Screening Room (14 page)

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photo credit 25.1
)

Cotton was a magical fiber. It was white, like snow. It was pure. It was soft. It breathed. It could be spun into yarn or thread. Until the development of synthetic fibers, cotton was the first choice for clothing. Negro slaves poured out their hearts into music while picking cotton. Southern belles wore dresses and frilly bloomers made of cotton. Cotton was plucked, bartered, hoarded, sold, fought and died for. Cotton cut and bruised the hands of those who picked it, but cotton could also absorb the misery of tears. Cotton could buy women, and cotton could buy men. “King Cotton” was a phrase used by Senator James Hammond of South Carolina in the late 1850s. After the Civil War and into the twentieth century, Memphis grew into the largest spot cotton market in the world.

In the course of events, cotton also became the pivot point of the major social event in Memphis, the annual Cotton Carnival. The idea for the carnival was born in 1931. In the midst of the Depression, the price of a pound of cotton had plummeted from twenty cents to five and a half cents, about the price of a Coca-Cola. Businesses all over Memphis, dependent on cotton, were withering on the vine. To raise money for the dying Memphis Chamber of Commerce, a group of businessmen paid a visit to Herbert Jennings, manager of the Loew’s Palace movie theater and a business rival of M.A.’s. It was Jennings who came up with the idea of creating an annual carnival to promote cotton. Rumor has it that a week before the fateful visit, M.A. challenged Mr. Jennings to a friendly wrestling match after the two of them had watched a showing of
Little Caesar
, starring Edward G. Robinson. No one knows whether the contest actually took place, or the exact machinations of M.A., but Mr. Jennings was apparently converted to a charitable disposition, because he began sending my grandfather complimentary passes to his theater every year. Uncle Nate probably knows the real story connecting M.A. to the Carnival.

At any rate, as Jennings’s idea for a cotton carnival grew, it came to encompass a spectacular extravaganza, including a Cotton King and Queen, a Royal Court, Ladies-in-Waiting, Ladies of the Realm, young Pages, parades, floats, marching bands, vast quantities of food and alcohol, and nonstop parties held by secret societies in the Downtown hotels. A Maid of Cotton, chosen each year from a cat fight of a competition, toured the country for months and became a national ambassador for cotton.

Initially held in winter, the Carnival was transplanted to a dizzy seven days in late May, opening with the Crown and Sceptre Ball the first night and ending with the Grand Carnival Ball on the last. At various times my family joined the Carnival. From the 1930s on, Cotton Carnival roared and ballooned until
the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which cast a pall over Memphis and marked the beginning of the disintegration of Downtown. Later, the Carnival was resurrected as Carnival Memphis.

Everyone plotted all year for the Carnival. In January, women would get fitted for their new dresses, then face the unhappy prospect of dieting for the next five months. Houses were refurbished. Jewelry was taken out of the vault. Appointments were rearranged. In March, my parents and their friends would begin making little house calls on Sunday afternoons, visiting the homes of high society to try to talk their way into the impending parties. Most of the secret societies of Carnival, such as Osiris, Isis, Luxor, Sphinz, and RaMet, excluded Jews, but one or two, including the Mystic Society of the Memphi, did not. Unlike the older Mardi Gras in New Orleans, which was based on social pedigree, the Cotton Carnival gyrated around business, cotton
business, and Jews were permitted to participate. Still, you had to be a member of one of the societies. Friendships were made and broken over who became a member where. In April, the identity of the King and Queen would be revealed in a long-awaited front-page article in the
Commercial Appeal
. The King was always an older, married man, usually a man whose family had been in business in Memphis for many generations. The Queen would be a college girl of twenty or twenty-one, the daughter of a man like the King. As soon as she was announced, the young Queen would scurry down to New Orleans to have her royal dress sewn and beaded.

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photo credit 25.2
)

My Aunt Lila was a Duchess of the
Mystic Society of the Memphi in the 1960s. “To be honest, dear, it was all just an excuse to have seven days of parties.” Memphi rented the Skyway Ballroom of the Peabody Hotel for the week. “We started drinking at eleven a.m. and continued all afternoon and into the night, quitting around two a.m. Then we’d fall into bed for a few hours and get up at ten the next morning and do it again. The only interruption was in the late afternoon, when the women retreated for an hour or two to bathe and change dresses and shoes. People took rooms at the hotel so they wouldn’t have to go home.” For the week of Carnival, children and businesses were left to fend for themselves. “A group of tall men, all wearing Egyptian headdresses and white dinner jackets, would escort the ladies to their tables. Everyone wore the most fabulous evening gowns. That was the best fun, seeing what other people were wearing. We danced and ate and drank and listened to the big bands. Of course, there were all kinds of silly ceremonies and costumes, bowing and what-not. The year I was Duchess, the crowd asked the band to play ‘Dixie.’ It was some band from New York. Either they didn’t know the tune, or they refused to play it. Several men got extremely bent out of shape and hopped up on the stage. Somehow, part of a trombone ended up on the
floor. And these were gentlemen from
very good
families, dear. This kind of behavior was just not acceptable. I walked over and said, ‘You gentlemen simply cannot behave in this way.’ Eventually, things settled down.”

