If These Walls Had Ears (15 page)

In the Murphree household, the females referred to Billie as “the king of duct tape.” For most jobs, that wide gray tape was
Billie’s answer to the problem. In later years when he began driving the Cadillac Ruth wanted, he even taped on a broken taillight.
That embarrassed Ruth, though maybe not as much as when he patched his Bible with great swaths of the tape and carried it
to church that way.

He insisted on doing most of the repairs at his rental houses—“If you hire everything out, you can’t make any money,” Billie
would say—as well as at home. If he couldn’t use duct tape, he resorted to what was known among the Murphrees as “nigger rigging”
—a tortured, make-do solution, such as the wires he and Tommy ran allover the house to hook up extra, unreported telephones.
When the Murphrees moved into 501 Holly, the old heater in the fireplace had a couple of ceramic burners that had slipped.
Billie rigged up a pair of coat hangers to hold the sagging burners in place.

The subterranean water problem baffled him, though. He had worried about it after the bathroom floor repair, but his concerns
grew after he’d had floor furnaces installed in the hall and the music room. The girls began to notice that the grate to the
music room’s floor furnace would rise whenever there was a hard rain. The grate appeared to be
floating.
If that was so, it meant that the water under the music room was so high that it was washing up against the bottom of the
furnace.

Martha says you could always tell when Billie was wrestling with a problem. He would put the tips of his fingers together
and press them into a point—into the shape of a steeple, or a temple. His index fingers, especially, would be pressed against
each other so tightly that the knuckles would pop. He would stare at the temple he’d made with his fingers and continue to
pop his knuckles. When the popping stopped, his decision was made. Years later, Martha read in a psychology magazine that
people who hold their fingers together that way think of themselves as superior to everyone else.

Billie tried a sump pump to remove the standing water, but the pool kept building up. Then he decided water was seeping down
from the house next door, which stood higher than his. To fix that, he gathered a pile of brick and fieldstone—whatever he
could find—and mixed them with concrete, fashioning a retaining wall along the driveway on the line between the two houses.
He and Tom also paved the old strip-concrete driveway, toddler Joyce adding her initials in the wet cement for good measure.
The idea was that maybe now the water running off the roof would trickle away and not steal into the darkness of the foundation,
where the very structure of the house would be at risk.

I find myself thinking of Billie and the water in symbolic terms, as though the water were the physical incarnation of all
the undercurrents of society that he tried desperately to keep from seeping into his family’s life. In the 1950s, Billie was
appointed to the Little Rock Censor Board, a group formed decades before when the local PTA had become alarmed by movie scenes
it considered unfit for youngsters. The ordinance creating the censor board stated that its purpose was “to protect the public
peace, sense of decency, and safety,” and it went on to name those things that would from then on be illegal:

Scenes and acts in which the names of God and Jesus Christ were used without veneration; scenes and acts exhibiting nakedness;
scenes and acts in which dialogue and jokes, gestures, and songs had a double meaning, suggesting obscenity or sex relations;
scenes and acts in which proper home life was ridiculed and immorality or underworld life or unfaithfulness in marriage was
made to seem attractive; and scenes and acts where marriage or love scenes between different races were portrayed.

The board had been lax during the war, but by 1947 it was clear to those concerned that something had to be done about the
increase in lurid magazines and books and pictures. A new ordinance was written, one less didactic than the original. The
new one left definitions of lewdness to the discretion of the censor board.

Billie took his board duties very seriously—after all, he had two daughters about to come of age, and he owed an all-out effort
to them. That meant his house,
this
house, had to be an ark capable of withstanding the flood.

Sunday was a day of rest at 501 Holly. Billie’s rule was: no television, no card playing, no music, no wearing of shorts on
that day. Sunday was a time to be quiet and praise the Lord—and besides, the preacher often came for after-church dinner.

Pat remembers that the day inevitably started with her father singing hymns as he dressed for Sunday school. Billie wasn’t
an accomplished singer, but he loved the old Baptist standards. As he shaved in the new pink-and-black bathroom, he would
hum or sing “The Old Rugged Cross,” one of his mother’s favorites. From behind the shower curtain came his lilting melody
of “Just as I Am.” Putting on his white shirt, blue suit, and red tie, he launched into “How Great Thou Art.”

