Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [5]
Like many southern broods, the Smith family was strongly matriarchal. Doll’s illness rarely allowed her to leave her bed, but she ruled the family with her sickness. Her feelings of entitlement allowed her to keep a comb and mirror hidden beneath her pillow, while her children slept together on the floor on a mattress padded with crabgrass, held their flimsy shoes together with metal rings culled from the snouts of slaughtered hogs, and fashioned toothbrushes from the branch of a black gum tree. When the Smiths moved, as they often did, dotting the communities around Tupelo in Lee County, “She would be carefully carried on a trailer in a supine position, like a priceless artifact in a traveling exhibit,” as Elvis biographer and psychologist Peter O. Whitmer wrote in The Inner Elvis.
Her husband, Bob, desperate to scratch out a living from a land where poverty was the norm, demonstrated no love of farming, especially tenant farming, by which he fed his family. He also relied on handouts. Mertice Finley Collins remembered her mother, Vertie, would say to the Smith children, “Bring a bucket,” and then “she’d put the leftovers in it for the Smith children to eat.” Years later, once Elvis became famous, the press labeled the whole Presley clan “white trash.” The Smiths still bristle at the term, even though rumor had it that Bob provided the extras Doll wanted from a less respectable trade.
“Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you’re white trash, even if you’re a sharecropper,” insists Billy Smith, Gladys’s nephew through her brother Travis, a hard drinker with a violent streak for fighting. “I guess you couldn’t be the son of a bootlegger and not drink. Because that’s what my granddaddy Robert was, a bootlegger, even though he farmed, too.”
It wasn’t just Bob who catered to Doll, but her children, too. Though Lillian, somewhat Gladys’s rival, reported her sister to always be “lazy as a hog,” shirking her housework, she could rise to the occasion. By her teenage years Gladys was industrious, making her own clothes on her friend Vera Turner’s sewing machine when she wasn’t taking care of her mother or the crops. The harsh reality of life in Tupelo—the year Gladys was born, the town had only one short expanse of sidewalk, and no paved streets, let alone electricity—made death, religion, and sheer survival in unstable times the central themes of existence.
The late Janelle McComb, a lifelong Tupelo resident, remembered the kinds of tenets that helped most folks cope. “Old Dr. [William Robert] Hunt who delivered Elvis was my Sunday school teacher, and he was one of my granddaddy’s best friends. When I was a little girl, he told me one day that I was going to heaven, and that I would walk upon streets of gold and have a mansion. I walked a dirt path, so I couldn’t imagine that. My granddaddy ran a grocery store, so I walked in there and I said, ‘Granddaddy, Dr. Hunt says that when I die I’m going to heaven, and I’ll have a mansion.’ Then I looked up and said, ‘But, Granddaddy, how am I going to get there?’ He closed the store and he walked outside with me. There was a chinaberry tree in the yard, and he put my hand on it and he said, ‘My child, the timber you send up is what your mansion will be made of. Don’t ever send up bad timber.’ That stayed with me all the days of my life.”
Still, what got most people through day to day was the rural code of solidarity.
“This tiny impoverished community somehow survived by mutually sharing good fortune,” the late Elaine Dundy, author of Elvis and Gladys, said in 2004. “The one existing home-owned Kodak became the communal camera, as did the few radios on the streets.” If a few folks chafed at the idea, they hid it well and maintained their standing “by practicing the art of good manners with an almost ritualized politeness and having an attitude