"Long Distance Information..."

"Long Distance Information, Give me Memphis, Tennessee..."

The Great Plotnik can imagine himself living in a city like Memphis, perched on the east bank of the Mississippi River, nearly halfway to New Orleans from St. Louis, and with a unique tradition of great music and lots of barbecue...for awhile. But it's a smaller city than he and Duck had imagined, and it certainly feels far more Southern than Nashville, the other major Tennessee city where Plot and Duck once both lived.

The river influences everything -- certainly the weather, and the historic passage of commerce and ideas and people and chord progressions. Memphis is venerable, but feels modern. On the other hand, when Plot, Duck and JJ-aka-pp drove to Oxford, Mississippi on Sunday, they felt like they'd gone back in time, to the battles between James Meredith and Governor Ross Barnett over integrating the University of Mississippi, and before that to Civil War days and plantations and slave cabins and King Cotton. Those images are probably cemented by the Confederate stars and bars that still wave on the Mississippi state flag.



The ghost of William Faulkner hangs benignly over Oxford. (The Great Plotnik kept humming Bob Dylan's "Oxford Town" -- "Oxford Town, Oxford Town, everybody's got their head hung down, the sun don't shine above the ground, ain't a-goin' down to Oxford Town" -- but neither Duck nor JJ had ever heard of it. So it's Faulkner.)

A bronze statue of the great writer sits on a bench in the town square. He holds his pipe in his hand and waits for people to sit down on the bench and discuss literature with him. Ducknik studied under a professor in college who was heading to Oxford to live with Faulkner and write about him, but Faulkner suffered a sudden heart attack and died. The professor never got over it and had a nervous breakdown the next year. Duck told Faulkner he died too soon.



Rowan Oak, Faulkner's home, sits out in the woods. (From the old cabins in the back you can hear cheering from the University of Mississippi baseball stadium. There's a path through the woods that students use, from Ole Miss to Faulkner's house. The university maintains the property.)

It's a fine old Southern home, not at all fancy but graceful. Faulkner bought the house in 1930, when he was 33, and lived in it until he died in 1962.



Elvis was only 22 when he bought Graceland. It's on the outskirts of Memphis, and on the way in, passing the Hound Dog Animal Center and The King Burger and the Don't Be Cruel: Sleep Here Motel, Plot and Duck expected the very, very worst. Instead, they found themselves surprisingly touched. Elvis, through all the shtick and grossness of his public life, was probably a pretty good guy. Plotnik doubts Elvis had all the pictures of himself stuck around his house then that they've put there now.



There are many artifacts on display, jewels to an Elvis fan, but minimally interesting to someone like Plotnik who loved his pop songs in the early days when they symbolized rebellion, but grew to picture Elvis as little more than a fat, bloated carcass who had become a caricature of himself and, worse, nonmusical.

One building at Graceland displays all his movie costumes, his jump suits and even the clothing he and Priscilla wore when they got married. Is all of this interesting? A little. Is it worth $28? Ummmm....





One thing you have to give Elvis: he overcame poverty (the low income projects where he lived as a teenager are pointed out on the Tour Bus), and was willing to listen to and learn about rhythm and blues in an era when the races didn't mix at all, even through music.

The Civil Rights Museum hammers that point home. It is dedicated to all the people who spent their lives working to overthrow the apartheid that America and Americans willingly endorsed for so many years, but in particular to the memory of Martin Luther King, who was murdered on the very spot where the museum now stands. Plotnik was surprised to have his heart jump into his throat when he turned the corner and saw the famous motel sign and balcony.





Inside the museum, the visitors are both black and white. Older black and white people tend to stare at each exhibit in detail, turning inward. Each image reminds them of something unsettling. Young black visitors tend to laugh and kid around, perhaps a bit uncomfortably, until they get to the part about lynchings. Seeing young black men hanging from trees surrounded by leering Klansmen and smiling onlookers gets everyone's attention.

Memphis has its own Bourbon Street: Beale Street. Once the main thoroughfare in the black part of downtown where many great jazz icons reigned, it is now little more than a too-familiar, soul-less mix of night clubs and curio shops. On weekends college kids walk Beale Street with beer cups in their hands, looking for a party or a corner in which to throw up.

Britt was in college in Memphis for four years, so she knows Beale Street, even worked as an i.d. checker at the door of Silky O'Sullivan's. So she took Plottie, Ducknik and JJ-aka-pp in to the Silky to see the two dueling pianists (playing baby grand pianos which had been hollowed out to replace their innards with electronic keyboards) and have a Guinness in the courtyard.



Britt's the last, there are no college kids left in the family, and she leaves for the Peace Corps, somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, at the end of the summer. Her graduation from Rhodes College was held in an outdoor green patch on campus. Everyone was happy, especially Britt's sister D.C. Niecie.







Plotnik can't put his finger on it, but he knows there is a thread that runs through Oxford and Memphis, Elvis and Big Mama Thornton, Rhodes College and sub-Saharan Africa, race relations in America, food, music, art and culture, church and state, barbecue, hush puppies and chicken-fried steak, politics and Real Life.

Everything is changing. As JJ-aka-pp says to all sides about the Confederate flag: "It's 2008. Get over it."

A young black man, an old white man and a middle aged woman are running for President and one of them will win. Shit happens, but so does change, most of the time too slowly for us to recognize, and always in fits and starts, violence and misunderstanding. But in the end we know we will sit down at the table, look back and say: "Y'know what? It's all good. Why was this so hard, anyway?"