Getting James Earl Ray into print

by F. Tupper Saussy

When I resolved to challenge government on the issues of money and taxation, people warned me that I was asking for trouble. At that time, my best experience with trouble from challenging government in America was the life and work of Martin Luther King.

I had been a Nashvillian, with good friends on both sides of King’s struggle. The ones I honored most were his supporters, one of whom baby-sat my little boy. I remember asking her if she could sit with him one weekend. “Friday I can,” she said with a smile, “but Saturday, we’ll be at Walgreen’s soda fountain, which probably means jail.”

Here was someone for whom jailtime proved the sincerity of personal convictions. I was deeply impressed, and often thought of her while developing my resolve on money and taxation.

Well, people were right. There was trouble. But always when trouble comes from taking the high side of a moral issue, the result is good. One of the many blessings that came from my troubles was that James Earl Ray heard me on talkshows and read the daily newspaper reports about me during the middle 1980s.

One morning in 1986, I received a postcard from Ray, then incarcerated at Brushy Mountain State Prison. “Would you help me publish my autobiography?” he asked. I asked to see what he had, and he sent me close to 300 pages of soul-baring typed manuscript. I spent several months checking out his facts before agreeing to the project.

Providentially, the state moved James to the pen in Nashville, and we were able to have a number of personal conferences. At one of these, I photographed James (the source of the watercolor at the bottom of this page) who, by the way, was an artist himself—of the style known to the art world as “naíve,” or “outsider.”

What resulted from our collaboration was Tennessee Waltz: The Making of A Political Prisoner. James was the author of record. To criticism that I “ghosted” the book, I told one reporter “James wrote his own book as surely as Presidents and Senators and Congressmen write their own speeches. He owned final edit right up to when the book went to press.”

While working with James, I corresponded by mail and telephone often with Judge Jim Garrison, the former New Orleans district attorney who came close to identifying President Kennedy’s assassins. Garrison read my epilogue toTennessee Waltz (an indictment of federal economic power entitled “The Politics of Witchcraft”) and wrote me to say that “the intelligence community, which murdered Martin Luther King, is not above taking desperate measures to prevent the truth from surfacing.”

At about the time Tennessee Waltz was due off the presses, the court ordered me to begin serving my misdemeanor sentence at federal prison camp in Atlanta. Taking Jim Garrison’s admonition to heart, I decided it would not be wise to make myself available, in a prison setting, to “desperate measures to prevent the truth from surfacing.” And so, as Salmon Rushdie would subsequently do to avoid reprisals from totalitarian Islamic authorities for his writings, I went into seclusion. (The ROE filter now persuades me that the intelligence community can only prevent from surfacing truth meant to impugn or obstruct their operations. Truth told can be dangerous if it doesn’t come out of love.)

“It was tough,” I later recalled for a Memphis reporter, “not being able to talk about the book while I was on the Lamb. James wanted some minor errors corrected, but since there was no one to take responsibility in my absence, he republished with another ghost under another title. None of this diminishes the significance of Tennessee Waltz, in my opinion. Ours was the first comprehensive exoneration of James Earl Ray, which reached perfection in the magnificent work of William Pepper.”

In its issue of April 30, 1998, the Memphis Flyer characterized Tennessee Waltz as “literate and philosophical... carefully footnoted and written in a lively, entertaining, and polemical style...a highly entertaining indictment and ridicule of Nashville society and its mediacrats, — a book stylishly edited and generously interwoven with Saussy’s own literary, intellectual, and philosophical musings... Saussy is perhaps the greatest King-assassination conspiracy theorist of them all.”

One of the book's unusual touches is the cover. If the author is famous enough, publishers often go to the trouble of embossing his autograph into the hard cover. James inscribed not only his own autograph on the cover of Tennessee Waltz, but also the six aliases he used.

I have no plans to reprint Tennessee Waltz. All but about a thousand (sold) copies of this first and only edition of what Mark Lane has called “an important historical document” were stored for 14 years in a cave next to Jim Woods’ house near Manchester, Tennessee. In summer of 1999, I removed them from Jim’s cave and put them in a dry warehouse. Many of them have minor dust-jacket scratches due to paper sticking from the ups and downs of humidity. Their condition, I think, speaks volumes.

Once this cache is gone, there will be no more.

COLLECTOR'S
FIRST EDITION
TENNESSEE WALTZ: The Making of a Political Prisoner
by James Earl Ray
Edited and with an Epilogue by Tupper Saussy  Saint Andrew's Press, 1987. Hardcover, 322 pages with illustrations. $30.00