Bluff City: Memphis, USA

Jackie Mahler

A  TALE OF TWO KINGS

Photo: J. Mahler CLICK TO ENLARGE

Photo: J. Mahler

Photo: J. Mahler

Photo: J. Mahler

Photo: J. Mahler

When the sun first rises in Memphis, it bathes the side streets in warm light. The abandoned buildings take on new textures, and the vacant lots look full of promise.

Memphis has a way of lulling you into thinking that things are alright, or at least getting better. The feel-good vibe comes from good food and hot music. Memphians know how to eat. Roasted peanuts and deep fried chicken. Sweet tea and wet ribs. Dirty rice with turnip greens and hot sauce.

Memphis serves it up 24/7,  synced with a soul-lifting soundtrack. Start the morning with some R&B, easing into Funk at noon. Juke Joint Blues at midnight. And Gospel by dawn. Of course, Rock ‘n Roll is here to stay. Elvis swivels and sings around the clock. That’s guaranteed when you come to Memphis.

CLICK/TOUCH ARROW Big Mama Thornton “Hound Dog”

Full of Grace
Every year, more than 600,000 people make a pilgrimage to Graceland. According to Elvis Presley Enterprises, annual revenues top $45 million–just a drop in the bucket compared to the $150 million “total economic impact” pilgrims have on the city as a whole. Not bad considering the official host died exactly 37 years ago today.

Elvis Is in the Building
A trip to Graceland is a study in excess. Although the mansion is small by today’s standards, every interior space shows what Elvis’s money—a lot of money—could buy. Mirrored walls, porcelain monkeys, and ceilings draped in paisley silk. A Tiki tacky Jungle Room covered in green shag carpet and leopard prints.

Elvis may have died in the ’70s, but he is still making news. The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story with the headline Elvis’s Style Is King. Again.  His version of kitsch is suddenly cool.

“The King of Rock and Roll” died on August 16, 1977.

Even if you aren’t into interior design, you can still experience regal style. The complete package tour includes close-up encounters with Elvis’s Cadillacs, jumpsuits, and two private jets.

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The Shrine
The National Civil Rights Museum is another must-see in Memphis. It’s located at the former Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. He was in Memphis to support black sanitation workers who were striking for job safety, better wages, and union recognition.

A large plastic wreath marks the spot on the balcony where he fell. Visitors can peer through a window to see Room #306 exactly as he left it the night he died.

About 160,000 people visit the museum each year. Since its founding in 1991, NCRM has expanded into several buildings. In 2014, it underwent a $27.5 million renovation.

At the Lorraine Motel, a white wreath marks the spot where Dr. King was killed.

The Vigil
A few yards away from the museum’s main entrance, Jacqueline Smith has been holding a vigil. She sits near a table stacked with hand-out information packets. Behind her, large protest signs call for people to boycott the museum. Some criticize the renovation demanding that $27.5 million be invested in housing and community services for the homeless and displaced. Smith updates one sign every day. It counts the number of days since January 12, 1988, the day she began her protest.

These days in just about every town, people are out on the street enlisting support for some cause. Smith was the last tenant of the Lorraine Motel. I thought about approaching her until a gust of wind blew down Mulberry Street. Papers flew off the table and scattered on the ground. The table and the protest started to look a bit wobbly and easy to ignore. I walked past Smith and headed straight for the museum entrance.

The Crime Scene
My first stop was the second floor of the Legacy Building–the boarding house where James Earl Ray fired the rifle shot that killed Dr. King. According to a 2002 news story, the museum purchased the building to “give visitors a view from the killer’s perspective to the Lorraine balcony.”

The second floor is divided into three sections. The first section has recreations of the filthy living space that Ray briefly occupied: bedroom, seating area, and communal bathroom. Investigators believe he stood in the bathtub to take aim and fired a single shot out the open window.

The entire bathroom is encased in plexiglass. While I looked from a distance,  other visitors circulated around me to get as close as they could to the scene. I noticed they were speaking to each other in hushed voices. Many took photos.

Next to the recreated rooms are rows of glass display cases filled with documents, artifacts, and specimens from Memphis police archives. The 200 items would have been presented as evidence if Ray hadn’t confessed and received his 99-year sentence without a trial.

The display includes a .30-06 hunting rifle found outside the rooming house, the bullet tweezed out of Dr. Kings’ body, Ray’s forged passports, a guidebook to Rhodesia, prison records documenting his escape, a hairbrush, boxer shorts, his favorite aftershave, and mug shots showing him bruised and bleeding after he was extradited from Britain and taken into U.S. custody.

With two sections viewed, there was still one section left for me to cover: “Lingering Questions.” Who actually killed Dr. King? Was the FBI involved? Did the Memphis police department plan and execute the murder? Large display boards play out a range of scenarios evaluating the evidence for each conspiracy.

That’s when it hit me. I was going to vomit–right there on the spot in public. The “immersive environment” approach crossed a visceral line. I was a voyeur on a macabre trip, invited to see things from an assassin’s perspective. I had my choice of depraved candidates. All the neatly organized displays catalogued the gruesome and grotesque. No lie; I needed some fresh air.

The Prophet Speaks
After a few minutes of street time, I went back to the second floor. I’m glad I did because I found something that has stuck with me– video clips of Dr. King from the months and days leading up to his death.

He was speaking about education and school integration. Speaking about the moral and economic costs of war. Speaking about poverty and hunger and economic equity. Speaking about unemployment and Congress’s indifference to urban decay.

