Table of Contents
___________________
Introduction
PART I: BEALE AND THE BLUFF
Her Better Devils
DAVID WESLEY WILLIAMS
South Bluff
Heartbreak at Graceland
KAYE GEORGE
Whitehaven
Through Valleys
JAMEY HATLEY
Westwood
PART II: MEMPHIS BLUES
The Panama Limited
RICHARD J. ALLEY
Beale Street
Green-Eyed Blues
DWIGHT FRYER
Annesdale
The Never Never Is Forever
ADAM SHAW & PENNY REGISTER-SHAW
Downtown
Chain of Custody
LEE MARTIN
Orange Mound
PART III: MEMPHIS MISFITS
There Is No Rest
ARTHUR FLOWERS
Riverside Park
A Game of Love
SUZANNE BERUBE RORHUS
East Memphis
Mother
EHI IKE
Germantown
Battle
STEPHEN CLEMENTS
Hollywood
PART IV: ABANDONED MEMPHIS
Stinkeye
CARY HOLLADAY
Medical District
A Shut-and-Open Case
JOHN BENSKO
Midtown
Nightflight
SHEREE RENÉE THOMAS
Vollintine Evergreen
Tell Him What You Want
TROY L. WIGGINS
Uptown
About the Contributors
Bonus Materials
Excerpt from USA NOIR edited by Johnny Temple
Also in Akashic Noir Series
Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition
About Akashic Books
Copyrights & Credits
To Mama and Jacqueline, for your love and support.
To John, for your nonstop encouragement, faith, and love.
To Leonard, Johnny, and the writers herein: thank you for making this collection possible.
—L.P.C.
To Laureen, whose idea it was.
—L.G.
INTRODUCTION
City of Marvels & Misfits
A city equal parts darkness and hope. A scarred city. An often violent one. But a resilient city too.
That’s our Memphis.
Like many cities, we have a namesake—in Egypt, Men-nefer became Menfe became Memphis, enduring and beautiful, on the banks of the Nile. Centuries later, another continent, another people, another river: Memphis, Tennessee, the soul of the Mississippi Delta, was formed. We are a place born of history, inhabited as much by memory as by the living—the past and present inextricably and inescapably linked.
What is the relationship between our city and the rest of the world? What does Memphis bring to mind?
We bet it’s not that we had the world’s largest mule market in the 1950s, or that we led the world in hardwood lumber and spot cotton in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. No, it’s usually the river. Floods. Music. Race. Yellow fever. And—of course—barbecue.
We also bet we’ve changed the world you live in.
Part of our resilience is survival against the odds—the Battle of Memphis in 1862 (which turned the city into a Union stronghold), seven yellow fever outbreaks and the flight of local wealth after the 1878 epidemic, political corruption, poverty, high teen pregnancy rates, high murder rates—we’ve definitely had enough going against us. Maybe even a lot worth hiding.
But lifelong Memphian Edwin Frank, Curator of Preservation and Special Collections at the University of Memphis, might ask you, “Why shouldn’t the city be itself?”
In a city of deep and persistent tensions, the people of Memphis reside low in a delta, but sit high on the bluff. Remnants of slavery and sharecropping, of shifting underclasses (black and white), and of African folk traditions abound. Our popular culture works from the bottom up, built without the support of (but not so very far removed from) the sprawling plantations and aristocratic sociopolitical structure so often part and parcel with the image of the South. Instead, race and music, old endings and new beginnings, connect this city in webs spun deep in its very core.
R&B producer Ralph Bass could tell you of the impact of black radio stations like WDIA, the “Mother Station of the Negroes,” in breaking down segregation in Memphis over unsegregated airwaves. Those airwaves brought black music to the white ears of a new generation and encouraged black clubs to add “spectator” tickets for whites, then “white nights,” to become, eventually, a shared space.
Beale Street was built on black music and black commerce, and, for a time, it blurred racial distinctions—until Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination brought tensions to a new level and urban renewal razed the music mecca and many of its landmarks. Decades would pass before Memphis, the “Home of the Blues,” saw fit to bring Beale back, fitting for a city as rich in blues as in spirit—but not without its dangers.
Danger and music seem ever-entangled, like pit vipers in molasses: Richard J. Alley’s contribution to this volume, “The Panama Limited,” puts the reader inside a train car headed south for Memphis. So too in David Wesley Williams’s “Her Better Devils,” which takes us from floodwaters to the South Bluff, in the company of a black blues singer, her white man, and the looming presence of an escaped criminal.
Adam Shaw and Penny Register-Shaw’s graphic story “The Never Never Is Forever” takes hold of the tensions of love and oblivion in the city’s downtown music scene in the ’90s, with its constellation of alternative rock, abandoned buildings, drugs, and death. Just north of downtown, in Uptown Memphis, the folks inside Fat Red’s underground club know good times and violence, and both collide in the gyrating crowd of Troy L. Wiggins’s “Tell Him What You Want”—a tale evocative of Langston Hughes’s poem “Beale Street Love,” with fists and knuckles passionately engaged with lips, eyes, love, and desire. If Hughes’s Clorinda had lived near Uptown, we have no doubt she’d have been at Fat Red’s cooing, “Hit me again.” Moving farther east, it’s a matter of money and a loveless cage of a marriage in Suzanne Berube Rorhus’s “A Game of Love,” where a national tennis tournament serves as a backdrop to adultery—and murder—among the city’s well-to-do, harnessing the faithlessness of lovers so often figured in the blues.
