The Old Man in the TR 2

It was the fall of 1974.  I entered the UK for the first time early one morning at Dover, England as a foot passenger on a car ferry.  I was a little alarmed at the cost of the fare.  After paying it, I had less than $100 USD.  I would need a job quickly, maybe instantly, in Aberdeen, and until then, I would have to travel on the cheap.  The view of those white cliffs from the boat was free and beautiful.  I felt lucky to be there.

I met an American GI couple on the ferry who offered to take me to the outskirts of Dover in their VW van before they turned north along the coast.  I had decided to go to London and catch one of their big highways to get to Scotland quickly.  All done on paper maps those days.  It looked to be as good a route as any.  I’d gotten an early start.  The day was clear and sunny.

The VW was left-hand drive in a right-lane world.  After they let me out, I stood on the wrong side of the road to hitch, quickly realizing it when a car went by me in the wrong direction.  The GIs left me at a country roundabout.  Not a bad place to thumb down a ride.  I walked through the circle to the road I needed, made sure I was on the correct side of the road, set up where the shoulder offered a space to pull over, propped my backpack against my knees, and struck a hopeful pose. 

A tiny green convertible with the top down approached.  I put out my thumb and almost instantly the sound of deceleration, then braking, filled my ears.  Life is good in those moments.

The driver was an old guy, in his seventies I’d guess, with a flat touring cap, a big gray mustache, and a smile.  He opened a very long side door to let me in.  I stood with my backpack in hand and nowhere to put it.  It was a two-seater.  Two individual windshields too.  Right-hand drive, wrong side of the road.  I was disoriented.    

 

“Hang on there.  We’ll stow your gear in the boot.”

The boot was the trunk of course.  We sat low in the car.  It felt as if we were inches above the pavement.  The motor was loud.  Above the noise, he was telling me about his car.

“Wanted this car when I was working and raising kids but couldn’t afford it.  Bought it when I retired.   I take it out nearly every day the sun shines.”

“What year is it?”

“1952 Triumph.  TR 2.”

“That would make me a year old when it was built.  I’m 23.”

“Bloody hell, you’re but a lad.  I’ve got fifty years on you.”

Thus began a conversation that continued throughout the ride.  As much as the driver of the Mercedes on the Autobahn was laser-focused and tight-lipped, that old guy never stopped talking.  Within twenty miles he’d queried my whole life story, short as it was.  And he drove so slowly.  Everyone passed us.  Some honked.  Others waved.  My new friend smiled and waved back.  He was a happy man.

 He told me about his wife, his kids, his job, and his childhood.   I barely had time to look at the countryside.

“Say, could you make us rollups?”

“Tobacco?”

 He looked at me oddly, with a question on his face.  I answered quickly.

“Yes, I can.”

“Would you mind then?”

 “No problem.”

He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a tin of Golden Virginia tobacco.  Inside the lid was a pack of rolling papers.

Premade cigarettes were much more expensive in Europe.  Rolling your own made them lots cheaper.  I caught on to that in Amsterdam where I landed, smoking a nice Dutch tobacco called Drum.    My driver’s tobacco was much the same; moist, soft, stringy.  It rolled up perfectly.  I made two.

“Shall I light yours for you?”

“That would be brilliant.”

I leaned forward under the dash, struck a match, lit both, and passed one of the rollups to my new friend.

“Ta.”

Ta is an old British expression for thanks. 

“Ta back to you for the tobacco.”

“Back to me, you say?”  He chuckled.  “So American.”

As we neared Canterbury, I realized we were traveling, in reverse, the route of the characters on the pilgrimage in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.   Chaucer wrote that tale in 1400.  I never thought when I studied it as an English major at ISU I would be on that same trip 574 years later.

My friend and I talked about Beatles albums.  He favored Rubber Soul and Revolver while I liked Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, and Abbey Road.  He was also fascinated with the Beach Boys.

“How did they make that eerie sound on "Good Vibrations"?  What’s the instrument?  I keep asking you yanks but none of you seem to know.”

“It’s called an electro-theremin.  You play it without touching it.  It’s an electrified stand-up wand of some kind.  The tone changes depending on how close you hold your hands to it.”

