Friday, October 26, 2007

Downtown Tourist Blues

After the convention the hotel’s revolving glass doors magically transformed me from a business traveler into a tourist.  The streets of downtown Memphis opened before me. What should I choose? Electric blues and barbeque on Beale Street? The pop culture kitsch of Elvis Presley’s Graceland? The nostalgia of Sun Studio and Stax Records? Or the weighty one, the grave and honorable choice, the National Civil Rights Museum located on the spot where Dr. Martin Luther King was killed? It took me a while to decide.

I was at a disadvantage in Memphis. As a tourist I couldn’t judge what I was seeing.  Sure, the old downtown was recovering its composure as an entertainment district.  You could buy a drink and watch the Peabody ducks waddle out of the elevator of that posh hotel to spend the day snoozing in the fountain of the lobby bar. There were plenty of panhandlers, but the ancient trolley costs only a dollar and the new minor league ballpark was a jewel. Still, the conference organizer warned us not to stray too far from the hotel. What was a visitor to think? 

Luckily, the convention’s keynote speaker, the Reverend “Billy” Kyles, provided some clues, and my airport cab driver provided others. Reverend Kyles himself was on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel when his colleague Dr. King was shot.  As they waited for the ambulance, Kyles slipped the cigarette from Dr. King’s fingers.  He didn’t want a personal weakness to become part of the story of this good man’s death. He wanted his country to focus on the essence, on justice, not ephemera.  Reverend Kyles was no tourist.

The National Civil Rights Museum is at the end of a long stretch of downtown buildings that have seen better days – some empty and disheveled, some housing old businesses or funky new galleries, all in a district that has lost track of itself. 

The first part of the museum tells the brutal story of America’s struggle for equality, and the tour ends at a window where you look out a few feet to the place where Dr. King fell. Across the street, in the second part of the museum, I visited the room where the sniper had waited.  There on the wall was the rifle with its telescopic sights.  I looked out the window to the balcony where Dr. King stood talking to colleagues below in the parking lot.  Technically, I could see that this was not a very difficult shot.  People who have been hunters or soldiers could have done it.  I saw from the window that I could have done it.

Later I caught a cab to the airport.  The driver, Larry, grew up in the city.  “We were poor,” he said, “but there were some families who might not have anything for dinner.” Larry and his buddy would get up early on Saturdays to play basketball over at the Catholic Church. “Everybody respected the white priests,” he said. “There would be dinner down at the church for those who had nothing at home.  Sometimes I played all day and stayed for the dinner. Even the gangsters,” he said, “made sure nobody messed with those priests.”

One time a priest stepped out and yelled at a junky who came by the basketball hoops. Larry was as astonished at the hard words coming from a man of the cloth as much as at the stand the priest took in defense of the black children there. That white priest was no tourist in Memphis.

Larry said that there was a time when he thought the city might break apart into civil war, it had been that bad.  By now we were nearing the airport, and those historic, beaten, empty streets were far behind us.  We shook hands and parted, probably never to meet again. I felt a little less like a tourist and a little more like a fellow citizen, and I wished I knew more about the history of struggle and change here in Michiana, and more specifically what work is not yet done.  Sure, everybody knows in general. Anyone can glance around a city and get the general picture, the way a visitor would.  But who wants to live like a tourist in your own town?

Broadcast by Ken Smith on October 26, 2007
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