Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [12]
A few days after the delivery, a still exhausted Dr. Hunt recorded the births in his ledger, misspelling Elvis as “Evis” (probably following Vernon’s pronunciation), and transposing the i from “Jessie” into “Garion.” He similarly erred on baby Jessie’s death certificate, recording the date of birth as January 7 and listing him only as the nameless “infant of Vernon Pressley,” repeating the original family spelling. Dr. Hunt’s daughter, Sarah Hunt Potter, would later say that she wasn’t certain that 4:35 A.M.—Elvis’s time of birth as recorded in the ledger—was correct, since her father had waited so long to enter it.
However, a bigger mystery than the exact time of Elvis’s birth is the location of his dead twin’s grave. For decades, it was said that on January 9 Vernon had climbed the hilly terrain of East Tupelo’s tiny Priceville Cemetery in the bitter cold with the little coffin, a minister, and an undertaker from W. E. Pegues at his side. There, in the Presley plot, they supposedly carried out their grim task, burying the infant in an unmarked grave that all but disappeared when the grass grew in.
But Priceville has been questioned in later years. Billy Smith says that Jessie was, indeed, buried in an unmarked grave, but in another cemetery closer to Saltillo. One of Elvis’s classmates insists the twin was buried in a cemetery by St. Mark’s Methodist Church across from the birthplace. And Joe Savery, who owns the original death certificate, has said that “nobody really knows where that child is buried. . . . Later on, Elvis tried to find out. . . . You would think that somebody in the family would have known where they buried that child, but I have never known anybody that does.”
However, Roy Turner believes Priceville is the burial spot after all. Someone put a small marble foot marker there years ago that sets near the grave of Noah Presley. “When I stumbled on what I thought was Jessie’s grave, because of the chronology of the surrounding Presley graves—then a space for two more that was never used—I assumed this was the spot. A lot of people in that era were not able to afford tombstones. When I first saw the grave, there was only a concrete chunk marking the spot and some artificial flowers.”
Becky Martin, one of Elvis’s favorite fifth grade classmates, confirmed it as Jessie’s final resting place and remembered the Presley family usually put flowers on the grave when they visited the cemetery each decoration day, which at Priceville is the first Sunday in August.
Jessie’s death certificate also lists Priceville Cemetery as the burial site, as does the receipt at Pegues for the coffin. Some years back, “I was doing a documentary on the [1936] Tupelo tornado and interviewed Mr. Pegues, wanting to know how many deaths they handled,” continues Roy Turner. “While he was going through his records, he said, ‘You might be interested in this.’ ” The book contained records from the 1930s, and the funeral director showed Turner where Vernon bought and paid for the coffin, and for Pegues to handle the burial.
“People say, ‘Why didn’t they just move Jessie to Graceland the way they did Elvis and Gladys?’ ” asks Billy Smith. “There wasn’t anything to move. They had a little wood coffin for the baby and all. But there couldn’t be anything to move but a hunk of dirt. The little coffin’s rotted and gone. Baby’s gone. Maybe bones. We don’t really know. Why bother? Leave it in its resting place.”
Today, the Presley gravesites in Graceland’s Meditation Garden include a small plaque for Jessie, as J. D. Presley spelled it, not “Jesse,” as is so often written.
From the moment Elvis was born, mother and son demonstrated a remarkable closeness, almost as if Gladys had been Elvis’s twin and not Jessie. She tended to the infant’s every need, refusing to hand off care to a relative or even her husband for a single afternoon’s respite. “Gladys had a one-track mind,” offered a female cousin. “She would hold that baby so tight I thought he might suffocate. She wouldn’t let nobody carry him around but her, not even Vernon.”