Think how much we all needed Google in the 60’s and 70’s.

My friend and his wife lived on the south outskirts of London.  I explained how I was in a hurry to get to Aberdeen and asked how I could get to London’s north side quickly.

“Just barreling through, are you?  It’s a pity you can’t take in more of our greatest city.  But if you must, let me take you to the Tube.  I’ll point you to the last stop up north.  Then it’s either the M1 or the M6 north.  Takes about the same amount of time.  You’re nine hours away though lad.  Over 500 miles.  You’ll likely not make it today.”

He looked worried for me.

“I know.  It’s OK.  I’ll be fine.  I appreciate the ride and the conversation so much.  I wish you the best.”

“And I you.”

“Promise me in the future you’ll take in the sights of London.  It’s one of the world’s great cities.  There’s Stonehenge too, out in Salisbury.  You have a lot to see.”

“I will.  Maybe on my way back.”

I didn’t know when I’d be back or even where I would go from Scotland.  Turns out I did pass through at winter’s end, traveling quickly to join my brother for Christmas in Germany, and have yet to fulfill that promise to my Triumph driving friend.

Now that I’m about his age, fifty years later without a hitchhiker in sight, I’ve lost the opportunity to return the favor by pointing a young man with a sketchy plan in the right direction.  Perhaps I’ll find another way.     

The Autobahn

 At the end of the summer of 1974, with my Eurail pass expired, I took to the highways.  It had been a great summer, but my money was running low, and I needed to reload.  I heard good things about Aberdeen, Scotland.  The North Sea oil boom was in full swing, American companies were hiring for their offshore platforms, and they spoke my language.  Good money, they said.

I left my brother’s house in Tellig, Germany a small village in the Mosel River Valley.  He was an officer stationed at Hahn Air Force Base flying F-4’s.  He, his wife, and two young daughters were my anchor while I stayed in Europe.  I had been in Europe for five months, made the decision to stay, told my parents, resigned my teaching position, and said goodbye to my traveling companion who returned to the States.  When I left my brother and his family, I would be totally alone and on my own.  I hated saying goodbye, but I had to go.

My brother bought beer from a nice old guy in Tellig who brewed his own.  Good beer in returnable liter bottles.  Days before I left Tellig, my brother and I brought an empty case to his house to pick up a full one.  The beer man had gotten to know me and was interested in my plans.  My brother’s German was very good.  He told the beer man I was about to leave for Scotland. 

He knew no English and always assumed I understood his German.  He asked me a question.

“Wie reist du?”

I looked at my brother. 

“He wants to know how you are traveling.”

I looked back at him.   Not knowing the German word for hitchhiking, I stuck out my thumb.

“Ah,” he smiled.  “Tramp.”

I looked back at my brother.  He smiled in a way that told me to let it go.  So, I smiled back at him.

As soon as we got outside with the beer, I said “Did he call me a tramp, like we know tramps?”

Our farm was on an Illinois State highway, Route 9 between Bloomington and Pekin.  The men that traveled the highway on foot, often stopping to rest under our big maple by the road, were definitely tramps.  Hobos.  Bums.  I’d never thought of myself as one of them.

“No,” my brother replied.  “In German tramp is not a bad word.  People who travel alone, sometimes hitchhiking, sometimes not, are often called tramps.  To them, the word has an adventurous sort of meaning.”

A few mornings later, my brother let me off with my backpack by an entrance ramp.  He had offered, once again that morning, to take me to the train station in Koblenz for a ride to the Belgium border.  But I declined, telling him I might as well just get started hitchhiking.  He persuaded me to at least let him take me to the Autobahn, like an interstate highway in America on steroids.  We hugged and he drove away.  And there I was, very much alone. 

I walked to the middle of the ramp, stood tall with my backpack at my knees, put my thumb out and started my trip to Scotland.  Before long a black Mercedes slowed and stopped.  I ran to the passenger side and the side window went down on its own.  Early electric windows.  The driver leaned forward.

“You are accepting of rapid driving?”  He had a very heavy accent.

“Yeah. Sure.”

