Walking in Memphis

Day One: Memphis, TN.
Though I've lived in Tennessee my whole life, I've never been to Memphis, so I was excited that it would be our first stop. It was very different than I was expecting it to be. I suppose in my mind I had always glorified this city steeped in the history of the blues and home of the mythic Graceland. However, it was interesting being able to compare the tourist part of Nashville to the tourist part of Memphis, because the two cities felt very different, though I had always assumed the two cities were essentially similar, just highlighting different genres of music.
Our first stop was the Peabody Hotel to see the march of the ducks- for those of you unfamiliar with this apparently time-honored Memphis tradition, a group (flock? gaggle?) of 5 ducks stay in a pool on the roof of this hotel (the "duck palace") and at 11 a.m. each day, they ride down in their personal duck elevator and proceed to march down a red carpet to swim in the fountain in the lobby. Literally hundreds of people were gathered in the lobby this Saturday morning to watch this duck march. I personally was a little unimpressed by this whole event, but lots of the other observers seemed to get a kick out of it.
After the ducks marched (or rather ran and clumsily splashed) into their fountain, we all headed up to the roof to get a better view of the city. We were all struck by the emptiness of the largest city in Tennessee…from the roof of this hotel in the middle of the city on a Saturday morning, we could see the empty mall parking lot and near-deserted streets. This was especially strange because hundreds of people had just shown up to see ducks walk around in a hotel- where was the rest of the town? We headed down to Beale Street for some authentic Memphis barbeque (even though the “ambassador” for Memphis, Rashina, is a vegetarian, she was a good sport and helped the meat-eaters find some of the best of her hometown’s famous food) and settled on the Blues City Café. The food was great but again I was struck at how empty a tourist restaurant like this one was at lunchtime on a summer Saturday.
After lunch, we set out to explore the famous Beale Street. We wandered into some of the shops, and found an interesting an eclectic mix of souvenirs. It was interesting to compare the Memphis tourist souvenir shops to the Nashville tourist souvenir shops that we had just visited on Friday. In Nashville, just a few hours north and in the same state, you find souvenirs devoted to promoting in a comedic fashion the notion of the idiotic hillbilly, a vast array of the Country Western-wear of spurs, snakeskin boots, and designer cowboy hats, and a plethora of Confederate flags. I did not see anything like this in Memphis; rather, in the souvenir shops I observed, many of their products called to mind what one of the group called “ a poor man’s New Orleans.” They sold votive candles, voodoo masks, African musical instruments, incense, porcelain animal charms and other such things, alongside your typical tacky tourist objects like personalized keychains and elaborate pocketknives.
All the people walking around seemed to be either people enjoying their drinks or harried parents pushing strollers and/or chasing after stray toddlers. I couldn’t figure out the appeal of Memphis as a family destination. Nothing on Beale Street seemed family-friendly, which was not what I was expecting to find. I would have been interested to see Beale Street at night, but our daytime glimpse of it was enlightening in its own respect.
We had planned to hit the Stax museum but we didn’t have enough time before our reservation for a Graceland tour. It was interesting visiting Graceland among a bunch of non-Elvis fans. I am certainly not Elvis’s biggest fan but I’ve grown up listening to oldies radio and have believed in the hype about Graceland all my life. In my mind, it was the kind of trip any self-respecting music fan should make at some point, so I was pretty excited. Of course, I should have seen it coming but it still took me by surprise how horribly impersonal and commercialized the whole experience it was. You stand in line, receive a tape recorder that speaks to you about the house’s history, board a shuttle that takes you across the street to the house, are herded like cattle through the exhibits by the near-lifeless “guides” working in the house; one of our group members realized that the whole process could theoretically be completed without a single human interaction after buying your ticket.
I did enjoy seeing the house- I am always interested in seeing older interior decorating, and especially the over-the-top style of Graceland was just so fascinating to see. Once you move from the house part of the exhibit to the more career-focused exhibits, I felt the tour lost what little charm it had left. Not that the whole thing wasn’t impressive in size and glitter, it was just so much memorabilia plastered all over the place and the pace of the crowd was moving too fast to really absorb much information. As a student who just took a sociology course examining gender, it was definitely interesting to see all the posters of girls throwing themselves at the feet of this iconic male figure….to see phrases like “it’s fun! It’s color! It’s girls! It’s music! It’s Elvis’s new hit movie!” (we equate women with flair for film?) The tour ends with a trip to the “meditation garden” where I was shocked to find gravestones for the Presley family. It felt like such a manipulative, manufactured emotion the Graceland establishment was trying to feed us by using a deceased man’s body…it felt like the worst kind of intrusion of privacy.
After Graceland we spent some time driving around other parts of Memphis to see the stark dichotomy of the different neighborhoods; we steered clear of the really impoverished (and dangerous) parts of town, but we did drive through some really rundown older neighborhoods that are just a few short miles away from some of the most elaborate and beautiful homes I’d ever seen in my life. It was really like seeing three different cities today instead of just one.
We then ended our day at Rashina’s house with an amazing homecooked traditional Indian meal/feast where I ate and enjoyed my first Indian meal ever. It was a really nice opportunity to experience a family setting one more time before we embark on the rest of the journey. Tonight we drive through the night to Little Rock, AK.