Standing in the Rainbow (29 page)

Mozelle said, “That gospel crowd alone keeps him busy night and day.”

The reporter addressed the next question to both of them. “What would you say is the secret of his success?”

They both thought about it and Mozelle spoke first. “I would say that it’s his love of pageantry and knowing people. He told me one time, he said, ‘Aunt Mo’—Mo, that’s what he calls me—he said, ‘Aunt Mo, people need a little help to cry over their departed.’ He said most people try to hold it in when they should let go and get it over with. And believe me, with his theater background he knows exactly how to tug at your heartstrings . . . with music and lighting and all. He really knows how to pull it out of you.”

“That’s true. I’ll guarantee you will not go to one of Cecil’s funerals and not wind up crying along with the rest of them. I know. He did Old Lady Brock’s funeral and by the time we were halfway into the service he had me carrying on like she was my own mother. By the time he’s done you come out feeling like a dishrag—but you feel good too, don’t you?”

“You do,” said the other aunt. “And with him it’s not just a business. I’ve never been to one of his services that he didn’t get all emotional himself. Every time, no matter who the departed is, he sits in the back and has himself a good cry. I think he enjoys his work as much as the customers do. And he is not afraid to spend money. He hires only the best cosmeticians and hair people.”

“That’s right. I’ve yet to go to one of his funerals where the family didn’t say that the deceased looked better dead than when they were alive.”

The reporter thanked them and went home and wrote her story. She was tempted to headline the piece “Better Dead Than Alive” but thought better of it and used “Funeral King Kind to His Mother” instead.

Ferris’s Funeral

T
RUE ENOUGH
, when Ferris Oatman died suddenly in 1952 of a massive stroke, Cecil Figgs was the first one called. Although it was seventy-five miles from Ferris’s hometown, Cecil decided the service was to be held at the old Boutwell Auditorium in Birmingham, where the Oatmans had sung at so many sacred-music festivals. On the day of the funeral every gospel group in America showed up to pay their respects. Everyone said it was one of the biggest the gospel world had seen, by far. Besides all the Oatmans and the Varners and the devoted fans, and the gospel groups by the hundreds, so many buses rolled in that they did not have room to park them all. Even the mayor and the governor himself showed up.

Ferris’s large white casket was covered in a spray of white carnations with black musical notes shaped out of little black pipe stems that Cecil had personally designed. As a tribute, Beatrice Woods, backed up by a stage full of twenty-six gospel groups, sang “There Will Be Peace in the Valley.” By the time it was over, Minnie was so torn apart she had to be put in a wheelchair and rolled out of the auditorium. It was a fine funeral, just the kind that Cecil Figgs loved. Big and showy. Everything had gone well except for Ferris’s brother Le Roy. He had been so riddled with guilt over leaving the group and joining up with the hillbilly band that he showed up drunk and kept yelling all through the service for Ferris to forgive him. Betty Raye was the only member of the family that would speak to him that day.

Hamm had driven Betty Raye over to Birmingham for her father’s funeral and he used this opportunity to shake hands and introduce himself to as many people as he could. Before the service started, while working the crowd, Hamm had watched the governor out of the corner of his eye. He had never been this close to a real governor, a man of such power and importance. He noticed with fascination how everyone clambered around him, how all the men on his staff jumped when he said jump, and how the entire auditorium hung on his every word as he delivered his short eulogy.

Before the day was over and they went back home, two momentous things had happened.

1.         Hamm had discovered exactly what office he wanted to run for.

2.         Hamm had met Cecil Figgs.

Emmett Crimpler

B
EATRICE
W
OODS HAD
been the first to call Dorothy and tell her what had happened to Minnie. Dorothy immediately got on the phone and called Betty Raye, who had taken the baby and gone over to be by her mother’s side.

Dorothy said, “Honey, I just heard. Is there anything you need or anything Doc and I can do to help?”

“Oh, thank you,” Betty Raye said, “but I just don’t know what anybody can do now. I’m so worried about her—she won’t see the doctor, and it’s been almost three weeks since she’s eaten a thing.”

“Oh, dear. Well, keep me posted and just know we are all sending you our love.”

