Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [9]
Gladys’s family was large, sprawling, and financially unstable, but in some ways, the Smiths were high-minded and genteel compared to the Presleys, another matriarchal southern clan. None of that was lost on the locals.
As Tupelo historian Roy Turner recounts, “When Mertice Finley Collins told her mother she had bumped into Gladys Smith in town and learned she had married Vernon Presley, her mother replied, ‘One of the Presleys above the highway,’ which was to distinguish where in the East Tupelo hierarchy they were. Even as Tupelo looked down on East Tupelo, East Tupelo was divided into two sects—the more prosperous below the highway, and the less fortunate above the highway. The highway being 78.”
Vernon’s grandmother, Rosella Presley, was the daughter of Dunnan Presley Jr., a Confederate army deserter and bigamist who abandoned the family when Rosella was a baby to return to his first wife and child. Rosella, who never knew him, grew up independent and freethinking, and continued the tradition, bringing ten illegitimate children into the world by various men who never stayed long enough to know their offspring. A sharecropper, she died at sixty-three without ever identifying the fathers of most of her children. But her youngest son, Joseph Presley, would say a man named Steele, part Cherokee Indian, sired at least a few of her brood.
“She was a very strict disciplinarian, but a loving mother. Despite the hardships, she always managed to give each of us a little present at Christmas—even if it was only a piece of candy or a secondhand pair of shoes.” Though she had no real education, she wanted better for her children, and saw to it that they attended school.
Two of them exemplified the best and worst of the family and set themselves up as passionate rivals, in the tradition of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Noah Presley, the “good” son, moved to East Tupelo, where he ran a grocery store and drove a school bus. Civic minded, with a soft spot for children (he had thirteen of his own), he regularly took the kids of East Tupelo to the zoo in Memphis on Sundays. In 1936, when he ran for mayor of East Tupelo—then little more than a wide spot in the road, and considered inferior to the larger town of six thousand citizens—he was handily elected, gaining praise for improving East Tupelo’s physical facilities.
On the other end of the scale was Jessie Presley, also known as J.D. His mother had bestowed a gift upon him that she’d withheld from the rest of her children—honoring him with his real father’s surname, McClowell, in addition to her own. A sharecropper on Orville Bean’s dairy farm, Jessie had five children—Vernon, Vester, Gladys Earline, Nasval Lorene (also known as Nashville, or Nash), and Delta Mae—with wife Minnie Mae Hood, a tall, skinny, peppery woman from Fulton, Mississippi, whom he tried to dominate. Like his son, Jessie had married at seventeen, wedding an older woman (Minnie Mae was eight years his senior) of higher social standing.
In contrast to his brother, Jessie D. McClowell Presley was as self-centered and parsimonious as Noah was generous. Everyone in East Tupelo talked about how mean he was, particularly when he drank. They clucked about his habit of locking up his whiskey so Minnie Mae couldn’t get to it, and laughed at his stinginess in dictating how many pieces of cheese she could slice or biscuits she could serve when guests came calling. Remembered one relative, “When that was gone, you was out, so we didn’t ever go back no more for dinner. We went somewhere else if we wanted to eat.”
Still, Jessie has his defenders. “Was he being stingy, or were the