Ruth and the girls could hear him throughout the house as they ate breakfast and got themselves ready. Then, at the appointed
time, the family would walk out the door to the car, Bibles in hand. There’s a scene in one of the home movies, probably at
Easter, when the Murphree females come swishing out of the house in hats and gloves and full-skirted dresses like a gaggle
of Loretta Youngs on the way to a party. During the ten-minute ride to Second Baptist downtown, Billie drove and the whole
family sang along:

On a hill far away

Stood an old rugged cross.
…

Every one of the Murphrees went to Sunday school and then to church. On Sunday afternoons, the girls were required to attend
Baptist Training Union—BTU—and then evening church service. On Wednesday nights, there was prayer meeting. The Murphrees were
typical of the times. In 1954,
McCall’s
reported that church membership “has rocketed from 50 million in 1929 to more than 95 million—a gain of 90 percent, while
the population was increasing only 31.4 percent.” Even outside church, the trend was reflected in the public’s choice of reading.
Norman Vincent Peale’s
The Power of Positive Thinking,
Catherine Marshall’s
A Man Galled Peter,
Thomas Chastain’s
The Silver Chalice,
and the new Revised Standard Version of the Bible all hit the best-seller lists in 1952 and stayed there into 1953. In 1954,
President Eisenhower changed thePledge of Allegiance to reflect the mood of the country: He added the words
under God.

I think I understand how deeply the Murphrees’ religion affected the life inside this house. I grew up Baptist, too, attended
BTU and prayer meeting, and I remember that church felt mighty
aggressive
in those days. Maybe it was the Russians—the Cold War against “Godless communism” was heating up—or maybe it was simply an
expression of postwar superiority. Preachers had a lot of power, and they weren’t shy about telling their flock how to live
their lives. For most of my childhood, we had a Sunday-morning ritual much like the Murphrees’, though with more grumbling
and less singing. Then one morning-1 guess I was in high school—it became noticeable to everyone that my father wasn’t getting
dressed. We couldn’t see him, but we knew he was still sitting in the living room reading the paper. My brother and I exchanged
meaningful glances. Finally, my mother had to break the ice. “Honey!” she said. “It’s time to get ready!”

Phil and I held our collective breath. Dead silence for a long moment. Then we
heard our father’s voice from the other room. “I’m not going,” he said. “I’m not going ever again.” As he later explained
it, he was fed up with the hypocrisy of the Baptist Church. He shopped around for a while, and eventually he and Mother began
going to the Presbyterian.

But the Murphrees lived a mid-century Baptist life. Joyce remembers that Catholics and Jews weren’t spoken of highly in their
household (never mind Negroes). Pat recalls that her mother wouldn’t let her play with one little girl whose mother had been
divorced. When Billie took the family out to eat, if they walked into a restaurant and Billie noticed alcohol being served,
he would quietly say, “Let’s don’t eat here.” In general, says Joyce, if you didn’t come from a family in which the father
went to work, the mother stayed home, and everyone attended your kind of church, then “the Murphrees didn’t need to be friends
with you.”

* * *

Home is a fragile ecosystem. One person’s dark mood can suck the very sunlight out of a room. An icy stare can steal a house’s
heat. It’s part of what makes the concept of family—a group of angst-ridden individuals living together under one roof—almost
laughably difficult. In the midst of that hothouse jungle, most of us think and act as individuals, rather than putting the
family above ourselves so it can have what it needs to flourish. Once the precarious balance is out of whack, then blooms
fade. Roots wither.

In the mid-1950s, the mood in the Murphree house changed dramatically. Martha was a willful teenager by then, and Pat was
right behind her. At the same time, Ruth started becoming ill a lot. She complained about horrible headaches. She was hospitalized
several times for what were diagnosed as bladder infections. She was irritable, and everyone in the house had to walk on eggshells
to avoid setting her off. This spell lasted four or five years.

