a guitar. Now he had also Beale Street emporiums (notably the talismanic
Lansky’s) that catered to black folks, and here he began to style an edgy,
flamboyant persona. Before he was twenty, Elvis had discovered Sam Phil-
lips and Sun Records, and vice versa, and the era of rock ’n’ roll, already
well under way, took off. Mississippians black and white—most illustri-
ously Elvis Presley—were the astronauts.
Or were rock ’n’ roll’s pilots representative of allthreeof the country’s so-
called races? One of Gladys Presley’s great-great-grandmothers was ‘‘a full-
blooded Cherokee’’ named Morning Dove White (ca. –), whose re-
mains lie about thirty-five miles east of Tupelo, over in Hamilton, Alabama.
(Morning Dove had married one of Andrew Jackson’s Tennessee soldiers,
another Scots-Irish scourge of Redstick Creeks in the savage Alabama War
of –.) Elvis was probably well aware of the connection (as well as a
Jewish one, also on his mother’s side). The native identity lives on, however
blurred, in fans’ memories, via films in which Elvis portrayed ‘‘half-breeds,’’
especially an awkward movie he made with the uncomfortable director
Don Siegel in —Flaming Star—about a Euro-Kiowa named Pacer who,
shunned by society, heads for the desert to die alone. It was Elvis and his
rowdy entourage, all amphetamine-charged, who made Siegel uncharac-
teristically dysfunctional during filming. Chemistry may have enlarged the
star’s own genealogical consciousness, too. Yet Elvis’s Indian heritage, con-
firmed by an Alabama genealogist, has larger, contextural credibility. Many
southerners (Euro- and Afro-) have native ancestors; some are certified,
but most are documented only by oral tradition. And if Elvis consciously
situated himself, genealogically, as simultaneously ‘‘both colonizer and
colonized,’’ the notion is effectively enhanced by his and his family’s re-
pudiation of the anti-Negro ideology that prevailed during the age of Jim
Crow. The Presleys often roomed on the borders of black neighborhoods;
Elvis sometimes attended black church services in Tupelo, and in Mem-
phis his transracial tastes in dress and hairstyle set him apart in high
school. For all his shortcomings, Elvis was tolerant and receptive. He was
a mama’s boy, too, compounding the Indian aspect of his heritage in an
odd yet illustrative sense: Cherokees, Chickasaws, and most other native
peoples were matrilineal cultures; that is, social and political status de-
rived from female connections and descent. So a poor white man might
ascend through marriage to a native woman of noble rank. The son of
such a union might be a ‘‘half-breed’’ and ‘‘trash’’ to whites, but among
natives he would be a legitimate aristocrat, beloved and favored not only by
his parents but by his mother’s powerful brothers. It is interesting, then,