One of the highlights of the week was when the King and Queen and all the Royal Court loaded themselves up on the Royal Barge, along with numerous big bands and gallons of Jack Daniel’s, and floated down the Mississippi to the front of Union Street at night. Tens of thousands of people stood on the bluff on Riverside Drive and watched the Royal Barge come down the river, lit up like a gambling casino, the bands blaring. Others ventured out onto the river on their private boats, half crocked, and followed the barge into port. “Hubert Lewis and another friend of the family, with no boating experience beyond a floating lounge chair in the club pool, once rented a motorboat for the big night at Carnival,” says Lennie. “We tried to talk Hubert out of it, but he was hell-bent. Nothing shilly-shally about Hubert. All was well until they passed under the Mississippi Bridge. Then the fireworks started. Evidently Hubert became highly excited, took a wrong turn, and ran aground on some shrubby sandbar of an island. They could hear the bands playing and see the lights of the barge in the distance, but they couldn’t be seen themselves, and no one heard their cries for help. I believe Hubert and his crew ended up spending an itchy night among the bushes and sandy weeds.”

The Cotton Carnival celebrated white society. Running parallel to Carnival, like an underground river with a fierce energy of its own, was the Cotton Makers’ Jubilee, all black. The Jubilee, started in 1935, was the brainchild of a Beale Street dentist named Dr. R. Q. Venson. As Venson and his friends recalled later, they felt it would be a good thing to “see black folk coming
down the street looking pretty.” The Jubilee had its own floats and parades, its own dueling marching bands from Douglass and Manassas and Booker Washington high schools. Music bellowed and jived from a WDIA radio float, carrying a group of black guys in suits singing into the mike. The floats and parades would boom down Main Street, then turn the corner onto Beale, passing pawnshops and rundown hotels and restaurants selling barbecue with neon signs in front.

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photo credit 25.3
)

Jubilee appointed its own black King and Queen and its black Royal Court, with everyone dressed to the hilt. Instead of a Royal Barge, the Jubilee had a Royal Coach, in which rode the King and Queen in all of their splendor. As in the white Carnival, the black Princesses were usually young college women of polish.

Many of Memphis’s white families were not pleased by the
black Jubilee. In the mid-forties, after a story in
Time
magazine on the Cotton Carnival with a picture of the black royalty,
Time
published a letter to the editor written by one Franklin S. Kimborough of Memphis:

Our dear Blanche attended Jubilee every year and sometimes sang with her church choir on a float covered with purple satin. I remember one spring in the early 1960s when Blanche’s niece Georgina was chosen as a Princess of Jubilee. Georgina was a small girl, not much over five feet, with delicate features and long, straightened hair. For several years, Blanche had been gushing about her niece, who had been second in her class at Melrose and was now one of the few black students enrolled at Memphis State University. When Georgina got elevated to Royalty, Blanche practically sailed around the house. One evening about a week after Jubilee ended, Georgina came to our house in tears to pick up Blanche. It turned out that one of her white professors had made some belittling remark about her being in the Jubilee, “dressed up like Cinderella,” and the white students jeered. As a result, Georgina had decided to drop out of college.

My mother, visibly shaken, suggested to Georgina that she transfer to Lemoyne College, where she might be “more comfortable.”

“No, ma’am,” whimpered Georgina. “I’ve got to get a job.”

Then one of my mother’s friends, who happened to be visiting that evening, muttered under her breath: “What’s a colored girl going to do with a college degree anyway.” It seems that everyone overheard this remark. Georgina broke down crying again, as did Blanche. Mother tried to comfort Blanche. But there was nothing to be done. Blanche and Georgina drove away in a rusted old Ford, the red eyes of the taillights trailing down our long driveway to the street and then out along Cherry until they were faint dots in the distance.

“Did your Aunt Lila ever tell you how she was anointed Duchess of Memphi?” asks Nate. He takes a forkful of kosher lamb from his Tupperware container—which he brings like a first-aid kit to meals at the impure Lightman houses—stares at the food with his protruding bullfrog eyes, mutters a
bracha
, and swallows. “So, it’s one night in the mid-1960s, more than five years after M.A. died, and Lila dreamed that she was attending a royal ball in a palace. Her escort was M.A. In the dream, she and her father were the same age. He wore a white tuxedo with tails. She wore a long, emerald-colored gown with a daisy pearl tiara on her head. All the guests, dressed and jeweled, applauded the two of them. That was the dream. The next day, one of the Memphi secret ‘contacts’ telephoned Lila and informed her that she had been chosen as a Duchess of the Mystic Society of the Memphi. When she got fitted for her various costumes, what would you guess but she was given a tiara exactly like the one in her dream. What would you say to that, my friend?”