In the infancy of this project, Stephen Clements, author of “Battle,” shared with us perhaps the most elegiac of summations: we had two kings, and we killed them both. “Battle” meshes Clements’s experiences as a veteran, his love of the city of his birth, and his keen eye for redemption even in the darkest of corners, among the saddest of souls. “Heartbreak at Graceland” by Kaye George goes beyond heartbreak: a dark fascination with Elvis’s place of death, his bathroom, leads to even darker revelations and little resolution behind the Whitehaven mansion’s gates.
But leaving Graceland does not put the darkness behind. Sheree Renée Thomas’s “Nightflight” captures the solitude of a brilliant woman at a time when the sun can no longer bear to shine on the soul of the Delta, which brings to mind another poem, John Townsend Trowbridge’s “Memphis”:
At last he seemed to lose it altogether
Upon the Mississippi; where he stayed
His course at Memphis, undecided whether
He should go back or forward. Here he strayed
One afternoon along the esplanade
And high bluff of the river-fronting town,
To watch the boats and see the sun go down.
Spinning poetry, performance, past, and present into a tornado of a tale, Arthur Flowers highlights Memphis’s hoodoo history with
his special brand of prose in “There Is No Rest.” “Mother,” by young writer Ehi Ike, unearths the darkness at the heart of a nuclear family in the upscale suburbs, while Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin, in “Chain of Custody,” takes a slant approach to the commonplace: a party in Orange Mound leads to a shooting, which leaves police certain of their suspect but the suspect certain of very little.
And, no question, we are one of the most crime-ridden cities in America. Historically, Al Capone’s Chicago had nothing on us; presently, there’s hardly a negative top ten on which you can’t find Memphis. Amid all the changes this city has seen, our crime problem remains.
Dwight Fryer’s “Green-Eyed Blues” looks at our desegregated police force in the 1940s, the city’s political power brokers, and the juxtaposition of love and lust, racial tension and murder. Shifting to the present-day: Jamey Hatley sets us squarely on the other side of the law, and takes us to Pussy Valley, in “Through Valleys,” a story of conspiracies, fraud, and more—borrowed from local headlines and laid at the feet of city councilmen, state senators, the Memphis Police Department, and a librarian who isn’t what she appears to be. The boarded-up remnants of a Midtown mansion sets the stage for the strange goings-ons in John Bensko’s “A Shut-and-Open Case.” Noir veteran Cary Holladay’s edgy and eerie “Stinkeye” features not only Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest (from beyond the grave) but also the bizarre case of a Memphis medical examiner, a story imaginatively recast but torn from a front-page news story that garnered national attention.
Some might say it’s the people who come here from elsewhere who often teach us most about Memphis, but—whether you’re a native or a newcomer—there’s no denying that the city has carved its place in history. Grasping our bottom-up culture, Sir Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilization states, “What the Memphis story finally shows is that the music of an underclass could literally become the music of the world.” In fact, popular song lyrics feature Memphis more often than almost any other city in the world. Whether you’re sad or wistful, leaving or returning, walking in Memphis or riding the City of New Orleans, miles from or real nearby, thinkin’ ’bout Elvis or honky-tonk women . . . you’re singing about us in a bittersweet way. George A. Norton knew the moody, muddy echoes of the city well:
Hear me people, hear me people, hear I pray,
I’m going to take a million lessons ’til I learn how to play
Because I seem to hear it yet, simply can’t forget
That blue refrain.
There’s nothing like the Handy Band that played the
Memphis Blues so grand.
Oh play them Blues.
That melancholy strain, that ever haunting refrain
Is like a sweet old sorrow song.
Here comes the very part that wraps a spell around my heart.
It sets me wild to hear that loving tune again,
The Memphis Blues.
Somewhere between our blues and our kings, our fevers and our rock ’n’ roll, our history has transformed yours—our Piggly Wiggly began the self-serve grocery businesses; our FedEx changed the way you do business; our Holiday Inn brought you your Holiday Inn; and our music has been the soundtrack to your life. Its wild beat has rocked your world. And our struggle against our own darkness has kept us in the headlines. Memphis is marvels and misfits—two-faced and unabashedly so.
And no, we are not Atlanta, or Chicago, or Nashville; we are not Austin or New York, Detroit or Los Angeles—and we shouldn’t try to be.
We are Memphis, and this is our noir.
Laureen P. Cantwell & Leonard Gill
Memphis, TN
August 2015
PART I
BEALE AND THE BLUFF
Her Better Devils
by DAVID WESLEY WILLIAMS
South Bluff
1
She sat on the top step of the porch, watching the rain, and he stood in the doorway, watching her. “It’s not the end of the world,” he said, and she said, “I think the end of the world’s been called on account of rain.”
