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Friday, May 6, 2022

Elvis, Graceland, and Whiteness

 For spring vacation this year, I convinced the reluctant wife to go on a trip.  One of the weird effects of COVID is that we have not been taking vacation time.  Ever since I was a kid, vacation has meant going on a trip.  My dad only ever had two weeks of vacation a year and we spent most of that time driving to some new part of the country to explore either the cultural opportunities or the sites.  I have continued this tradition with my family, but when COVID made travel suddenly dangerous, we quit vacationing – a staycation just didn’t occur to us.  So when I realized how long it had been since taking a break, and how COVID and otherwise exhausted we were feeling, and still being leery of plane travel, we looked at destinations we could drive to that we hadn’t recently visited.  We decided on Memphis – a place where I once spent a day visiting Graceland, but a place the reluctant wife had never been.  So we booked a hotel and took off.



No first trip to Memphis would be complete without going to Graceland.  The reluctant wife was skeptical, but I convinced her that it was a slice of Americana that is not to be missed.  It is an internationally known destination and millions have visited the King’s home.  I convinced her to put it on the itinerary and we booked tickets for first thing in the morning on our second day there, hoping to beat the crowds that had teemed the last time I was here some 25 years ago.  Would Graceland be different the second time around?

It turned out, in building the whole itinerary that Memphis has more to offer than just Graceland.  Who knew?  The first day we visited the National Civil Right Museum at the Loraine Motel.  We had walked across the river to Arkansas and back in the brisk morning air to begin exploring the city and to stretch our legs.  When we came upon the Loraine hotel I was unprepared for the experience of seeing the balcony on which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot.  The iconic photograph of the men pointing to the place where the shot came from was etched in mind and seeing it in living color was profoundly moving.



The museum carved into the Loraine Motel was created in a partnership with the Smithsonian, and it is a recounting of the African American experience, beginning with the middle passage – the brutal trip from Africa to the Americas for slaves - proceeded through the Civil War, reconstruction, the Jim Crow era and the long (and continuing) battle – first for human rights and then for civil rights.  We have all been continuing to become aware of this long arc, especially in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.  I teach about the doll study that was critical in the Brown vs. Board of Education School desegregation case, but it was useful to realize that this case was the culmination of 20 years of legal work to get a case before the Supreme Court.  It turns out that, before the current court, reversing a decision was a big deal.  Similarly, there were details of the Freedom Riders’ work that was news to me – despite having read John Lewis’ graphic novel March – and ending the tour in the last room that Martin Luther King occupied brought home the efforts that untold numbers of African Americans have made to achieve some measure of his dream.

When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot, he was in Memphis to help the sanitation workers.  Two of them had recently been killed when the trucks they were loading had crushed them to death along with the garbage.  They were on strike for safer working conditions, better wages, and to be included in the pension system.  They printed picket signs that said, in bold letters, I AM A MAN.  They were largely, or perhaps exclusively African Americans; doing the dirtiest of jobs and getting paid little to do it. 

After King’s death, Memphis, unlike many other cities with large black populations, did not have race riots. Federal mediators were brought in to help bring an end to the strike, and the sanitation workers got a union and better wages and working conditions, but the sign said they are still waiting for a pension system.  While things on the surface went well, Stax records, a recording studio and record label that had promoted Soul music and is now a museum, took a hit.  An apparently seamlessly integrated work place before King’s death, racial issues started to surface there after it and became one of the factors that led to its eventual demise.

So when we arrived at Graceland the next day, and to a vast and largely empty parking lot, we had race on our minds.  I was concerned that Graceland’s target audience had aged out, but the reluctant wife reassured me that he would be of interest generationally in the families that were fans.  The greeter who took our tickets explained that this is always their slow time of year – it begins to pick up with spring break and then summers (when I was here before) are crazy busy.  And that’s not figuring in the COVID slowdown in travel.  Still, we did not need to have made reservations!

Graceland is, of course, the house and grounds that Elvis bought and reshaped to his needs.  To tour Graceland, you enter a museum/theme park that is across Elvis Presley Boulevard from the mansion, watch an introductory film, take the bus over and go through the house, and then come back to wander through various halls filled with memorabilia, cars, planes, and walls of gold and platinum records along with kitschy interactive things to do.

Yes, Elvis is still King and still a person of fascination.  Or is he?  The most striking thing about the tour of the mansion and the surrounding buildings and then the museums associated with Elvis’ career is that they aren’t really about Elvis, the person, but about Elvis the entertainer and about his home – or more precisely, the public areas of his home.  The second floor of the house, where Elvis died, is off limits. 

The first time I was here, I thought they didn’t want us to go upstairs because they didn’t want us staring with macabre fascination at the bathroom where he died.  It was kind of spooky.  But this time, the audio guide informed us that the parts of the house we were seeing were the public parts, and that when Elvis came down the stairs, he was, in effect, onstage, functioning as Elvis the entertainer.  He was always careful to come downstairs dressed for whatever public might be there to see him.

At this moment in the tour, I began to feel for the guy.  He died when I was a senior in High School and he was, by then, a bloated caricature of himself, playing in Vegas and hooked on pills.  He was also only 42 and already an elder statesman in the world of Rock and Roll, a world that was very focused on youth and the “now”.  The tour, in so far as it let us into the world of Elvis the person, emphasized that he came from humble beginnings and had a meteoric rise to stardom.  Mostly, however, the tour focused on the place and on Elvis’ success.

