Inside Graceland: Elvis' Maid Remembers (4 page)

The sofa, or should I say sofa’s’, never made it to the pool room. Vernon ended up giving one half to me and another half to one of the other housekeepers. I made good use of it for a number of years in a living room in my house.

Aunt Delta redecorated her mother’s room after Grandma passed away. She redid it in a beautiful pea green color scheme.

On the first floor of Graceland, the kitchen has pretty much remained the same over the years, except for an occasional facelift or two.

New appliances have been added, replacing the old green and red refrigerators that used to be in there, and the cabinets were updated many years ago. The carpet has been also been changed a few times.

There are pieces of plexiglass that now protect the drawers and appliances from the tourists that walk within a few feet of them on the tours. A lot of people don’t know that the kitchen and dining room is still used today by Priscilla and Lisa Marie. On special occasions when either or both of them are in Memphis, they will call up and make arrangements to have meals cooked, just like the ones they used to enjoy, right there in the mansion. After the last tour of the evening, the pieces of plexiglass are removed from around the cabinets and meals are cooked, just like they used to be prepared, and served in the dining room. A cleaning crew then makes sure that everything is put back into it’s original, and clean, condition before tours are conducted the next morning.

Originally, years before the jungle room was added to the house, a small kitchen table sat against a wall that was located where the few steps going down into the jungle room are now located. Elvis would often eat his meals at that table, with both Vernon and Gladys joining him. That table was located across from the long counter area that wound through the kitchen.

The kitchen at Graceland, as in most houses, was always the center of activity.

It was also the heart of the mansion. It was brought to life each day by the warmth of the Presley family sitting around that counter. If only those kitchen walls could talk. What a story they would tell.

“LISTENING AND LEARNING”
 

So
me of my fondest memories are of sitting around that
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tchen counter in the morning, eating breakfast with Aunt Delta. She was often one of the first ones up and I, as well as the other housekeepers, would sit around and eat breakfast with her, or if we had already eaten, have a cup of coffee with her as she ate.

She normally would eat the usual eggs and bacon, toast, and coffee with cream and sugar. It was not unusual for her to get up and re-fill everyone’s cup with fresh coffee. It sometimes seemed as if she waited on us almost as often as we waited on her. It was like a family atmosphere all the time.

Then, after breakfast and several cups of coffee, interspersed with watching the television sitting on the counter across from where we sat, (which you can still see on the tour today), she would be off to take care of the daily activities involved in running the house.

A little later in the morning, usually around ten, Dodger would wander into the kitchen from her bedroom, always looking beautiful. She was always dressed immaculately, wearing one of her beautiful dresses with trademark apron and matching handkerchief. She prided herself on always being dressed like the typical proud southern lady.

Her presence would bring about round two of the breakfast club. We would fix her a plate of biscuits, along with a bowl of redeye gravy to pour over the biscuits, and coffee to drink. We would then sit and drink more coffee with her. I often thought we were keeping the coffee industry in business in Memphis.

It was during those times, sitting around that white counter drinking coffee, that she shared so many memories of the Presley family.

She told me one time, “It was a sin that Elvis’ twin brother didn’t live. It was the doctor’s fault. He did not have sense enough to know that there were two babies instead of one. I told Vernon that doctor was no good, but Vernon was young and didn’t understand about things like that. I would have run that doctor out of town, personally, but Vernon wouldn’t let me do that.”

She told us stories of Elvis growing up. He may have become a superstar later on, but he had grown up just like any other poor child born during the depression in Tupelo, Mississippi.

She told us how Vernon and Gladys had not been able to afford medicine when Elvis got sick. When he got stomachaches, for example, they gave him hard peppermint candy that had been soaked overnight in moonshine, to help settle his stomach. Probably not what the doctor would have ordered, but apparently it worked.

Dodger told us that when Elvis was small, she lived practically next door to them in Tupelo. She said, “He was so cute. He used to get mad at Gladys for whatever reason and would walk over to my house. I always knew he was upset because he would be carrying some of his clothes in a paper bag. He’d tell me he was ‘running away.’

When Gladys would find out he was with me I would tell her to just leave him with me and I’d bring him home after he settled down.

I remember, when Elvis was little, he would play with some of the neighborhood children. Right in front of their house was a ditch that frequently had water in it. One day, Elvis, on a dare, sat in the ditch and got his clothes soaking wet. I was looking after him that day and I paddled him pretty good when he came inside. He cried, and promised not to ever do it again. Because he looked so pitiful, I ended up crying myself.

