If These Walls Had Ears Read online

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  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.

  I’ve come to suspect that there was even a part of Billie that identified with the dangerous secular world he was fighting on the censor board. He certainly understood sex appeal. When young girls would come over to the house, he would tease them. “How’s your love life?” he would say. He was vain about his own good looks. In photographs, he was never shot candidly—he posed, the way people who know they’re attractive learn to do, making sure he showed himself off to best advantage. Martha once even caught him in the bathroom applying a little makeup to a blemish on his face.

  Maybe that side of him explains the car. The year was 1956, a busy year for Billie, both at the censor board and at home. First, a writer named Grace Metalious published a scandalous book called Peyton Place. Second, a singer named Elvis Presley was inciting ever-more-unseemly riots among young women. Third, Pat became a teenager, which meant Billie now had two teenage girls, and an angry wife, at home. But as if to add fuel to the fire, when Martha turned sixteen, Billie honored that milestone by giving his oldest daughter a 1955 baby blue Ford Fairlane convertible. Forty years later, Martha remembers it as “the sexiest, greatest car.”

  On the censor board, Billie was a member of the motion picture committee. That meant he focused on movies, but of course he was privy to discussions of all the printed materials, and those discussions had a deep effect on him. I found a grainy news photo of the censor board in action, sitting around a raised table at the front of what appears to be a vast but empty auditorium, somewhat like a courtroom. The women are in hats, the men in coats and ties, reflecting the importance of their mission. Billie sits at the extreme left in the picture, listening intently, his fingers pressed into the shape of a temple.

  Martha’s new car and Billie’s censor board duties clashed in as perfect a portrait of the conflicting strains of the times as you’re likely to find. A car is freedom, and a car like that approaches anarchy. That car had a radical effect on life in the Murphree home. Now, whenever Martha wanted to get away from her mother, she would simply jump into her baby blue convertible and take off. She carried her Kent cigarettes in a metal Band-Aid box in her purse, and as soon as she was out of sigh
t of 501 Holly, she would fire up a cigarette and turn up the radio. Elvis’s “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” was playing everywhere in mid-summer of 1956, and Billie had little use for Elvis. But so what? Gripping the steering wheel of her very own car, Martha felt, for the first time, that she had control of her own life. Today she realizes that some of Ruth’s outbursts were caused by frustration over losing control of her daughter.

  Martha sometimes even threw that loss up into her parents’ faces. Once, when the family had a maid who didn’t live in the garage apartment, Ruth asked Martha to drive the Negro woman home. The “Negro problem” had become a hot topic ever since 1954 and the Supreme Court’s ruling against school segregation. Ruth was opposed to integration, and she was very vocal on the subject. That gave Martha just the ammunition she needed.

  Knowing her traditional place, the maid started to climb into the backseat. “No, no, no,” Martha said. “You sit up front with me.” As she backed out of the driveway, Martha could see her mother standing at the front door scowling. When Martha got home, Ruth was waiting. “Don’t you ever do that again,” she said. “The maid is not to sit in the front seat of the car with you.”

  “She’ll sit in the front seat if I’m driving,” Martha said. It wasn’t that Martha was so liberal; it was just that her mother was so demanding.

  Pat wouldn’t get a car when she turned sixteen, and neither would Joyce. But it was too late to backpedal on that score with Martha. So Billie and Ruth became even stricter. Martha says they wouldn’t let her go on a real “car date” until she was almost seventeen. Even when she was eighteen, Billie laid down the law regarding the movies she could and couldn’t see. One he was particularly adamant about was The Long Hot Summer, starring Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. Martha lied and said she was going to see something else, then went to see it anyway. When she came home, she told her father that not only had she gone to see it against his wishes but also that there wasn’t one thing worth censoring in the entire movie.

  Billie and Ruth (here with Joyce) made the rules and expected them to be followed.

  “Well,” Billie said, “don’t you remember that she walked around the bedroom in her slip?”

  Despite the freedom the Ford convertible gave Martha, it also became a powerful tool of punishment for Billie. Once, Martha had picked up several friends, and one of the boys wanted to drive her car. She let him. When she got home, Billie was waiting. “Martha, you let somebody else drive the car,” he said. She tried to lie, but he knew too much. He knew the street she’d been driving on, knew that the boy had been smoking, knew that he’d had his arm around Martha. “I won’t tolerate that,” Billie said. She was grounded for a week. Later, he told her that one of his and Ruth’s bridge-playing friends had driven past Martha’s entirely too recognizable car and had promptly called in a report.

  That baby blue 1955 Ford convertible had a spirit of its own. I know that because I remember the year of that car so vividly. It was the year of Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause. It was a seesaw year, the year that finally tipped the balance away from Billie and Ruth’s (and my parents’) big-band postwar innocence toward something younger and freer and not nearly as certain. Martha drove that car across that seesaw as though it were a bridge. And even when she parked the convertible outside, its spirit came into the house with her.