Today her daughters suspect the onset of menopause, but at the time her family thought her ailments were psychosomatic. “She
never suffered alone,” Martha says. Joyce remembers her father telling the girls, “I’m going to put your mother in the hospital.
It’s the only thing that’ll make her happy.” Whatever the causes of Ruth’s pain, the effect in the household was profound.
Ruth would hole up in the downstairs back bedroom and not come out for hours. She would try to pick fights with Billie, which
he would quietly deflect. She began talking about moving to a different house—one newer and finer. There was one farther into
the Heights that she particularly wanted, and the whole family went to look at it. Eventually, Billie put his foot down. He
liked 501 Holly, and that’s where the Murphrees were going to stay.

For a time, he moved upstairs to a corner of the attic, which he had finished off —in his way—so Pat could have bunking parties.The
floor was still nothing but splintery attic planks, but Pat liked the room so much that she moved there, too. She slept in
the corner nearest Lee and Holly, and Billie had his bed at the opposite corner, toward Woodlawn and Elm. Pat pasted silver
stars all over the slanting plasterboard ceiling so she could pretend she was sleeping under a peaceful sky. The attic was
a make-believe place. It was a hideout.

Martha was the one most at odds with her mother. That was due partly to Martha’s being the oldest, but also to Martha’s rebellious,
even belligerent nature. Her mother made her crazy. Whenever Ruth said, “What will the neighbors think?” Martha could barely
contain herself: “Who
cares
what the neighbors think!” she would scream. And, with that, she would stomp up the stairs and slam her bedroom door. She
says she soon decided it was just better to avoid her mother whenever possible. Coming home from school was like approaching
a minefield: Would she trip the explosion, or would she make it through safely? “If mother was in the kitchen, I went in the
den,” Martha says. “If mother was in the den, I went up to my bedroom.”

Even when the rest of the family thought Martha was up in her room, she sometimes wasn’t. She had matured early, and she liked
boys. With the same resourcefulness and agility that had allowed her to circumnavigate her floor on doorknobs, she’d now calculated
a way to sneak out of her bedroom at night without anyone knowing. She would crawl through her window onto the flat landing
on the roofjust outside, and from there her long legs could reach the trellis that held up Jessie Armour’s sultry Cape jasmine
bush. Ruth and Billie would be downstairs in the den reading—poring over the
National Geographic
or one of their numerous books on history or religion—and Martha would be outside in the dark meeting her boyfriend. Hours
later, she would simply use her key and walk in through the front door, knowing everyone else was fast asleep.

Martha also began having conflicts with her father. As a member of the censor board, Billie once wrote a stern note to Martha’s
literature teacher protesting a play the class was reading, and he kept his ears open to the music she was listening to. None
of the girls would ever take to piano the way Ruth and Billie had hoped. By the mid-1950s, popular music was becoming too
hot for Mozart to match. The week Martha turned fifteen, the number one song in the country was “Rock Around the Clock” by
Bill Haley and the Comets. It was an exciting sound, and new, at least to white kids. Only later was it obvious that that
song had marked the absolute end of one era and the beginning of another.

Martha spent a small fortune on 45-rpm records, which Billie monitored the best he could. He had a troubling suspicion that
something insidious was seeping into his home through the lyrics to some of the new music. One of Martha’s favorites was a
raucous song by Etta James called “Roll with Me Henry.”

Just what in the world did
that
mean? Billie was taking no chances he confiscated that record, as well as others he deemed equally offensive, from Martha’s
collection.

Billie’s daughters and widow all hasten to make the point that Billie Murphree wasn’t seen in the world as a sanctimonious
man. He certainly had his standards, but he was nevertheless a regular guy—a backslapper, a political insider, a man who never
met a stranger. He was kind and fair, and he could bend his moral judgments when a higher moral was involved. Once, he got
word that one of his mortgagees had been killed. The man had been a kind of shade-tree mechanic, and a car had fallen on him
and crushed his chest. Billie drove down to the Delta town where the man had lived to see what kind of benefits he could arrange
for the man’s family. He talked to the wife, who in the course of the conversation told him that, in fact, she and the late
father of her three children hadn’t technically been married. That meant she wouldn’t be eligible for a widow’s pension, which
in turn meant that Billie would have to foreclose. But he didn’t. Even though he disapproved of the concept, he managed to
have her declared a common-law wife, and she was able to keep the house. When Billie told Ruth about it, she was stunned:
Never before in her life had she heard the term
common-law wife.