After Ferris’s funeral Minnie had said to the boys and Uncle Floyd, “Take me home.” They’d put her on the bus and drove her, Minnie crying all the way. When she got to the little house in Sand Mountain, she announced, after the boys helped her get in bed, “I can’t go on without Ferris. I’ve come home to die.”

The entire family was so upset that they called in her personal preacher, the Reverend W. W. Nails, and prayed over her. But it did no good. “It’s no use, Reverend Nails,” she said weakly. “Yea . . . though I have oft walked through the valley of the shadow of death, due to high blood pressure, diabetes, inflammatory arthritis, and gout, I always prayed myself out the other side. But now I don’t want to come out the other side. I’m just gonna lay here reading Scriptures until I go.”

The Reverend W. W. Nails came out of the bedroom and reported, “That woman has gone sick to the soul with grief and nothing can help her now except a miracle.”

Everyone pleaded with her. Betty Raye cried and begged her to at least eat a cracker. But she would not. The house was flooded with flowers and letters from fans, although nothing helped. Chester the dummy came in and pleaded his little wooden heart out. “Oh, Momma Oatman,” he said, “get up, we need you. What will happen to the Oatman family without you?”

“Little Chester,” she said, “honey, I lost the will to sing when we lost your Uncle Ferris. . . . You take care of Floyd and be a good boy.”

Floyd could not take it and ran out of the room and locked himself in the bathroom again.

Bervin and Vernon came in, not knowing what to say. She took their hands and said, “Boys, music is left my heart. You and the rest is going to have to be brave and go on without me.”

There was great speculation in the entire gospel world. Articles appeared in the
Singing News
wondering if the death of Ferris meant the end of the Oatmans. Someone even called and asked if their bus was for sale.

But help was on the way in a six-foot-five-inch package called Crimpler. A few days later a green Studebaker drove up to the house and he got out.

Vernon saw him first and exclaimed, “It’s Emmett Crimpler!” The boys threw the door of her bedroom open and said, “Somebody’s here to see you, Momma.” Minnie was so weak at this point she could barely sit up. Emmett walked in and stood at the end of her bed and, not saying a word, he opened his mouth and sang to her “Sweeter as the Days Go By” in the most beautiful bass voice she had ever heard. After he finished he said, “Minnie, if you can hear me, I’ve come to tell you that I’m available to sing with you if you want me.”

Minnie sat up a little more in the bed. Emmett Crimpler was considered, along with J. D. Sumner and James (Big Chief) Wetherington, as one of the great basses in gospel music. He told Minnie he had had a dream where Ferris had come to him and told him to leave the group he was with and to go over and take his place.

After an hour she said to Bervin, “Run down to the drive-in and get me an order of fries and a ham-and-cheese sandwich.”

Emmett did not mention that he had wanted to leave the Harmony Boys for over a year but it did not matter. His arrival had been a miracle, said Reverend Nails.

Minnie had lost over thirty-five pounds—and the Oatmans were on the road once more!

A Man of the People

H
AMM
S
PARKS WAS NOT
, as noted, particularly good-looking, not very tall, only about five foot nine, and of average build. He had brown hair, dark brown eyes, but he had something more. He had charm and was naturally seductive and he did not even know it. There is a certain kind of appeal about people who know
exactly
what they want and let you know up front what you can do to help them get it and what you can expect in return.

But the most seductive thing about Hamm, which made his overt, raw ambition oddly charming, was that, unlike most ambitious men, he meant what he said. There was not a covert or phony bone in his body. He believed that everyone was his friend and that he was his or her friend. He believed that he was the person to speak for them, to fight for the average person, and for those who were being pushed around. And he was a man looking for a fight. Dukes up, ready to take on the world. He was nice but tough and single-minded and came from a long line of proud people.

