little about Quentin. “I ain’t met no good men, and I ain’t wasting my time on them no-count men no more.” Blanche also mistrusted doctors and would quietly endure her ailments for weeks without treatment. During the years I remember, she hobbled about from room to
room with legs swollen from diabetes and obesity. In addition to the diabetes, Blanche suffered respiratory problems caused by her smoking and would go into terrible fits of coughing and wheezing, finally dowsing her spasms by drinking an RC Cola mixed with lemon juice. After each of these episodes, my mother would wag her finger at Blanche and admonish her to stop smoking, in the same voice she used to ask her children to stop eating candy. Blanche would smile and say, “Yes’m, Mizz Lightman.” The next day, she would light up her Pall Malls.
In many ways, my brothers and I loved Blanche as much as we loved our mother. And Blanche loved us back. Her love was more simple and reliable than my mother’s. Blanche asked for nothing in return. Some days I would come home from school, injured by a cruel remark made by a classmate, and bury my face in Blanche’s gigantic bosom. “Tell me ’bout it, honey,” she would say, enveloping me with gentle affection. When my brothers and I began dating, Blanche let us know which girlfriends she approved of. Later, when we got married, she came to the weddings.
Blanche worked long hours. She arrived at 7:00 in the morning and left in the evening around 8:00, after cooking dinner for our family and washing the dishes, five and sometimes six days a week. For a number of years, she lived in two small rooms attached to our garage, which my parents called the “servants’ quarters.” At some point, she got a house of her own, on Lowell Avenue near Lamar, and took the bus each morning to the corner
of Cherry and Poplar, then trudged down the street to our house. In the late 1950s, my parents paid her $30 per week. Minimumwage laws didn’t exist, and that was the going rate for black “help” at the time.
Each morning, when she first came through the back door of the house, Blanche would stop in the utility room and change into a white uniform. Then, before leaving in the evening, she would change back into her own clothes. I often wondered what she thought of that white uniform. I suspect that she hated it. But Blanche never complained. In fact, she was always smiling. As a child, I once asked her why she always smiled, and she answered, “I smiles when I’s happy, and I smiles when I’s not happy.”
Blanche’s duties covered everything from cleaning the toilets to washing clothes to ironing shirts to cooking meals. She swept the floors, made the beds, sewed pants that were ripped, polished the silver, picked up the toys, fed the dog, dusted the hundreds of books on our bookshelves. Several times a week, my mother sent Blanche off to the grocery store with a shopping list. Blanche’s reading ability was extremely limited. Almost always, she would come home missing a few items on the list, at which point Mother would run around in a flutter, saying “Blanche, when are you going to learn how to read English?” Blanche would get very quiet and hurt and busy herself putting away the groceries.
On evenings that my parents were going out to a party but my father wasn’t yet home, Mother would ask Blanche for advice as she pulled various dresses out of her closet. “This one makes me look fat, Blanche, don’t you think?”
“You looks pretty, Mizz Lightman,” Blanche would say, and my mother would suck in her stomach and turn around twice in the mirror. Then she would touch Blanche’s shoulder and giggle, as if the two of them were teenagers helping each other dress for
a prom. “Blanche Lee, you’re just trying to make me feel good. What use are you?”
A swinging door separated the kitchen from the dining room. In the evenings, while my parents and brothers and I sat eating at the table in the dining room, Blanche ate her own dinner at a small table in the kitchen, ten feet away, behind the closed door. That was the order of the world. The unspoken rule was that Blanche should never watch us as we ate, because that would make her like a guest at the table. When my mother wanted something, she rang a small brass bell. Blanche would come hurrying through the swinging door, ready to serve another helping of mashed potatoes or fill up the glasses with more iced tea. Years later, after both Blanche and my mother had passed away, I inherited that brass bell. Its handle consists of the figure of an old woman sitting with her legs crossed, wearing a supplicant’s cloak and holding out her hand for alms. In my youth, the sound of that bell was pure music. Now it cuts like a knife.
When I was fourteen or fifteen, I would climb out of my dormer window at night, quietly creep down the sloping roof in the dark, leap to the pecan tree next to the house, and shimmy down to the ground. Then I would walk up Cherry to Poplar and catch a bus to a coffeehouse called the Bitter Lemon. There I would meet my friend Joel, who had also made a clandestine escape from his family.