Photo: UUSC photostream

“No nation can ultimately win a war. It is no longer a choice between violence and non-violence, it is either non-violence or non-existence.”  MLK

Again and again, he connected foreign wars with domestic poverty. Again and again, he outlined the stark contrast between America’s technological prowess and inevitable spiritual decline. He questioned why the government was spending $500,000 to kill one Vietcong soldier and only $53 a year for every hungry child in the U.S. He was convinced that the non-violent civil rights movement was inexorably tied to the wider struggle for world peace.

“…We aren’t going to let anything, or anybody turn us around in this just cause and in this struggle for peace.”  MLK

Near the looping video clips, I noticed a small document. The paper has turned tea-stained brown, but you can clearly read the typed out message. An internal FBI memo identified the preacher of non-violence as “The Most Dangerous Negro in America.”

Built on a Bluff
In 2014, swaths of Memphis look like an urban wasteland. Up on the bluffs above the river, hard times have produced abandoned homes, shuttered warehouses, padlocked gates, and empty corners. Even Beale Street props up the facade of an historic building that burned long ago. Overall unemployment in the city is 7.8%. More than 26% of its residents are living below the poverty level.

Poverty and despair aren’t unique to Memphis. Check the data, and you’ll see that people across the country are dealing with the same grim realities. I only wish I had stopped to talk to Miss Jacqueline because feel-good Memphis felt awfully sad to me.

CLICK/TOUCH ARROW       Ann Peebles “I Can’t Stand the Rain”

I made every effort to state the facts accurately. The experiences and observations are my own.  JM

Babalú Bubbe

Jackie Mahler

Photo: Mykl Roventine

“Desi Arnaz 1950” by General Artists Corporation (management)

Maracas in La Fortuna, Costa Rica

My grandmother taught me how to cha-cha when I was six years old. She thought it was an important life skill, which made sense at the time. It was the 1960s when everyone was swept up by the bossa nova, mambo, rhumba, samba, and anything else you could play on the hi-fi that got your body moving and your hips shaking. My tiny Jewish grandmother was part of the Latin dance craze.

Nan (AKA Nanny AKA Nanny Bessie) lived with my family from time to time. She was under 5-foot tall and sewed all her clothes. I wish we still had her sewing machine. Forged at the turn of the century, the workhorse Singer was a permanent fixture in her life. I’m sure that after she died, her daughter Betty disposed of the well used machine. My mom wasn’t sentimental about things from the past.

“Children in India Are Starving… So Eat!!”

Photo: fishermansdaughter

Photo: marusula

Drawing by Matt Swaim/swaim sketching

Photo: kjunstorm

Playing Against Type

Unlike the template Jewish grandmother, Nan did not dote on children. And unlike the stereotype, she was not much of a cook. She had two stand-out dishes. The first was rugelach. She made the dough from scratch then patiently rolled it out until it covered the dining room table. When it was just right, she spread jam on it, added a layer of crushed walnuts and dried fruit, then finished it off with a heavy dusting of sugar and cinnamon. The other standout was coleslaw, which seems to have a genetic marker because everyone in my family knows how to make killer coleslaw, including the men.

Border Crossings

“What country are you from?”

I thought it was a simple question, but Nan had no easy answer.

“Pfffffttt! One day it was Poland. The next day, it was Russia.”

Theology was a simpler matter. She stopped believing in God the day her family was killed. I now know that day was in August 1942. Twenty years later, she traveled around the world to visit her son Morris who was working in India. En route, she stopped in Israel where she had arranged to meet someone from her hometown. He bore witness and revealed the awful truth.

Later she told me, “They didn’t even wait for the Nazis to get there. The townspeople and police were more than happy to kill Jews.” That was all she said about her parents and 12 younger siblings.

Ephemera

Nan crocheted lacy shawls with scalloped edges and metallic threads. She knit slippers, read Yiddish newspapers, and sang in the kitchen. Sometimes we sang together. Tum Balalaika and Tsena Tsena were two favorites.

I have a flowerpot that was Nan’s. It’s bright yellow with a dark green base. The sides are fluted to make it look like a tulip. I first saw it in her apartment on Hastings Avenue in Rutherford. She filled the pot with soil and coaxed a large snake plant to grow inside. I remember the pot, and the plant, and the way the light filtered in through the curtains in her living room.

Twisting Fate

The most remarkable part of Baszie Bessie Gurtovoy Gordon Budin’s story is that she had the guts, spunk, and sense of self to leave Rozyszcze, Poland and come to the U.S. by herself at age 16. Her father Avram was a harness maker. Her mother Pesia Wajner raised hens, sold eggs, and did whatever else she could to make sure 13 children didn’t go hungry. As the oldest child, Bessie saw the heavy toll this took on her mother. She decided she was not going to have the same life.

When matchmakers found a perfect husband for her (a prosperous 30-year-old tailor), Bessie told her parents she had other plans.

“He’s too old. I don’t love him, and I’m going to America.”

Nan arrived in NY around 1913. Her first home was a boarding house run by her aunt Sara and Sara’s husband Yoelik Sheinbein (from Osova). She became Bessie Gordon and soon found work as a seamstress in a sweatshop. She was so homesick in New York she wrote her parents to tell them she was saving money to buy a passage back home.

As fate would have it, Bessie went to a Bund-sponsored dance, met tall dark and handsome Jake Budin, and the rest is (family) history.

Bessie standing by a window

Jacob and Bessie, 1922

Passport photo for trip to India, 1958

Bessie with Jake’s sister Gussie

Bessie, 1915

“You can catch more flies with honey than with winegar (sic).”

Bessie had three husbands: Jacob who died at 57 soon after they bought a chicken farm in Toms River, Chaim Siegel (perhaps 5 years together in the 1970s in Passaic), and a man she met in the early 1980s when she lived in Miami Beach. She outlived them all.