Another time I saw Gladys spanking him. When I asked what he’d done to deserve the spanking, she told me he’d called his daddy ‘Vernon’, instead of ‘daddy’. I couldn’t stand to see him being whipped, so I begged Gladys not to spank him anymore. I don’t think Elvis called his daddy ‘Vernon’ again until he got older.”

Dodger said that when Elvis was a baby he would sleep half the day if no one woke him. I often wondered if that played a part in his sleeping habits later on.

She told us that Elvis had been afraid of his grandfather, Jessie Presley, because he drank so much. She explained that he would come home late at night after he’d been drinking and Elvis would always try and hide to stay away from him. She said that was probably why Elvis never liked being around drunk people. (It didn’t matter if you were family or not, Elvis felt very uncomfortable around them. He came close to kicking Aunt Delta out of Graceland because of several drunken outbursts by her in front of Elvis and his friends. She was allowed to stay only after a tearful appeal by Dodger.)

Dodger had so many stories to tell about Elvis’ singing as a child. She told us, “We always took Elvis to church with us and he would sing and clap his little hands and shout ‘hallelujah.’ I can still see him getting so excited when the singing would start that he would run down to the front of the church near the choir and just go crazy with excitement! He would stand there, facing the audience, and swing back and forth to the beat of the music, totally oblivious to everyone’s smiling stares.” She went on, “He got his singing naturally. Both Gladys and Vernon had beautiful singing voices. They were both very musically talented in their own rights. Gladys had also been an excellent dancer in her younger days, and I’m sure that had something to do with the way Elvis learned to move.”

I learned, from listening to Dodger, that Gladys had been an excellent cook. She proudly explained that she had personally helped teach Gladys how to cook after Gladys and Vernon got married.

Dodger went on to explain that she herself had been forced to learn to cook at a very young age because her family had been so poor and she had had to earn money for the family by cooking for people in the neighborhood who were sick and could not cook for themselves. I remember her telling me one morning, “I cooked for black and white folks alike, it didn’t matter. When you’re poor, like we were, we all tried to help each other. I had to learn to cook just so we could survive.”

Dodger told me about the first time she tried to cook. She said it was when she was seven or eight years old. She explained to me that her mother had gone somewhere to visit and that she decided she would surprise her mother by making some cornbread for her when she returned home.

She told me, “I did not know how to fix it, but I remembered my mother mixing things together, so I mixed corn meal and water together and cooked it. When momma got home, I told her, ‘I’ve fixed some cornbread for you.’ Momma took a bite of it and politely said, ‘This is really good, but next time try putting some lard and flour in it.’”

Grandma said, “After that, she decided it was time to teach me how to cook. She would stand me up on a wooden box next to the stove and let me watch her as she fixed meals for the family. She cooked in what I call the old southern style, which means ‘low and slow’. I taught that method to Gladys, and that’s the style of cooking little Elvis grew up on. He loved that style of cooking up to the day he died.”

Dodger taught me, over the years I was at Graceland, how to cook certain foods. She taught me how to cook things like fried green tomatoes, fried lettuce, old fashioned tomato soup, and ham gravy. She insisted on eating ham hocks only when they were cold. Pork, she taught me, was only good when it was cooked long and slow, until it was nice and tender.

On another occasion, she related to me how she had experienced different food cravings with each of her children while pregnant. We were sitting around the kitchen counter having coffee one morning when she told me about it.

“When I was pregnant with Vernon,” she told me, “I had a craving for snuff. With Gladys, (one of her daughters) it was fish, while Vester made me crave whiskey.” She then laughed as she finished with Nash. “She made me crave dirt!”

She went on to say, “Vernon and Delta were more like their daddy, Jessie, and Vester, Gladys and Nash took more after me.”

She said, “My mother would always call on me to do things, because I found it easy to catch on to things. I would always get up first in the morning and get the fire going in the stove. Then we all had to get up and help saw wood, feed and milk the cows, gather eggs, and feed the chickens. It was a tough life back then growing up. The problem with today’s kids is that they have it too easy.”

I would just smile and say, “You’re right, Grandma.”

She often talked about how she regretted that she didn’t get to go very far in school. Parents back then, she explained, believed in children working around the house. She said, “My daddy used to leave for work early in the morning to try and earn enough money so we could have clothes to wear and food to eat. He cut our hair, to save money, and I was always getting a whipping because I didn’t like the way he would cut it, and I would try and cut it a different way, and that would make him mad. My hair started turning white when I was fairly young, and I hated that.”

