Marooned in Memphis

Joshua J Cotten

Memphis 2006. Great expectations. I’d hadn’t lived in the south for over fifty years.  The city certainly had its attractions--Elvis Presley’s Graceland, Beale Street blues joints, the Orpheum Opera house, a triple A baseball team, Memphis in May International BBQ competitions, a very reputable zoo, and the famous Peabody Hotel with its parading ducks to name a view. 

We chose to be Memphis city dwellers, living in a tree shaded, zero lot line enclave at the south end of town, three blocks from the Lorraine Hotel made famous by the assassination of Martin Luther King. The location was ideal for river walking and gazing over Tim Lee Park situated along the Mississippi river directly below our bluff. This bluff had an aversion to annual occasional tornados because of its position high above the river surrounded by lower ground where the winds swept to the north and south.  It did rain sideways in storms, but the tornados always went around us. The suburbs had no appeal with their sprawling homes, golf courses and private schools.  My husband gladly reverse commuted to his company’s suburban campus location.

The good news was that the lower cost of living allowed me to stop working. I began writing because inside me, a story bubbled, and I needed to find a way to get it out.  I began blogging with high hopes of enjoying city living and writing success. However, in Memphis storms always loomed just over the westard horizon in the spring, and were followed by endless steamy hot days because summer lasts five months, not three. You see, Memphis sits at the top tip of the Mississippi Delta (aka Yazoo Basin), the heart of old cotton growing country. If my body wasn’t spewing sweat bullets before I walked three blocks from the house, my mind was melting from the isolation. 

I was marooned in Memphis because I did not fit it. I mistakenly thought an educated, politically astute white woman with a youthful southern living heritage would find a home there.  It has a reputable University and thriving financial and health care industries. But unlike many cities, Memphis culture is rigid. It embraces only folks with generational roots in the city or those willing to live the manner acceptable to its race divided society.  Everyone else is a tourist or transient who, with luck, will pick up and leave.

The majority of my peers, corporate husbands’ wives, were deeply involved in charity galas, tennis or golf and long lunches. I wasn’t working somewhere where I might meet like-minded career women. Nor was I a parent, shuttling her children to and from private tennis, swimming and dance lessons or attending school football games on weekends.  When someone asked me what church I belonged to, I could only say I didn’t.  That was the wrong answer, for sure. When they asked me where I graduated from school, I thought they meant college, but I was wrong again.  The correct answer was the name of one of many Memphis private high schools.  Even worse was that I didn’t dress in their style of wearing flowered flowy skirts. I’m a strictly a slacks and jeans kind of girl.  I was a pimple on the surface of their lacquered lives that had to be removed. I was marooned, but gratefully so.

In less than 18 months after we arrived, we were back on the east coast. When morning sun gushed through my bedroom window, putting the Capitol dome and Potomac River in my view, I took a deep breath and stretched.   I was home in my familiar comfortable world where I fit in.

Do I regret my Memphis adventure? Of course not. I learned what Dorothy realized after adventures in OZ. “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.”  Memphis was a lesson well learned.