On July 24, Bob Solomon, Katie Rohner, and their
three children — Sammy (age 13), Phoebe (age 10), and Max (age 8) — started a three-week cross-country trip from their New Haven home to Berkeley, California, where they will spend the fall semester. This is an installment from their occasional journal:
As we were leaving Nashville, the sun started to peek through the clouds, so we made a last visit to the park around the state house, a beautiful public space with the Parthenon on the far end. Then, with hopes of a sunny day, we got on I‑40 for the three-hour trip to Memphis. We got a sense of I‑40 as one of the great American east/west trucking routes, and it seemed like there were as many trucks as cars. About an hour into the trip, the sky started turning darker, then darker still, with the wind picking up dramatically. In Nashville, a tour guide had joked about tourists’ fear of tornadoes, and we wondered exactly what we should look for. We searched through local radio, and confirmed that it is much easier in Tennessee to find country music then anything else. Soon we were in the midst of an incredible lightning storm. Every time the rain and lightning stopped and we thought we were out of it, we drove into another storm. It was quite an afternoon.
Entering Memphis, we hit the Mississippi River, and it was a dramatic sight. Memphis has developed the riverfront with parks, the Pyramid Arena (a gleaming sports center) and other attractions. From the river, we turned onto Beale Street, the home of the blues. Beale Street was lit up in neon, with bars, clubs and rib joints, honky-tonk at its best. That lasted for about three blocks, when we got a sense of a less appealing Memphis.
Because of its location on the river, in the north of the rich Mississippi Delta, Memphis was a center for cotton and slave trade. It was a Confederate stronghold at the beginning of the Civil War, but was soon captured and controlled by the Union. With Union control throughout the Civil War and a large African-American population, racial tensions were high throughout the 20th Century, culminating in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Memphis was one of the most dangerous cities in the country, with high murder and violent crime rates. Although crime lessened in the early part of the decade, it has started to rise. Driving through neighborhoods, we had the sense of pockets of tourist attractions, surrounded by blocks of blighted housing and boarded up buildings, with many empty streets.
We made three reservations before we left. The first was the Grand Ole Opry and the second was Graceland, home of Elvis Presley and when we got up the next morning, it was time for Elvis. Memphis may be Elvis’ home, but Elvismania is part of Tennessee’s culture. It is impossible to walk through Memphis without seeing the Sun Records studios, where Elvis was first recorded, Elvis posters and mugs in every store, or the ubiquitous small book of Elvis’ favorite recipes, including his beloved peanut butter and banana sandwich. (Think grilled cheese, with a mashed banana-peanut butter mixture instead of cheese.) Even at Ryman Auditorium, the former home of the Grand Ole Opry, one of the featured photographs is a picture of Elvis visiting the Opry. So, we were pretty well primed. Even without Paul Simon’s Graceland blasting in the car (which it was).
Elvis did not build Graceland – it was a big house on a main drag in Memphis and he bought it for $100,000. The upstairs, with eight bedrooms, is not open to the public, but the main floor looks pretty much like you would imagine a comfortable, but not overly elaborate 1977 living room with a big white couch and some comfortable chairs and an old television. Elvis liked televisions, and they are everywhere, but they all look more like museum pieces than luxury items. The kitchen is not particularly fancy, but Lisa Marie Presley said it was used 24 hours a day, with a cook to make whatever Elvis and his entourage liked, especially, you guessed it, peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Then there’s the Jungle Room beyond the kitchen, Elvis’ playroom and later recording studio, looking like any family room that happened to have wall-to-wall-to-ceiling shag carpeting and a pretty odd jungle theme and an indoor waterfall. Then there was the pool, the gravesite, the bowling alley turned museum, and the planes.
In a way, the larger plane was the most interesting item of all, because it was decorated just like the house, and you really had the sense that Elvis was comfortable at Graceland and wanted all of his surroundings to look just like it, including the occasional gold bathroom fixtures. Supposedly, Elvis’ hotel rooms were made to look like Graceland, with Elvis’ own furniture, and you had a sense of that from the plane. There was a separate building to house Elvis’ cars and other toys, a separate movie room, several of Elvis’ costumes, and plenty of opportunity to purchase every Elvis memento you can imagine, and many you cannot, including up to $6000 for an authentic replica of Elvis’ favorite Las Vegas outfit.
We left Graceland, in the rain, and headed back to Beale Street for some Memphis barbecue, then headed across the Mississippi on the beautiful Hernando de Soto Bridge, crossing, we thought, into Missouri, on our way to St. Louis, so we were pretty surprised to find signs welcoming us to Arkansas. We had not checked our geography too well, but the road north along the river included a sliver of Arkansas, a barren sliver, with empty flat fields, few buildings, and not a sign of the Mississippi. After a while, we turned off the highway toward Osceola, Arkansas, drawn in part by a sign saying “Riverview.” We did not know if we would see the river before St. Louis, and wanted to stand on its banks in a more rural setting, imagining the Mississippi of years ago.
While the road to Osceola was a state highway similar to so many others, almost all of the commercial properties had to do with farming supplies and equipment. We kept driving, making several turns, following the many signs advertising a river view. The roads got narrower, and eventually we reached another turn, onto an unpaved road. The mist was getting worse, and with the increasing risk of getting stuck in the mud, we turned away from the river, heading back toward the main road.
Osceola has a historic district and was a home to many musicians in the early days of the blues, but we saw a different Osceola, with small houses that were little more than shacks, many looking like they were ready to collapse. With the sky turning black, we stopped at the omnipresent McDonald’s just as the storm started. It seemed like a good portion of Osceola was there, crowded together, with a polite but odd separation of black and white, apparently unwritten rules understood by all. We left while the storm was at its height, still hoping to get close to St. Louis by nightfall, still with the vague hope that the Mississippi would magically appear to our right. It did not.
Bob Solomon’s previous travel diary entries:
• Journey To Bethlehem
• Reflections On Life Underground
• From “Fat Daddy’s” To “The Parthenon”