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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