Tennessee

Listening to: O Children
-Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

It takes about five hours to get from Springdale to Memphis, so if Anna and I set out at 6 am we should hopefully be there by noon. I pulled some strings and got us a free place to sleep at St. Paul Baptist Church (we're saving up for a more luxurious stay in Columbus). I've stayed there before and the janitors usually stick around most of the night, so at least it won't be the two of us ladies alone in an empty church in Memphis. Just from what I've experienced, even the churches there aren't safe.

Don't get me wrong, Memphis is an incredible city. It has a rich history of surviving plague, flood, poverty, whatever hardship you can imagine, and it still maintains prominence in the music world and the food world. However, during the time that I've spent there previously it became apparent that there is a gap in the community between the modernization and the culture of the city and the general poverty of its people.

 It's a strange goal, but I plan to visit the Mt. Zion cemetery. The oldest African-American graveyard in Memphis, the cemetery was started by the United Sons of Zion in 1873. By the 1920's the church that maintained the cemetery dwindled, and by the 1970's it was left to grow into a forest of weeds tall enough to hide cars to be stripped, drug dealing, prostitution, all kinds of craziness. A local reverend tried to clean up the place in 1979, but he started bulldozing a random corner of the lot, destroying multiple headstones, until the owner with the last share of the property made him stop. It wasn't until 2005 that the Community Zion Project was developed to restore the cemetery in the correct way. Hopefully there will be a crew there helping to rid the place of its overgrowth and dig up headstones that have fallen into the ground, if so I'll make an effort to join them. If no one else is there I think I'll just walk around and pay my respects.

Also, I want to revisit the Lorraine Motel, but not as a tour this time. I want to talk to Jaqueline Smith, the one-woman protester stationed across the street from the hotel.  From what I gather, she argues that proceeds from the museum are gentrifying the area and pushing out the poor. Considering what I know about downtown Memphis (it thrives as far as music and culture, but not so much for the locals in the area) I'm willing to believe she has a point. I'd like to see if she would agree that marketing Memphis's history is actually one of the things killing the actual city? Would a center to help the poor and starving be something more like what Martin Luther King Jr. would have wanted in his honor? 

Anna and I will end our day on Beale St. enjoying whatever local or touring musicians happen to be there at the time, then we will head on to Jim Neely's Interstate Barbeque, where I will again forego my vegetarianism for the sake of this trip. (Let's just pray I don't get sick)