He reached over and opened the door.  I stashed my backpack in the back seat and climbed in.  Soft leather seats.  He instructed me to use the seatbelt and shoulder harness.  Before driving on, he reached into the glove compartment and brought out a pair of fancy leather driving gloves.   Tan with air holes across the knuckles.  He put them on slowly and carefully, pulling the wrist straps tightly. 

Then he revved up his engine, smiled at me, put the Mercedes into gear, and popped the clutch.

And the fastest ride I ever had hitchhiking began.  There are no speed limits on Germany’s autobahns.  They’re well-maintained, nicely banked, and engineered to accommodate high speeds.  The guy beside me had a car built just for this kind of driving.  Every time he shifted I was pressed back into the seat.  He put his car in the left lane and whenever we encountered another auto, he flashed his lights and the slower car pulled over to let him by.   No one passed us.

It was an amazing ride.  We hardly spoke.  He managed to ask me, without looking at me, how far I was going. 

“Oostend, Belgium.”

"So weit reise ich nicht.“

I heard the words “ich nicht” and, knowing them to mean “I not,” said OK.

I don’t know how far we went.  Germany flew by.  I hardly saw anything.  My eyes were glued to the road as were his, thank God.  He was a very good driver. 

He left me at a good intersection far west of where he picked me up.  I thanked him and he stuck out a gloved hand to shake. 

“Good luck.”

At that point, he left the autobahn.  I walked slowly to the next on-ramp.  I felt like I’d been in a NASCAR race.  I’ve never had a ride like it since.  

The End of Hitchhiking

 Have you ever made a flip comment, meant to be humorous, then remembered it later and thought “That might actually be true.” 

I responded to one of those pointless FaceBook posts that posed the question “What is the one thing that is destroying the world as we know it?”  The real answer is no doubt climate change, which barely showed up.  The most numerous comment, of the thousands generated, was “Joe Biden”, which shows you who is reading generic FaceBook posts these days.

This thought came off the top of my head and I posted it without thinking.   

“It all started with the end of hitchhiking.”

I’ve had that thought before but never expressed it.  I don’t know when it happened or why and I’ve known anyone else concerned about it.  But hitchhiking is dead, and I think it has implications.  It’s a symptom of something bigger and more troubling. 

I’ve traveled a lot during my almost 72 years on Earth.  I don’t know where hitchhiking falls in the order of miles per mode of travel.  I’ve flown to Europe four times, to both Japan and Hawaii, as well as a winter trip to Mexico or Central America nearly every year since 1988 volunteering for I Care International’s optometry clinics.  So, air travel might account for a lot, because of the big trips.

Being an American in the rural Midwest most of my daily travel has been in cars, old Buicks mainly in the past twenty-five years.  While I drove a lot of miles between Ottawa and both Chicago and Springfield for work, my more frequent daily commute, a benefit of living and working in a small town, began on Ottawa’s north side and ended down the hill on the north side of the rivers, not 2 miles away.

I own a canoe but never had a boat, and have never been on a cruise, so nautical miles are limited mostly to ferry rides, lazy floats down the Fox, a handful of great trips in the boundary waters, and day trips fishing from open boats with outboard motors on Ontario lakes.

I used a Eurail pass heavily during the Summer of 1974, took the train to Springfield for a while there in the late 80s before my cornea transplants, and enjoyed a great ride with my wife on the rails from Montreal to Quebec City up the St. Lawrence River valley.  Now we take the Metra from Joliet to the LaSalle Street station when we visit Chicago and the kids, but rail travel has not amounted to much in my getting around.

But from the time that Eurail pass ran out till the end of 1975, I hitchhiked all over Europe and North Africa.  I hitchhiked from the Smoky Mountains to Ecuador and back to Danvers, Illinois in 1976, save for the occasional cheap bus ride here and there.

And when I once again owned cars, I picked up hitchhikers whenever I could.  I considered giving rides in return for rides given me as good karma.  I never had a bad hitchhiking experience as a rider or a driver.   It was both a way of getting from place to place and an unspoken social contract between humans.  I liked hitchhiking a lot. 

In its purest form hitchhiking is (or was) “I want to travel but I don’t have much money” meets “I’m going that way and I don’t mind having company while I do.” 

