I don’t recall if after the award and speech in 1998 I looked deliberately at the spot outside West Cottage remembering how the Head had queried me about a pending Supreme Court decision that I knew nothing about, but surely I must have. If I had I would have shaken my head in wonder that I left Wooster completely innocent of the thunderclap that would shake the South in the second semester of my freshman year at the University of Alabama.
3
A whole civilization lay dying around me in the six years after prep school, but I was too self-absorbed to notice. For four of those years, I was concentrated on the pleasures of sorority girls, bad sex, and cheap bourbon as an undistinguished undergraduate at the University of Alabama, and for two more as a U.S. Navy enlisted man. A classmate who truly was distinguished, David Mathews, later became president of the University, Secretary of Health Education and Welfare in the Ford administration, and president of the Kettering Foundation. We didn’t know each other in school but became friends when he was a dean of students at UA. Once during his presidency I asked, “David, why didn’t I ever see you drinking beer in any of the fraternity basements?” He answered, “Why didn’t I ever see you in the library?” That pretty well summed up my first wave of university life—a sensual explosion on escaping the monastic restraints of prep school and entering the relative license of college.
At the white-columned brick Phi Gamma Delta house, we paid scant attention to news of the outside world, which came to us on a black and white TV set in what was laughingly called the library. TV told, for instance, about a governor of Virginia invoking a shadowy power called “interposition” to prohibit blacks from going to white schools. Mildly interesting, but of more immediate interest were the weekend parties. The nuances of federal v. state authority gave way to defining the corporate personality of the top sororities: Kappa Deltas, bitchy but interesting; Tri Delts, too sweet for our taste; Kappa Kappa Gamma, natural and fun, good ol’ girls.
While most of us grieved at the mighty Crimson Tide football team’s losing seasons, beneath us the socio-political geology rumbled on its axis. But we could not feel or hear it. A warning tremor had been felt by Dad’s generation earlier, in Birmingham at the July 1948 “Dixiecrat” convention led by former Alabama Governor Frank Dixon. Among the delegates, five Southern governors mingled with a who’s-who of such violent racists as Gerald L. K. Smith and J. B. Stoner. They nominated South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond as their presidential candidate to oppose the reelection of President Harry Truman, and to preserve “States’ Rights,” meaning a state’s right to deny Negroes the vote, and the minimal conveniences of dining, sleeping, or using bathrooms when and where they were needed. The 1948 Dixiecrat convention was the first in a series of “Pickett’s Charges” in the war to preserve white supremacy.
But we happy-little-idiot fraternity boys didn’t know we were playing on a social fault line that was in motion. We knew we had a genial giant as governor, six-foot eight-inch James E. Folsom, because we sang a song about his paternity problems. Well-to-do parents were embarrassed by what they considered his crudities, and didn’t care for his populist appeal. “Y’all Come” was the slogan of his second successful gubernatorial campaign, an appeal to all the bypassed working folks, urban and rural, to come visit him in the Governor’s Mansion. We chuckled at the disarming honesty of his sexual exploits: “If they bait a trap with a pretty woman, they’re gonna catch Big Jim every time.” There is a story repeated so often that, if it isn’t true, it ought to be. It stands as a metaphor for dealing with a sexual scandal that might have instructed President Clinton. In the story, Governor Folsom is confronted by reporters who ask if it is true that he slept with a “colored” girl in a Phenix City motel the night before. Folsom answered, “It’s a damn lie; not a word of truth to it—didn’t sleep a wink! “ Over beer and cheap bourbon in fraternity basements, we sang a song about our colorful governor:
She was poor, but she was honest.
Victim of a rich man’s whim;
’Til she met that Christian gentleman Big Jim Folsom,
And she had a child by him.
Now he sits in the governor’s chair,
Makin’ laws for all mankind
While she walks the streets of Cullman, Alabama
Sellin’ bits of her behind.
We also listened to the popular idol of the fifties, Elvis Presley—and we hated him. Only when his death in 1977 set off a shock wave of grief did I begin to understand the tragedy and the enduring power of the man. Elvis’s fans don’t see the fat man who died alone in his bathroom a generation ago. They only see the slim, hip-pumping boy with the glistening pompadour, heavy sideburns, and outrageous clothes who was both vaguely threatening and vulnerable. They crowned him King: sovereign in the kingdom of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, country and pop. They’ve made him into a memorial, a statue, totem, icon that has rendered the real man-boy unknowable. But the image fills a need in those who have to remember him a certain way. As always, those to whom we give symbolic power tell more about us than they do the object of our love or scorn.
Elvis Presley is a symbol for millions: of being born poor and making it? of fantasized fame and celebrity? Perhaps more of innocence lost. Thomas Wolfe was half right—you can’t go home again. If Elvis had survived his fame, he might have gone to the fiftieth reunion of Humes High School, his high school in Memphis, Tennessee, but at seventy, he couldn’t be that teenaged boy, raging with energy and mischief. Nor can the women who surround themselves with Elvis memorabilia go home again and revive the aching tenderness and insecurities of teenaged love, so they play the old records and blow on the dying embers, trying to recall how it was, enjoying the delicious sorrow of lost youth and innocence.
Elvis and I were the same age, and I thoroughly disliked him. I loathed what I took to be a sneering mouth—resented the attraction his rebellion had for girls our age, just as I was vexed by the appeal that the local “baaad boys” had for some girls I knew. Elvis was a shock, a threat to me and the well-protected cocoon in which I had been nurtured. We were from the right side of town—a family his people would call “rich.” He was from the wrong side of town, violated every convention I knew, and he was getting the girls. I hated that.
Now, having ventured far and wide on the discovery craft of journalism, learning the values of other worlds, plain and fancy, Elvis’s honeyed voice crooning “Love Me Tender” and the film clips of the girls squealing and swooning strike home with the combined power of innocent charm and nostalgia.
Elvis was an emotional force that attracted two small-town Southern presidents. When Elvis performed at the Omni in Atlanta in 1973, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter went backstage to meet him. In the White House, Carter took a call from the singer just weeks before he died. Presidential hopeful Bill Clinton appeared on the “Arsenio Hall Show” in 1992 and paid a musical tribute to Elvis with a saxophone performance of “Heartbreak Hotel.” The American presidency is a unique office, respected everywhere, but presidents’ popularity doesn’t match that of a dead singer. We have always needed to create heroes and kings, but we exact a terrible price from them. We demeaned Carter and Clinton, and bestowed such high-voltage charisma on Elvis that it killed him.
Our adolescent resentment of Elvis was a more potent emotional presence than the great events unfolding in Montgomery. Like a war on another continent, the first skirmish of full-scale civil combat, the Montgomery bus boycott, occurred beyond our notice on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a city bus to a white man. The story of the determined passenger in the Montgomery bus has been told and retold so many times, it need not be repeated here, but one picture from that historic episode still surprises. It