Soul of the City; Soul of the Countryside: Headed East on 70

"Shout your memories" is one of the lessons at the Civil Rights Museum. If generations do not pass along the stories, they will be forgotten. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, a group got the money to save the Lorraine Motel from demolition and it is now the National Civil Rights Museum. We spent Wednesday morning in an intense history lesson about the struggles our country went through and is going through so that every man, every woman in our country has the same rights under the law. Much of what we viewed, we lived through. Maturity and more experience with diverse people gave us a different view from what we were getting as white children in the south. We shared the journey through the years with a diverse group of people at the museum. I heard one older woman standing in front of the motel room murmur, "Oh, Lord! Why did they hate us so!"

The final part of the museum is across the street at the rooming house from where James Earl Ray fired the shot across the street that was a pivotal point in our history. There is a great deal of doubt that he was the only one involved in this, but I will leave that to the theorists. There are a great many things in our history about which we may never know the truth.






Our last stop in Memphis was Alcenia's for lunch. The menu tells the patron that "Alcenia's was founded on Grandma Alcenia's dishes prepared from those unreachable roots of the soul that only a tried and true soul food cook can read. Baby Alcenia provides the inspiration to deliver the soul from our hearts to your stomach." We knew that we would be greeted with a hug and the owner-creator of Alcenia's(BJ Chester-Tamayo) did not disappoint. I felt more like I was having lunch in her home than in a commercial place. The place is in an old building at North Main Street. Colors, a bright orange, surrounded us as soon as we entered with purple, green, and yellow table cloths. A large painting of an older woman holding a child is on one wall, and other paintings and bright objects circle the room. We were the first customers and by the time we left most of the other ten or so tables had someone siting at them. The food is fresh and is prepared after it is ordered, so this is not a quick food place. It is tasty. We ordered the fried chicken and vegetables which included yams, green beans(fresh), cabbage, and hot water corn bread. There are spices and seasonings in the vegetables that I can't identify, but they were very, very tasty.

After we reluctantly (I think Klep really wanted dessert even though he had no room for it} left Alcenia's, we turned ourselves around, drove by the huge St. Jude's Hospital complex and headed north on Highway 51 to Henning to see the new Alex Hailey Museum and Interpretative Center which doesn't officially open until August. We drove through a summer early afternoon passing a sign that told us it was 102 degrees at 1:08 p.m. Blue chicory, golden daisies, orange native day lilies lined roadways and we passed fields of young soybeans. Henning was on the old road and we drove into a small neat town and found the house where the author of Roots spent much of his childhood listening to the tales of his grandmother.

We toured the house which is a well built house constructed near the beginning of the twentieth century by Hailey's maternal grandfather. One of the most interesting displays in the new museum is the replica of a slave ship built so that people can actually put themselves in the space that was provided for slaves being brought to this country. It is no surprise that so many died on the trip over.

A thunderstorm took us out of Henning and north to Ripley which is known for its delicious tomatoes and, in our family, as the place Klep spent a summer working on a surveying team during his years as an engineering student at UT. The old square is still in Ripley with a large brick courthouse in the center. The stores around the square are prosperous looking and the preservation efforts have been quite effective. We headed off to find the place where he rented a room and the beautiful old three storied brick home with its large inviting porch was still there.






We headed toward the river on highway 19 and a few miles out of town Klep showed me the bluffs which I describe as a mini-mountain range. And then....there was flat land to the right and left of the road. We rode for miles in between corn fields. After nearly twenty miles we glimpsed the river and then we were curving around and headed back through the flats to town. The elevation in the flats was around 300 feet above sea level; on the bluffs, 500.

We connected with Highway 70 in Brownsville, "A Good Place to Live," a neat town with well manicured lawns. We passed sunflower fields just beginning to bloom and passed through Nutbush the childhood home of Tina Turner.

With the day winding down, we found a clean motel, a little family restaurant, and settled down for the evening in an area which looks much like the farmlands of the Midwest.