If These Walls Had Ears (16 page)

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 sight 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.

1957  
  1959

I
n 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 students 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.