Hitchhiking was (I think using the past tense is sadly accurate) Uber and Lyft without the smartphone app, the credit card payment, or the star ratings.  Have we now monetized each and every want and desire humans possess, or are there yet simple kindnesses that don’t translate their worth into cash?  Hitchhiking was ride-sharing in the purest sense.  It cost neither party a dime.  Yet it created value.  Call it human capital.  Call it generosity.  I’m convinced hitchhiking was a good thing.  

Hitchhiking was a personal choice and a voluntary act.  For the hitchhiker, it started with a simple and universally understood gesture.  Extend your arm and put out your thumb. 

I think looking presentable and smiling led to more rides.  I got a lot of rides and never turned one down, that’s for sure.  I ran to cars that slowed as they passed me and stopped, and the first thing I did after stowing my backpack and taking a seat was to thank the driver profusely.  I considered hitchhiking a purely directional mode of travel.  Take me one mile or a hundred, as long as you’re going my way.  All I asked was that the driver let me out at a spot where I had a decent chance of getting another ride. 

As a driver picking up hitchhikers, I admit to slowing down and doing a quick assessment of the person I was about to pick up.  Though I may have slowed, reconsidered, and kept going I can’t as I sit here in the shack remember an instance when I did.  Hitchhikers and those who picked them up were a trusting group of people.  The whole premise was built on trust.  Usually, we discovered we had even more in common as we talked.

Back then driving alone isolated you from others.  Now we call whomever we wish to talk to at any time on our smartphones, and if they don’t pick up, we dictate a message or (dangerously) text them. 

Many times, I think drivers (especially long-haul truckers before CBs) picked me up because they needed to talk to someone, either to stay awake or simply pass the time.  I was fine with silence, but if the driver wanted to talk, I was along for the ride. 

Hitchhiking without conversation was rare. It started with the “where are you trying to go/how far are you going” exchange and built from there. Talking, even if obligatory, taught me how to communicate better.  Meaningful and pleasant conversations extended rides.

And on the flip side, it was very apparent that some people who picked me up didn’t want to exchange ideas, they simply wanted someone to listen to theirs.  I did a lot of listening while hitchhiking.  Most of it was sincere and attentive, though over time I learned to fake it.  Both later proved to be good skills to have.

Hitchhikers got rides and drivers picked up hitchhikers because we didn’t fear each other.  Any lurking fear was overridden by a trust borne out of positive experiences.  To this day I don’t personally know of anyone on either side of the equation being harmed by hitchhiking.  No doubt it happened somewhere but I’m not aware of it.  So why did hitchhiking go away?

Most contend hitchhiking is dead because it is perceived as dangerous.  So much so that police departments discourage it, and many states ban it.  Though lightly enforced, those laws had their intended effect.  Hitchhiking is so rare now that there is a whole generation of people too young to even remember it.

The fear factor was amplified by law enforcement through public service announcements in the 60’s and 70s in the U.S..  A 1973 FBI poster, signed by J. Edgar Hoover, delivers this dire message under a scene of a family opening their car door to a man with his thumb out.  Sounds a lot like Reefer Madness.

To the American Motorist: Don’t pick up trouble!  Is he a happy vacationer or an escaping criminal—a pleasant companion or a sex maniac—a friendly traveler or a vicious murderer?  In the gamble with hitchhikers, your safety and the lives of your loved ones are at stake.  Don’t take the risk!

Ginger Strand, Author of Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that there has never been good evidence that hitchhikers, or those who pick them up, are particularly likely to be raped or murdered.  One of only a few studies by the California Highway Patrol in 1974 concluded the results do not show that hitchhikers are overrepresented in crimes or accidents beyond their numbers.

It’s more likely the widespread fear of hitchhiking is motivated less by evidence than by a pair of other trends.  As hitchhiking became rarer, it seemed more dangerous because of the people still doing it.

People without cars trying to hitchhike might be perceived as weirder, more deviant, or more dangerous.  The more stigmatized hitchhiking became the fewer drivers who were likely to pick someone up.  Fewer willing drivers led to fewer people trying to hitch.  And the downward spiral continued. 