When the Tennessee Valley Authority had wanted to take over the family’s land and build a dam to supply electricity for the entire region, his father had fought them as hard and as long as he could. But to no avail. In the end the TVA flooded the entire area and nothing of theirs was left. They even dug up his ancestors who had fought and died in the Civil War and moved them to another place. Unlike most of the others in Norris, Tennessee, who had made the best of a bad situation and had gone to work for them, his father had refused to accept a government job or to live in the company town they had created. He had moved his family around and had spent his remaining years painting the roofs of barns all over the South with
SEE ROCK CITY
. It was a rough job and paid little money and eventually killed him at age forty-one but by God he had not caved in to the federal government. And as far as his son was concerned, he died a hero. His father had told him over and over, “Son, if the federal government can steal one man’s land and get away with it, democracy is in danger of failing. Once they sacrifice one for the so-called good of many, you’ve got socialism. Now, if they had asked me for my land, I might have given it up. I’m not dumb enough not to realize that electricity was a good thing but when they just come in and don’t give me a choice—that’s what wars are fought over. That’s why I fought, to be able to be free from government. To own my own land. That’s all we had. And the bastards took it away from us and don’t ever forget it.” This one event had changed his father and his family’s life forever. It had forged Hamm into a fierce defender of individual rights. His own and everybody else’s. In this one respect he was like a horse with blinders and could see neither left nor right. Now that the Depression and the war were over, he thought that Roosevelt’s handout programs should be stopped. He had no sympathy for anyone who would not work if they could. He knew firsthand what a toll a handout exacts from the spirit and dignity of a man. The only time he had ever taken anything from the federal government was one terrible day after his father had died. His mother was sick and he had walked all the way to Knoxville to get help. Although they had not signed up for it, the woman at the welfare office had begrudgingly handed him a sack with navy beans, a piece of a side of beef, a few potatoes, flour, and sugar in it. He had taken it and cried all the way home, thinking about how his father would have felt. But they were just about starving to death so they ate it. Afterward he had gone outside and vomited it back up. Sick with shame. That day he’d vowed never to take another thing from the government as long as he lived.

He went to work the next day at age thirteen and saved enough money to buy a used twenty-two rifle and every day before and after school he hunted and brought home meat for the table. In summer he fished and planted vegetables, swapped catfish and turnips for eggs, sugar, and cornmeal. Swapped rabbits, deer, and squirrels for money to buy shoes and clothes for his sisters. It was understandable why Hamm was to grow up hard-pressed to understand why any man that could would not work. To have little patience with men who would not fight and die for what they believed. Just like his father and grandfather before him, within a few hours after Pearl Harbor he had joined the army as a foot soldier. Hamm’s total belief that he was put here on this earth for a purpose and would certainly not die made him the perfect soldier and leader of ground troops. His expert ability with a gun and his lack of fear caused him to do things that another man would not have. In war, if you want to live, these feats are rewarded with medals and offers of advancement. But even then, between battles, some in the deepest jungles of the Pacific, he considered his future. When the army tapped him for officers’ training, he declined. He knew that after the war, just by sheer numbers, a lot more enlisted men would be voting than officers. He made a lot of good and loyal friends while he was in the army. When he returned home he worked part-time and almost finished college, but after he and Betty Raye married he dropped out and went to work full-time, trying to save a little more money for a house. But in 1952 the urge to go into politics was too great, so he quit his job at the Allis-Chalmers tractor company and ran for Pettis County commissioner of agriculture.

Even though it was just a county election, their rented house was in constant upheaval. Phones ringing, people in and out, and after he won, Betty Raye made him promise not to do that to her again. He held that office for a year and did a good job. But he was anxious to move on. What Hamm wanted next was to run for the office of state commissioner of agriculture. All Betty Raye wanted was for them to buy a small home of their own and have some security. At the moment they did not have anything but a two-year-old baby and the use of a car the county had provided and now they were about to lose that. The county job had paid very little and they’d had to move from one rental to another. But Hamm was not thinking about a house or security. He was thinking about his future. He knew that if he could just win this one election it would get his foot in the door of statewide politics. All those years of selling tractors and shaking hands had to add up to something. But he would be running against a strong incumbent. He needed campaign money and a car. He tried to get a bank loan but the bank turned him down. He knew only one person who might be able to lend him the money. He hated to do it but he called his old army buddy Rodney Tillman. Rodney had been a top Pontiac showroom salesman before the war and now owned a few used-car lots outside of Sedalia. When Hamm got him on the phone, Rodney listened a few minutes without comment, then said, “How much do you need, Hambo? If I haven’t got it, I’ll get it.”