  Martha’s parents didn’t allow her to have boy-and-girl parties at home, so she had them only when they were away and her grandmother was staying over. On such nights, Martha and her girlfriends and their boyfriends would spend most of the evening in the music room with the lights low and the music high. There was a good deal of what was then called “smooching” going on. Martha would also inevitably perform her specialty, the “dirty bop,” a slow bump-and grind shown off to best advantage when done to a libidinal chant like Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-a-Lula.”

  Of course, Martha had to take special care on nights after the weather had been rainy. That water under the music room would make the floor furnace float, and a girl could trip in the dark if she didn’t watch out.

  Pat Murphree (foreground) at age fifteen, July 1958.

  Chapter Seven

  Murphree

  1957 1959

  In a house, you never can tell where the next trouble will erupt. A doorknob will suddenly come off in your hand. A heating duct in the belly of the house will lose a screw arid pop out of its fitting. Even if you think you know the trouble spots, you’ll still be taken by surprise. A piece of upstairs trim will swell up and warp, and the next thing you know, the rain will be leaking in downstairs and two walls away.

  That’s the way it was both literally and figuratively at 501 Holly during the second half of the 1950s. For all Billie and Ruth’s efforts to control their world, or at the very least to appear to control it, the world now seemed bent on showing how powerless they were.

  When Joyce was in the fifth grade, she came down with mononucleosis. She bad to stay home from school for a month. On the day she was supposed to go back, she pleaded with her mother for just one more day of lying on the sofa watching TV. Her older sisters would later say that Joyce was “the perfect child.” She was enough younger than Martha and Pat so that she wasn’t involved in their fights. Plus, she wasn’t spoiled like Martha, and she wasn’t angry like Pat. Ruth said okay.

  In the early afternoon, Ruth left to go play bridge, and Joyce was savoring every minute of her final day in the darkened den. Suddenly, she thought she smelled smoke. She got up and walked into the back bedroom, where the large window fan was. Nothing was burning there. Then she went into the kitchen. What she saw stunned her: Flames were climbing the wall to the left of the back-porch door. It was amazing that the fire could’ve become so intense so silently.

  Joyce ran back into the den and called the first person she could think of—the neighbor across the street. The neighbor called the fire department, and they came immediately, men in hats and coats hauling heavy equipment into the house and across the polished hardwood floor of Ruth’s living and dining rooms. They found that the hot-water heater in the back-porch closet had gone bad and burst into flames. The men attacked the kitchen wall with axes. They flooded the room with the power of their hoses.

  By the time of the fire, the Murphrees had already been assailed from directions they never would’ve imagined in the good old clear-cut days after the war. First they found themselves in a battle at school. Next they were broadsided by the church.

  In the fall of 1957, Martha began her final year at Little Rock Central High School. Her mother and father were on a much-needed vacation in England when school started, and Billie’s mother was staying with the girls. But nobody had to prod Martha to get up and go to class. She was eager: This was an important day—she was now officially a senior. There had been a lot of talk lately about integration, but Martha hadn’t been paying attention to that kind of stuff. “It wasn’t a factor in my life,” she says. What was a factor was making good grades. Martha had partied a lot in the tenth and eleventh grades, and her grades had slipped. Over the summer, she had come to the conclusion that she had to make a strong showing her senior year, or otherwise she wasn’t going to get into a decent college. Part of the partying had had to do with becoming romantically involved with her boyfriend, Jerry Leazure. Now she was secure in that relationship, so she could focus her attention on other things.

  That first morning, September 2, Martha picked up her carpool and drove to school in her baby blue Ford. When she got within a couple blocks of the school grounds, a police car was parked, blocking the street. Martha rolled down the window and asked what was going on. “We’ve closed the parking lots,” the officer said. “You’ll have to park on the street and walk to school today.” When Martha had found a spot and she and her friends had hiked back to the front of the school, they saw that it was cordoned off. There were people everywhere, and many of them didn’t look like students.

  The teachers kept the studen
ts in the classrooms with the shades drawn that entire day. They had no idea what was happening outside. That night at home, Martha arid her grandmother watched Governor Orval Faubus on television. Nine Negro children were attempting to go to school at Central, and Faubus swore he wasn’t going to permit it. He said he was activating the Arkansas National Guard to keep it from happening. Martha called one of her uncles and asked him what she should do. He told her that as long as the school was open, she had to go.

  The students were in the dark for seventeen days. A few blocks away in the governor’s office, Faubus wrangled with a federal judge, with the Department of Justice, and even with President Eisenhower. Finally, on September 20, Faubus withdrew the Guard. Three days later, the nine Negro students were admitted to Little Rock Central High School. An angry crowd appeared out front, and school adrninistrators ordered the removal of the black students through a side exit. The next day, the mob was even more unruly. President Eisenhower responded by federalizing the Arkansas Guard and ordering in one thousand troops from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne. For the next month, the nine Negro children were escorted to school and from classroom to classroom—by armed soldiers.

  Martha had several classes with the Negro students. “The classroom activities were very stressed,” she recalls. “In those classes with the blacks in them, the soldiers, four or five of them, would have duty standing around the walls in the classroom. Then, five minutes before the bell would ring to indicate that class was over, the soldiers would circle the black students and carry them down the hall, like they were little peas in a pod.”