Fear of hitchhiking fit into a general fear of strangers that blossomed in American society over past decades.  For instance, parents instruct their children never to talk to strangers.  Stranger Danger is a word worn cliché.   There is a kind of safety bug that’s taken over in society.  We’re much more reluctant to interact with strangers than ever before.  All those empty seats, all those lonely drivers.  It seems like a wasted resource, doesn’t it?

But others believe the decline of hitchhiking has nothing to do with fear of crime.  Joesph Stromberg, a journalist writing for Vox put together a good piece on hitchhiking called “The Forgotten Art of Hitchhiking-and Why it Disappeared.”  Here’s what he found by talking to others about the topic.

Most experts agree that the decline of hitchhiking has nothing to do with fear but everything to do with increased car ownership.  Since the 1960s, the percentage of car ownership in the U.S. has tripled, and the portion of households with multiple cars has grown even faster.  20% of us own three cars or more.  Add to that the fact that cars now last longer, and increased car ownership has extended to lower-income families.  Fewer of us need to hitchhike to get around.  In developing countries, where far fewer people own cars, hitchhiking is still commonplace.

I was talking about all this with a friend, not in the front seat of a moving car but in the back room of a bookstore.  About the same age, he also hitchhiked. 

“I’ve got a ton of hitchhiking stories,” I said.  “I kept notes in a journal.  I’m not sure anyone would appreciate them now because hitchhiking is so rare.”

“I think you’re wrong.  I know I’d love to hear them.”

“Maybe I’ll blog some, see how people react.”

“Please do.”  

Marvel in the Moment

In my last blog post, I was getting out of Memphis, heading to Mississippi, and looking for a Waffle House.  But sometimes life interrupts those road trip sagas.  I have a note on my desk that reminds me why that happens.

Hard to follow that advice when you’re writing in late June about events that took place in early March and then relating them to American history fifty years ago or longer.  Today I am busting to tell you what’s happening right now around me.  It’s smaller in scope but exciting.

I was mowing past the clematis on the corner of the garage next to the patio when a bright red cardinal flew out of the vines past my head.  That’s never happened.  I didn’t think much of it till the next day when I walked past that same corner to get the hose and a female cardinal flew out of the same spot.  I informed my wife.  During the pandemic, we turned into bird watchers.  It gave us more to talk about.

“There’s something going on in the clematis with a pair of cardinals.”

We’ve had that clematis for I don’t know how long, but soon after we bought the house in 1987.  It’s been moved at least once.  We could take care of it better, but it does well on its own and is easy to ignore until songbirds start flying out of it.

“You know,” my wife said.  “I’ve noticed a pair of cardinals being closer to the house than normal for a week or so.  The male has been perching on your tomato cages.  He’s never done that before.”

I built new raised beds close to that corner of the garage, within reach of the hydrant and the hose. 

“Let’s go look.”

We slowly snuck up on our clematis.  Odd behavior for seniors in their own backyard, but we didn’t want to disturb a Cardinal again if it was lurking there.  Not seeing anything with feathers, we inched closer.  I’m taller than my wife, so I got up on my toes for a better look.

In a tangle of dead clematis vines I failed to cut back last fall was a smooth brown basket holding three tiny eggs. Light gray with dark spots. I announced the news to Colleen in a whispered flourish. 

“We’re about to welcome baby cardinals to the neighborhood.”

There is something wonderful about discovering new things in nature, especially when they happen so close to you.  The nest is fifteen feet away from an umbrella table where we spend a lot of our summer.  It’s less than eight feet from our new garden.  And no more than a foot from an access door to our garage, just inside is the fridge where we keep beer.  We want to give the expectant couple privacy, but the cardinals built their nursery in the middle of our summer hangout.  It’s nerve-wracking, likely for them as much as us. 

Two summers ago, during Covid when we lived like lepers, we watched a pair of bluebirds hatch their babies in a bluebird house fellow bird-loving neighbors gave us.  We did that mostly with binoculars.  We saw the fledglings fly awkwardly for a few days, then disappear.  But the bluebirds were across the yard and far away. 

As fate would have it soon after discovering eggs in the clematis, I borrowed another neighbor’s power washer to begin preparations for a family 4^th of July party.  My wife’s three sisters, my granddaughter June and her parents, a bunch of cousins.  Does this happen at your house?  My wife declared a list of home improvements that had to be done, and could not fail to be completed, before the party.  

