About three miles off Exit 90 on I-20, you’ll run into Elvis Presley’s birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi. I know about this place from years of going back and forth to school in Oklahoma City. I stopped there the first time out of curiosity, but something kept drawing me back to it each time I journeyed past on the long road home and back again. Most recently in the fall of 2019, when going to a friend’s wedding out west, I stopped to pay homage to this origin story.
I’m fascinated by the origins of great people. Andalusia, the home of Flannery O’Connor, sits in the county of my birth, as does the home of Margaret Mitchell and, a few miles down the road, the stomping grounds of Alice Walker and Joel Chandler Harris. These are all somewhat modest places, but Elvis’s family home evokes a more emotional response. I can see the struggle of a young family when I go to this place. I can hear the prayers of a mother wondering how her family will make it. I can smell the drunkenness of poverty and sense the aspirations of a young man who was built by this, who cherished this, but who wanted more than this.
The house that built Elvis is all-in-all the size of my living room. It is a little white two-room house with a front porch that must be about four foot deep. Vernon and Gladys Presley were evicted from this house after failing to pay rent when Elvis was just a few years old. They, like my Papa’s family, had to move around a lot. I don’t know where all the places are that housed my grandfather’s family, but I have an image in my mind—that my great Aunt Tina planted—of feeding chickens through the floorboards. When the job and money run out, you have to find a new place. Such was the life they led.
I’ve lived a much more privileged life, as there has never been a doubt in my mind where home is, both in the place sense and the people sense. My parents have stayed married since my mother was 17. I know it hasn’t always been unicorns and rainbows for Mama and Daddy, but the fact is that they remained together through the trials life threw at them and, in turn, have provided a safe and strong foundation for my brother and me.
In the place sense, home has always been on Black Springs Road. The only time Beth and Buck Eubanks picked up and moved was next door, out of a single-wide trailer and into Granny Johnson’s old place. This patch of land will always be home to me. Part of my emotional stability is settled on the notion that no matter how bad things get, I can always find my way back to Mama and Daddy’s house, and I do just about every weekend. It’s a beautiful gift they gave me by staying put.
I have wandered. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to. I went halfway across the country to school and spent summers in Atlanta, Chicago, and New York, the city of dreams where I just knew I’d end up. I get to New York every once in a while, but I’ve settled here in Sandersville, Georgia, for the better part of a decade now. If you had told me eleven or twelve years ago that I would be here, I would have laughed in your face. But God has a vicious sense of humor sometimes, and He knew right where I needed to be—30 minutes from my Mama.
Elvis co-wrote and released a song called “We’re Gonna Move” in 1956. The song talks about all the things wrong at their place—there’s a leak, there’s a stove without a chimney, there’s holes in the walls the neighbors can see through, a window without a pane, a hole in the floor, a crack across the ceiling. He finishes each stanza with “We’re gonna move to a better home”. One of his earliest songs, these lyrics cut to the heart of his short life. Elvis went to his heavenly home at only 42, abusing prescription drugs and passing suddenly at his Graceland estate in Memphis.
Graceland is by far the most famous Elvis attraction, hosting over 500,000 visitors per year. The website for Graceland boasts that it is the most famous home besides the White House. But it is not Graceland that draws me back each time I drive out West. It’s that tiny two-room house in Tupelo.
All She Wrote 