The Bitter Lemon was a little storefront on Poplar, in Midtown just east of the viaduct, so small you could fly past it on your way downtown. But it had live music, and you could hear real good rhythm and blues. Furry Lewis used to play at the Bitter Lemon. And Gus Cannon. Gus, who was around eighty years old by that time, had once made a banjo out of a frying pan and a raccoon skin and had a group called the Cannon Jug Stompers. It smelled of rich coffee and pizza, but not alcohol because this was a teenage joint. However, some guests came in already stoned, encouraged by the psychedelic paint on the ceilings and walls. This was the early to mid-1960s, and Beale Street was deceased. But you could feel Beale Street in the Bitter Lemon, you could feel a black trumpet player named William Christopher Handy, who wrote the first blues song in 1909, and later Gus Cannon, Muddy Waters, Louis Armstrong, Memphis Minnie, Rufus Thomas, Howlin’ Wolf, and B.B. King, all of whom played at Beale Street clubs like the Daisy, Mitchell’s Lounge,
and the Hippodrome. The Hippodrome was a made-over roller-skating rink. People rolled in one end of the building and jived to live music in the other. Beale Street had been the best and the worst of Memphis. Black churches, liquor stores, whorehouses, pawnshops, cheap hotels, and smoky clubs shared the pavement on Beale Street. Heroin was delivered on bicycles. But Beale Street produced new music for the world.
The pizza at the Bitter Lemon was terrible, but you could eat it if you washed it down with a concoction they called a Suicide—a deadly mix of Pepsi, Teem, and grape juice. The owner of the Lemon, a guy named John who wore Hawaiian shirts and who was reputed to be a professor at the Memphis Art Academy, would walk around serving Suicides and asking his stoned customers if they were having a “fine time.” Of course we were having a fine time. What could be finer for a fifteen-year-old kid than to sneak out of his house at night and listen to live soulful music while drinking Suicides and eating slices of godawful onion pizza?
Between sets, some of the customers turned on WDIA radio, the first all-black radio station in the country. WDIA played rhythm and blues and rock and roll. The most famous host of WDIA was Nat D. Williams, reverently referred to as “Nat Dee,” who ruled in the 1940s and 1950s. In addition to his two radio shows,
Coffee Club
at 6:30 a.m. and
Tan Town Jamboree
at 4:00 p.m., Nat Dee taught history at Booker T. Washington High School and wrote for the influential black newspaper
Tri-State Defender
. Nat Dee was proud to be a black man. He once boasted on the air: “
I’m black, Jack, black as a hundred midnights in a cypress swamp.”
B.B. King also worked for WDIA in the 1940s. King was born in Mississippi and given the name Riley B. King. When he began laboring as a disc jockey and singer for WDIA, he was nicknamed “Beale Street Blues Boy,” soon shortened to B.B.
He and a few other Memphis musicians of the time combined the blues with a gritty boogie-woogie rhythm, a heavy beat, and sexual lyrics to create rhythm and blues. Some of King’s best songs were “You Know I Love You,” “Woke Up This Morning,” “When My Heart Beats like a Hammer,” and “You Upsets Me Baby.”
Joel and I were more enamored of rock and roll and jazz and the new British sound. There was plenty of that at the Lemon. When we came in the door, there would often be four guys on the tiny stage, playing so hard the veins were popping out on their faces—a saxophone, keyboards, electric guitar, and a drum set. The whole place was the size of a large closet with twenty customers crammed together, and I could
see
the music in the vibrations of the Suicide in my plastic cup. The guitarist—a lean young man wearing jeans and a white shirt with ruffled front and sleeves and a bowler hat because the Beatles and the British motif had hit hard—was starting to wiggle his body like he was receiving electric shocks, but the shocks were the sounds that he was making himself as his fingers pranced over the taut strings of his music machine, and he was creating the sound as if the idea had just come into his head at that instant, as if this riff had never existed in the universe until then, yet every note was perfect, every note sang and vibrated and blasted through the air completely right, as if it had been laid down a billion years ago in some cosmic pattern, and the guitarist was gone, he was somewhere in Nirvana, but at the same time he had his bowler cocked back on his head like he knew he was being watched and admired. Psychedelic paint on the walls, crazy pictures of lotus petals and spirals, checkerboard floor littered with straw wrappers and bottle caps, six or seven tables with rickety wooden chairs but nobody cared about where they were sitting, a front wall of solid glass with “Bitter Lemon” painted above a yellow lemon; nobody knew where the name came from, not even
John. Joel and I would sit at a table near the back of the room, pressed against the glass, swimming in music, and we would swivel around in our chairs just for a moment to look out at the endless black night, our personal kingdom, and Poplar Avenue, the cement spine of Memphis that stretched all the way from the funky river and Downtown to out east where the affluent white people lived, past street lamps and parked cars and little storefronts lit up with neon. Maybe later we would go to a hamburger joint, or sometimes we would just hang at the Lemon until it closed, when the musicians were totally dripping in sweat. Either way, we would let the music and pizza churn in our bodies until we ourselves hummed and popped and controlled the world. We were fifteen, and we owned it all. It was all ours.