One assigned to me was power washing the patio.  I had to admit it was long overdue.  I borrowed the washer from another generous neighbor.  But after I was underway, and realized the noise that thing made, let alone the cloud of water and crud it raised, I quickly stopped.

“Colleen, I’m afraid I’m going to scare the cardinals away from their eggs for good.”

“Oh, come on,” she said.

“No, really.  Let’s find out about this.”

Because we wonder long about nothing in this smartphone phase of our lives, we sat down at the patio table and furiously googled the habits of the Northern Red Cardinal.   Here’s what we learned.

·       The female builds the nest 3-10 feet above the ground in shrubs, vines, or low trees.  The male brings her the building materials.  Nest building lasts 3-9 days.  It’s an open cup of twigs, weeds, grass, and leaves lined with fine grass or hair.  They build a new nest every year, sometimes more than once in a single year.

• ·       Cardinals don’t migrate.  They can start nesting as early as late February (though I doubt it in Illinois) and often continue into late August or September, raising one or two broods a year, one beginning in March and the other in late May or July.
• ·       Cardinals generally mate for life, which only averages 3-5 years.  However, divorces do happen, and when they do the partners search for a new mate.
• ·       A male Cardinals defends his territory during breeding season, chasing away intruders and predators. While the female is busy building, then nesting, the male keeps an eye out for predators.
• ·       Cardinals rarely abandon their nests because they are very protective of their brood during the breeding season. 

Trusting that last bullet point, I went ahead with the patio power washing.  I washed the section nearest their nest last, worked quickly, and the male Cardinal didn’t make much of a fuss.  A day after that was done, while taking a break from painting the patio steps with Colleen, I craned my neck to check the nest again when both parents were gone.  When I peered in, wide open beaks with big eyes above them rose and gaped open at the top of the nest.  Tiny naked bodies below those big beaks seemed almost an afterthought.  I was so shocked to see live hatchlings instead of eggs I didn’t count them.  I went in the house and reported the news immediately to Colleen.

“The Cardinal chicks are here!”

Young people might think of retirement as boring when they realize big news in their parents’ lives to be the arrival of baby birds in a bush.  But be honest, how cool is it to witness new life bloom right beside you?  Very.  I don’t care what stage of life you’re in.

We had the party, the weather was good, and our guests were on the patio all afternoon and into the evening.  We made a general announcement to them about the nursery in the clematis and they were good about staying away.  The Cardinals went about their jobs as new parents, gathering food, regurgitating it into their chicks’ mouths, and keeping watch over their nest.  It may have been my imagination, but I think the male stayed especially close.  I saw him perching in my garden, watching from boughs in the cypress tree, even standing guard on the rain gutter above the clematis.

I have to say I identify with his style.  I remember when our first child, our daughter Maureen, was born.  The day after her arrival when all was well, and she was scheduled to come home I went to Kroger and bought $250 worth of groceries (in 1983 when $250 bought a whole load of groceries).  Early the next morning I was one of K Mart’s first customers and bought our first microwave oven.  I was imagining warming up our baby’s milk and feeding her myself to help my wife.

I’m not suggesting human beings have similar parenting instincts as American songbirds, but the prospect of providing for my family hit me hard.  Like the male Cardinal I took parenting very seriously.  Still do.

Of course, Northern Red Cardinals have been in Ottawa a lot longer than humans have.  If they only live for five years, there are uncountable generations of Cardinals who have built nests, hatched eggs, gathered food, and stood watch over their chicks.  Maybe they too feel a need to make sure their kind survives and thrives in the ravines, valleys, and bluffs along the Fox and Illinois rivers, or wherever they their lives take them. 

My wife and I feel honored to be part of it if even in a small way.  The birth of a nest of Cardinal hatchlings in our clematis on Fields Hill is extremely local news noted only here.  But its good news.  For me, it comes at a time when good news seems scarce.   As a country we’re going to embark on an ugly election season that will last too long and exhaust us.  Be present in the moment and pay attention to the breadth of what is going on around you.  These are things that make up our lives.

