◔ Destroy & Rebuild ▵

The Social Experiment

The following is a what I consider a social experiment. I wanted to personally ask certain individuals about their experience growing up in America. Some features will consist of questions and some will consist of analysis and social dynamics.

Taylor

Professor Holdeman

English Composition/ Analysis 1020

January 2022

A Dirty Southern History

It’s all around me. History. Most of it passes underneath your feet as you walk across the land your ancestors once crossed, the randomly strewn historical markers no one ever reads, down Beale Street as names muddy the sidewalks cluttered with personalities, honey. That’s the only way to describe it. Personalities. You recognize a few key names, events, locations, but that’s about it. When you’re from Memphis, this history can bring up a multitude of emotions. It can be a little aggressive.

Wrong and strong. Loud and proud. Liked and unliked.

Memphis ten is like the gritty sands that line the Mississippi Riverbank. Chalked full of history, and soul, and pain, and culture, and revolution, and change.

Pain and Pleasure. Truths and Myths. Confusion and Certainty. Pride and Shame.

These are the feelings felt when the history that makes Memphis unique in numerous different ways bring you to smile, experience joy, and brings you to your knees all in the same breath.

Pain.

Say His Name. Ell Persons. ELL PERSONS. Arrested, investigated, and released twice, Persons was abused to no end here. Captured again and made out to be the scum of the earth despite having been the heart of an innocent. It’s insurmountable even still today.

Pleasure.

The land before it’s time. Started by two siblings Bob Stewart and Estelle Axton, who could have ever imagined that the kids coming from all over their South Memphis neighborhood would turn their studio into a Worldwide name. The name is Stax. Wattstax. Can you dig it? Damn, right. A concert held in Watts, California to benefit Sickle cell Anemia and the MLK Jr. Hospital in Watts, just imagine being back here in Memphis seeing your favorite artists tear the house down in the name of funk and soul.

Truths.

A German white man helped Black people escape to freedom on the Underground Railroad. He refused to sit by and accept the norm, and his house is visited my millions each year to hear and see what folklore persists. I have the honor of being a docent here as well, and I can say, it blows my mind on a daily that it’s here.

Myths.

Could Memphis be the city where girl’s souls don’t rest? It’s haunting. Although I’ve never seen or heard anything while bartending here, they say the Orpheum is haunted by a girl named Mary who was killed in a fire or hit by a car right outside the doors. Either way, she decided the show was worth the money, the theater is her home, and seat C-5 and the organ pit are hers alone. And what about the club that used to be a brothel where huge stars like Ray Charles used to stay, and the juke box tells you what it wants to play? Ernestine and Hazel’s has a reputation that scares most away, and bones were even said to have been discovered in the walls. The upstairs is still blocked off to this day, but they might have the best fucking burger you will ever eat at 2am when you’re drunk. No apparitions are making the food though. Even colleges aren’t safe. I loved the theater when I went to Rhodes College, but they say a young woman took her life and wanted to swing from the chandelier, some still see Anni wandering around the halls and interrupting classes.

Confusion.

I had no idea how to feel walking the streets so thick like quicksand with history, chanting the names of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, in the middle of a pandemic. I had no idea how to feel remembering the march and speech given so few decades ago by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to fight for, more or less, the same damn thing we were out there marching for. I had no idea how to feel seeing a familiar white face in the crowd and the sense of relief I felt that someone loved me and people who look like me enough to share with me in this hurt. It was tough, but somehow it also felt melodic, and beautiful, and striking, and rhythmic in our heart beating as one, our feet pressing towards more freedom once again.

Certainty.

It’s pretty much facts. We have the meats. Barbeque meats that we are famous for. And no one can compete on that end. That’s it that’s all. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

Pride.

So many things make me proud of you, Memph. And it takes an exorbitant amount of courage and strength to push through some of the things you’ve had to deal with but showing up for yourself the next day and not giving up deserves praise alone.

And Shame.

It’s a shame. There’s so much more we have yet to discover through our day-to-day existence in how this mineral rich, river churned, mucky, natural flowing history embeds itself into the very aquifer of our being. Yet, it will still show over and over to us who we are as one people.

I am a Black woman. I am a scholar. I am an artist. I am unique.

These are the feelings felt when the history that makes Memphis unique in numerous different ways bring you to smile, a sense of joy, and bring you to your knees all in the same breath. Sometimes you don’t even notice how deeply you’re falling into it by existing in your day-to-day truth or the impact that it has had on you. The inertia that pulls us all. History. It’s all around you.

I am a Memphian, and I would not want to be from any other history created.