I think that was why she started coloring it a dark color in her later years, because she was so determined that she was never going to have white hair again. She once told me that she had hinted to Elvis that he needed to color his hair, which, of course, he started doing.

Dodger would talk about Elvis and Vernon. She once told me, “Elvis said to me, ‘I want daddy to be happy, but I don’t like him being married to Dee.’ He said, ‘No one is ever going to take mamma’s place.’”

She went on to explain that, after Dee and Vernon married, in 1960, the two of them had moved into Glady’s old downstairs bedroom, and that Elvis had had a fit. He couldn’t stand the thought of another woman sleeping in Glady’s bed.

That’s when the decision was made for them to build the house on Dolan Street, right around the corner from Graceland. That way, Vernon was still close by but Dee wouldn’t be living in Graceland.

She said that it was so ironic that Vernon worried so much about Elvis and Elvis worried so much about Vernon.

Our conversations would often turn to Dodger herself. She told me about how Jessie, her husband, had had another girlfriend before they got married. The girl had even made three wedding dresses, expecting Jessie to ask her to marry him, but Jessie said that Dodger was prettier, so he married her instead. She went on to say that, as sorry as Jessie turned out to be, she wished that the other girl had gotten him instead. She said, “He stayed gone half the time, and the other half he was drunk!”

She explained, “He never left us any food in the house, and did not help raise the kids. All five of my children got married at a young age just to get away from their father, because he treated them so mean.”

We shared humorous stories as well. Like the time her daughter, Aunt Delta, when she was young, had been given a hen, as a present. For some reason the hen began losing all it’s feathers, and Aunt Delta had made a pair of purple pants for it. Dodger described the scene of Aunt Delta chasing after this naked hen trying to put a pair of pants on it. We all got a big laugh out of that.

We also would get a kick out of conversations that Dodger would have, almost daily, with an elderly yard man that had been hired by Elvis. The man, though very nice and thoughtful, was very hard of hearing and, when he would ask Mrs. Minnie how she was feeling, (which was just about everyday when he would see her), she would often say, “Oh, I’m not feeling so well today.” Misunderstanding what she would be saying, he would reply, “Good, I’m glad you’re feeling better”, and would then walk off.

Dodger got to the point where she would just smile and thank him. Then, when one of us would walk by, she’d whisper, “That old coot didn’t hear a damn thing I just said!” That provided many a good laugh over the years.

We also discussed Dodger’s love of clothes. She once said she thought she had a dress to match each color of the rainbow. I told her my favorite dress was the pretty pink one with the white lace on the front.

After she died, Aunt Delta remembered how much I had loved it, and gave it to me to remember her mother by. I still have it today.

Some of my fondest memories of Dodger are of the two of us sitting together on the front porch, watching the fans gathered down at the front gate. She loved to look at all the flowers planted around the porch, and would always comment on how pretty they were. We got Earl Pritchett, the yard man, to plant some flowers right outside her bedroom window, so she could enjoy them after she got a little older, and was confined to her bedroom so much.

Dodger also loved to sing. She and I would sit on the piano bench in her bedroom and sing together, as she played. We sang a lot of different songs over the years, but it seemed that our ‘concerts’ always ended with a rousing rendition of “What A Friend We Have In Jesus.” That was one of her favorite songs.

She could play just about any type of instrument. I was always telling her how envious I was that she could play so many different types, and she was constantly trying to teach me how to play them. She once gave me a harmonica that Elvis had given her, and tried to teach me how to play it. She sent it home with me and told me to practice with it at home that night and let her know the next day how I did. I tried that night, with my husband’s help, to learn to play it, but I could never get the hang of it and the next day my fingers were so sore I could hardly get through the day. Grandma just laughed and told me to keep practicing. I never learned to play it or any of the other ones, but it didn’t keep her from trying to teach me.

Though not as heavy a drinker as Aunt Delta, she did enjoy an occasional “nip after breakfast”, as she used to call it. She would then sit in her chair in her bedroom and doze off to sleep. I always had to be sure I remembered to wake her in time to see her favorite soap, “As The World Turns.” When I would gently nudge her on the shoulder to wake up to watch her show, she would always say, teasingly, “I wasn’t asleep, I just had my eyes closed for a little while.”