 

Post Script:  I finished this piece on the 4^th of July to the sound of fireworks going off over the Illinois river down the hill.  This morning I checked the nest.

The chicks have fledged.  One never hatched.  From what I’ve learned, the fledglings fall from the nest, hop around on the grass, stretch their wings, and imagine flight.  All that while being watched over closely by the male and female Cardinals.  Another version of helicopter parents.  Unlike humans, they become empty nesters quickly.  Do you suppose they still worry after their offspring fly away?     

Sunset in Memphis

 It was late afternoon in Memphis when I said goodbye to the bartender at Pearl’s Oyster House and walked back to the Chevy.  When I got to where it was parked, I looked down the street.  It felt wrong to leave town without paying my respects to the site of the most significant event in Memphis history.  I walked on, past my car.

There are benches on Main Street between the front of the Lorraine Motel and the back of a building that used to be Bessie Brewer's rooming house on Mulberry Street.  The buildings are now all part of the National Civil Rights Museum.  My wife and I visited there a year before the pandemic.

It was warm, even for Memphis, as I took a seat on one of those benches in March of 2023.  Good time for a long sit.  As I looked around, I couldn’t help but think of what happened there just after 6:00 p.m. on April 4^th, 1968. 

My bench faced the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, which opened in 1940 as a modest and economical southern inn available to black travelers in the South.  Like many white Americans I was vaguely aware that segregation extended to hotels, but until I saw the movie Green Book, I didn’t appreciate what that meant.  That’s another way of saying I had never stopped to consider how it must have felt for a black person to be so separated from, pushed out of, the world enjoyed by white Americans away from home.

In 2019 the film Green Book won best picture, best screenplay, and best lead actor.  It was based on the true story of Dr. Don Shirley, a classically trained and superbly talented New York based African American concert pianist, played by academy award winning actor Mahershala Ali.  In the film Dr. Shirley insists that his agent book him for a series of performances throughout the South in 1962.

His agent agrees, but only if he accepts Italian-American night club bouncer and tough guy Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga, played by Viggo Mortenson, as his driver and bodyguard.   When Tony Lip is hired, the agent gives him a copy of the Negro Motorist Green Book.

“What’s this?” Tony Lip asks.

“Those a list of the only places Dr. Shirley can stay when you’re down there.  Make sure he does.  If he’s not in one of those places every night, he’s in danger.”      

Over my shoulder was Bessie Brewer’s Rooming House, a flop house built on a small rise and made up of two buildings loosely joined together, one for whites, the other for blacks.  On April 3^rd James Earl Ray, using the name John Willard, rented a sleeping room.  Across the street was the Lorraine Motel, which was listed in the Green Book. 

Bessie remembered James Earl Ray aka John Willard, who rented Room 5-B, because he was well dressed and carried a thick roll of bills.  He peeled off a crisp new twenty for a room that cost $8.50 a week in advance. He also insisted on a room in the rear of the building nearest a bathroom that looked out on the front of the Lorraine Motel.  She didn’t ask him why he came to Memphis.

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the national leader of the civil rights movement and co-pastor with his father of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, often stayed at the Lorraine Motel when he visited Memphis.  He was partial to Room 306, a double, in front of the motel just off the balcony.  He was sharing the room with another Baptist pastor, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  They came to Memphis March 29^th to support a strike of the Memphis Sanitation Workers, most of whom were African American.   The strike began in response to the death of two such workers crushed to death in a garbage truck accident.  1300 sanitation workers struck for increased safety measures, higher wages, and time and a half overtime. 

Dr. King and Rev. Abernathy’s support of the Memphis strike fit perfectly with the larger “Poor People’s Campaign” designed by Dr. King and other civil rights leaders.  The Poor People’s Campaign was aimed at alleviating poverty regardless of race by bringing poor Americans together as a unified group. 

The War on Poverty, neglected by President Lyndon Johnson’s administration and Congress, was widely seen as a failure.  The federal government was focused on the Vietnam War, and white America increasingly perceived anti-poverty programs as helping only African Americans.  The Poor People’s Campaign sought to address poverty by dramatizing the needs of the poor and providing solutions such as full employment, a guaranteed annual income, and more low-income housing. 