Graceland is a marvel of Americana.  It was originally built on “Grace’s land”, the part of a rich Memphis family’s plot that belonged to Grace.  It is an estate, but it is not palatial.  It probably was, and still appears from the outside, stately.  Inside, it is kitschy.  Stained glass windows featuring roses, Elvis’ favorite flower, surround the front door.  The formal living room, to the right, is extended onto a sunporch with has a grand white grand piano to match the rug and furniture in the living room.  To the left is a formal dining room and, since Elvis died in the 70s, the dining room table and chairs, the sideboard, indeed the furniture throughout the house are from that period -  a low point in the history of both fashion and interior design.  After a detour to the basement to see his entertainment center – with three TVs to catch all three local stations simultaneously – and the pool room with an amazing canopy over the table, the tour of the house ends with the jungle room, a family room with green shag carpeting on the floors, walls and ceilings!

Out back is the business office where Elvis’ father kept track of the checks, bills and correspondence, a racquetball and gym building, swimming pool, a trophy building, filled with memorabilia about the house (last time this was where the gold records were displayed) and Elvis and his parents’ grave, including his mother’s original headstone that included both a cross and a Star of David in honor of her maternal grandmother being Jewish.  But you have to Google Judaism to find this out.  The audio guide is long on telling about the building and short on describing those who lived here.

Closer to home, in Louisville, the Ali museum is about the person, Muhammed Ali, born Cassius Clay.  It describes his life and his character, and it doesn’t, as it were, pull any punches.  It describes both his character strengths, but also his weaknesses.

Graceland, on the other hand, is a shrine.  In so far as Elvis is portrayed, he is portrayed as a fun loving, somewhat impulsive entertainer.  A high school graduate who had a few hit singles before being drafted into the army, he turned out hit after hit, and then B movie after B movie, and we are told little about his ambitions, about his relationship with his agent, or about his relationship with his wife.  (We did skip the area that told the story of growing up as Elvis’ daughter, so maybe there was more biographical material there).

What we were told is that Elvis wondered why he had been singled out to have the talent that he did.  Apparently he read books on spirituality, partly in an attempt to understand how or why God had singled him out.  I remember seeing an interview of Elvis where he described his talent as the ability to communicate feeling in singing.  He felt his true competition in the field was not any of a number of other good looking guys, but Roy Orbison, whose ability to bring out the emotion in a song rivalled his own and whose looks most certainly did not.

I have promised in the title to articulate how Elvis and Graceland epitomize whiteness – this esoteric and difficult concept that is used to describe the dominant culture in America (and globally).  It is a term that is slippery and hard to pin down, in part because it is formed, at least in America, from high and low, north and south, and from a confluence of many national and ethnic rivers.  And yet it is referred to and experienced as if it were a monolithic concept.

The aspects of whiteness that Graceland and Elvis’ portrayal there seem to me to capture are: First and foremost, an emphasis on accomplishment rather than character – on the achievement rather than on how the achievement is attained.  Elvis is portrayed as having a God given talent that he used to become the king of Rock and Roll.  He is rewarded for utilizing this mysterious talent, so he is on stage, performing, acting, making a living – in Elvis’ terms, taking care of business, all the time.  His credo is, “I am what I have done or accomplished, not what I have felt and not how I have achieved what it is that I have achieved”.  This means that there is a certain hollowness to the experience of being a white man. So there is no small irony that Elvis achieves what he does because he is able to communicate what it feels like, I think, to be alive – to be vital, while simultaneously not quite feeling that his own feelings are authentic.  No small feat.

Second, the stuff that makes those feelings legitimate needs to be hidden.  The back story is somehow shameful.  In Elvis’ case, this has to do with – well, what?  We don’t know because we aren’t told what it is, at least not at Graceland.  He is not portrayed as some kind of tragic hero, kept under the thumb of Colonel Tom Parker, his business manager, for instance.  Nor is the relationship with his Mother described in detail – though there are enough hints at it to suggest that there would be a lot of grist for the mill there.  And his marriage (and affairs) – those are off limits except for a very white washed version.  So there is a denial – as if there were something to hide instead of something to understand.  When we project this onto whiteness in general, there is a ton under that surface.  It is as if Graceland is taking its cues from those who would whitewash history and portray our country as having always been color blind.

Third, there is just a whiff of arrogance and disobedience – enough to code signal that the stuff that is not being talked about makes him one of us, but not enough to make him culpable in any way.  I don’t know whether this is characteristic of Whiteness in general, but it certainly is of American Whiteness.  What I mean by this – Elvis the Pelvis – a nickname he is stated to have disliked – clarifies that Elvis is a sex symbol – and a symbol of the US moving out from under the repressive post WWII model of the good and obedient populace wanting to become diligent.  Elvis clarified that we – men and women – want to have fun.  One the many B movie posters included one about a movie where Elvis seduces a nun played by Mary Tyler Moore into a different life.  We are revolutionaries.  We do things that others have not done.  We are ashamed of our southern brothers, but we also admire them for being rebels.  But we are rebels – and Elvis certainly embodied this – in a sneaky way.  We are rebels who carefully protect our public image and pretend to the world and ourselves that we don’t really mean it – while our code signal warns people not to test our resolve. 

   


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