They said no more for a spell, her watching the rain and drinking what was left of the gin and then switching to what there was of rum, and him watching for some hint or sign, from her or from the heavens.
It had rained for weeks, first as a few plump drops and then as a steady drench. Then it almost stopped and the sun almost shone, but only almost, and then came the rain again—from great oaken buckets it sloshed. And then it did stop, as if in its own muddy tracks. It stopped for a full minute, and he said, “Finally. I think the rain’s run out of ways to fall.” She said, “Just wait, you,” and watched with a kind of wearied bemusement as it rained a hail of bullets across the land. She might have been using her drink stir as a baton, to conduct all this doom.
This lasted all of one day and the night that followed—not that day had one dim bulb on night, these days. Then it was one endless drop. It spanned town blocks and country miles and days of the week. The rain became time, place, law, religion, and the arts. The rain was myth and legend and tomorrow’s headlines wrung from the morning rag. The rain was all. There was only rain. Then the wind joined in. The wind howled hymns and chants and ghostly blues. It all seemed terribly biblical to him.
And she sat watching it, and he stood watching her. “You’re going to catch your death,” he said, “or get religion.” She said, “You really think anything happens when we die but that there’s one less soul in the world, and what’s one less soul, unless it was one who made a difference, like—” She leaned back against the front porch beam and sighed. She was thinking. She said, “Well, I guess there must have been one or two in there somewhere who made a difference.” She looked for something, some new bottle, to slug. “All right. I’ll give you Lincoln, and the Reverend Al Green. Don’t say I never gave you anything.”
“Soul,” he said. “You said one less soul, not one less person. There’s hope for you yet, Mrs. Flood.”
But still there was no hint or sign that he could see, except that the rum was gone and it was whiskey now—sour mash and the lightest rain yet, too soft to even call it falling: a veil upon the land. But rain is rain, and so the land sank further into itself.
The land swallowed deep, and the river body rose. The riverbanks swelled, and the river god crept closer.
He sat beside her on the top step of the porch. She had a fresh whiskey. She had bare feet and toenails painted blue the shade of dark in the usual way. He ran a finger along the barbed-wire-shaped scar on her left knee, the scar the color of midnight against her skin the color of dusk. It was her lucky scar, she said. She’d gotten it falling from the sky during a dream. He said that didn’t sound very lucky, and she said there were all kinds of luck. She said you could hang from luck; you could drown in it. “Anyway, it happened,” she said. Or anyway, that’s the story she told him that night, the night they met, on the bluff in Memphis. Three days later they were married. Three years next month, he thought now, river god willing and the world don’t end.
“This is a soggy river town,” she said.
“Most river towns are,” he said, “if it’s any kind of river at all.”
This seemed to cheer her some, for him to be the bearer of such news. She wagged her drink stir at him; it was a wand now. She sipped the whiskey. She poured him a glass and leaned in. She knocked him a kiss. He ran his finger some more along that barbed-wire scar and then considered her legs at great length. He admired their shape and sheen in the blue dark; he hoped for a lightning bolt, illumination, for better to see her skin, that scar, the full dusk of her. The power was out from Lower Grace to the big river, or else he’d have turned on the porch light.
“Well, well, well,” she said.
He considered her toes, kissed and even counted them.
“All there, Mr. Flood?” she said.
Now the sky spat, and the wind sighed; they seemed to be having a conversation about the end of it all.
He ran a fing
er the length of her shin, up and down, up and down. He settled on up. He bypassed that barbed-wire scar.
Said the sky to the wind, “You think it’ll ever stop raining?”
He stopped at the hem of her dress, and then he didn’t stop. “Ahem,” she said, and sipped whiskey through a hairline crack of smile. It was her favorite party dress, blue-flowered and drink-stained with a couple, three Lucky cigarette holes. She wore it that night, the night they met, on the bluff in Memphis, as a three-piece band played the electrocuted blues and the Saturday-evening sun painted the sky purple with mischief. He thought they could use a bluff about now.
Said the wind to the sky, “Don’t think so, no.”
He ran a hand up under that blue-flowered dress, between the soft tatters of fabric and the cold sheen of dark skin. She turned on him, threw a leg over, and so now they rolled on the porch of the small country house as husband and wife, trying to save their marriage as the great sky fell and the river god rose to meet it.
“All there, Mrs. Flood,” he said.
* * *
This is a true story, made up and written down. This is a fable and a good cry, a cautionary tale, a murder ballad.
This is the story of rain and more rain, high water and the search for higher ground—Beulah Land, or that bluff in Memphis. God is high up in heaven, watching, with silver flask and furrowed brow.
This is the blues, played on a single strand of broom wire.
This happened, just not yet.
* * *
They lay on the porch, after. She reached for the bottle of sour mash. Kentucky bourbon was her preference—sacrament, she called it—but she liked the label on the Tennessee sour mash, black the color of her scar and on it the face of some silver-bearded ancient with eyes wild like Moses on a bender. “A pint of Old Testament, my man!” she’d tell the counter man at the package store in Brownsville, and the counter man—born again, or claimed he was—would look at her with his best scold and say, “God’ll get you for that, Mamie Flood.” Then he’d look away, lest she—or God—see his smile.
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