Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [16]
Gladys also wrote at least two missives, both on lined tablet paper, lobbying for a pardon or a six-month parole. She insisted Vernon had never been in any trouble with the law (“he has never even been drunk in his life”), and that he had simply been “persuaded into selling some boys a signature off of a check” and didn’t understand the consequences. In the first letter, on October 29, 1938, she argued on behalf of herself and Minnie Mae. (“His mother is sitting here brokenhearted beside me.”) But in the second, dated November 25, 1938, she spoke powerfully about her own personal hardship. (“My health is bad and . . . I have no mother or daddy and no one to look to for a living. I have a little boy three years old. Please send [my husband] home to his wife and baby.”
Until Vernon returned, however, Gladys went back to work in the fields. By each September, the cotton crop was in, and Gladys would hire out along with nearly everybody else in East Tupelo, her fingers bleeding as she picked the soft white bolls from the prickly burrs, her back bent into the stalks, two rows at a time. It was grueling work, especially when the sun beat down upon her. But it paid real money—$1.50 per hundred pounds of cotton. And she could take her baby with her—little Elvis, wearing overalls and a brimmed hat to shield him from the sun, riding on her six-foot duck sack as she pulled it along the rows. He never forgot it, saying years later he had seen her put stockings on her arms or pour buttermilk on them to quell the sunburn when she went into the fields.
But no matter how much cotton she picked, or sewing or laundry she took in, Gladys couldn’t keep up the payment schedule to Orville Bean. (“He wouldn’t wait on you—if you didn’t have the rent, he’d tell you to move right quick,” remembered one resident.) Before long, she and Elvis would have to leave. “Aunt Gladys made the rounds, staying at different people’s houses,” Billy Smith recounts. At one point, she moved in with her first cousin Frank Richards. Elvis, clutching his teddy bear, Mabel, would sit on the porch “crying his eyes out because his daddy was away,” a relative recalled. Gladys, too, suffered mightily, a friend said. “After [Vernon] went to prison, she was awful nervous.”
Before the move, at night, in the front room of the house her husband and father-in-law had built with their own hands, she and her son would share the little iron bed that the three of them had occupied when Vernon was there, Elvis tucked under her arm. Awaiting sleep, after a spare supper of beans, potatoes, and maybe a little side meat, they would lie there and listen to the battery radio as a light breeze blew through the curtains. Gladys would speak of Jessie, telling Elvis of the brother he never knew.
From an early age, “He’d run up to you as soon as you’d come into the house,” Annie Presley remembered. “He could tell you right quick, ‘I had a brother.’ ”
During the months that Vernon was incarcerated, Elvis and Gladys bonded in the unhealthy state that psychologist and Elvis biographer Whitmer terms “lethal enmeshment, a normal developmental reality for the twinless twin.” Several factors contributed to it, starting with the fact that Elvis and Gladys slept in the same bed. While such a practice was hardly unusual in impoverished households of the South, the end result was that Elvis could never differentiate from his mother, and that he remained a part of her. Such nonsexual or covert incest contributed to a sense of shame, sexual confusion, and conflict.
Shame was something that the three-year-old was already grappling with on two other fronts. While Vernon would never be a strong father figure, his absence, and Elvis’s witnessing his father in the frightening prison garb at Parchman during family visits, would have left such a sensitive child with a sense of disgrace. Elvis’s Tupelo playmates report that he never discussed his father’s incarceration as he grew older. As a tiny