In 1968, Dr. King’s speeches often contained this line “We believe the highest patriotism demands the ending of the (Vietnam) war and the opening of a bloodless war to final victory over racism and poverty.”

The sanitation worker’s strike was supported by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the NAACP.  Although AFSCME was chartered by the State of Tennessee in 1964, Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb refused to recognize the union or the strike.  There was no dialogue between the city and the union.  Garbage piled up on Memphis streets.

 

James Earl Ray was born in Alton, Illinois and grew up in Missouri.  His family moved a lot.  The family went by the surname of Raynes after his father passed a bad check in Alton.  Young James Earl had a run in with the police at 15 and left school.  He joined the army after World War II but was court martialed for drunkenness and given a general discharge for “ineptness and lack of adaptability.” 

He worked in Chicago, then California, and in 1949 was serving a jail sentence for burglary.  That arrest and incarceration was the beginning of a string of jail sentences across the country; 1952 for armed robbery in Chicago, 1955 for robbing a post office in Kansas, and in 1960 an armed robbery in Missouri that earned Ray a twenty-year sentence.  In 1967, on his third escape attempt from the Missouri State penitentiary, he succeeded by hiding in a bread truck leaving the prison bakery.  He was on the run when he came to Memphis.

In Birmingham, Ray got an Alabama driver’s license and bought a white 1966 Ford Mustang.  He headed to Mexico.  There, under the name Eric Stravo Galt, he took up a career as a pornographic film editor.  It didn’t work out.  In November of 1967 he left Mexico for Los Angeles, where he worked odd jobs and was a volunteer for Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s presidential campaign. 

Wallace ran in November of 1968 as a third-party candidate of the “American Independent Party” against Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat Hubert Humphrey.  George Wallace’s most notable campaign line was “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”

Ray left L.A. and arrived in Atlanta on March 18 where he purchased a map of the city.  After King was killed, the FBI found the map. Ray had circled the location of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Rev. Dr. King’s home on Sunset Avenue.

Ray was in Atlanta only two days before he left for Birmingham where, under the name of Harvey Lowmeyer, he bought a Remington .30-06 rifle, a Redfield scope, and a single box of twenty soft point metal jacketed bullets.  He returned to Atlanta.  After learning that Rev. King was in Memphis, he packed a bag and his newly purchased rifle and drove there.  He arrived on April 2^nd.  James Earl Ray came to Memphis to assassinate Martin Luther King.

Fifty-five years later, I was sitting midway between the Lorraine Motel and Bessie Brewer’s flophouse where James Earl Ray had locked himself in a second-floor bathroom sometime between 5:45 and 6:00 p.m.  He unwrapped his newly purchased rifle from a bedspread, stood in the bathtub, and knocked out the screen covering the window.

At 6:00 p.m.  Dr. King and Jesse Jackson appeared on the balcony.  It was a cool night. They had plans to go to dinner and a strategy meeting that night with several other civil rights leaders at the home of Reverend Sam “Billy” Kyles, long time participant in the movement and pastor of the Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis.

At 6:01 p.m., as King’s driver, Solomon Jones, standing by the white Cadillac parked below the balcony called out “Dr. King it’s getting cool.  You better get a coat,” the crack of a rifle shot was heard. 

The bullet hit Dr. King’s cheek, fractured his jaw, then entered his body in the neck area, rupturing his jugular vein and a major artery before fracturing several vertebrae and coming to rest in his left shoulder.  He was rushed to St. Joseph Hospital and pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. April 4, 1968.

The bullet would have traveled diagonally over my head between the two buildings.  Not a long shot, slightly downhill.  One pull of the trigger, a single shot in Memphis echoed across America and changed history. 

Just as the rifle shots on a street in Dallas which killed President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the volley of pistol shots from three gunmen in New York that took the life of Malcolm X on February 21,1968, and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by a single gunman at the crowded Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5^th of that same year.  RFK’s platform of peace in Vietnam had just won him the California Democratic Primary, which promised to pave his way to become the Democratic nominee for president. 

Taken together, those political assassinations in the span of five years dealt a crippling blow to the national leadership of both the civil rights and anti-war movements in America. 

Martin Luther King’s death sparked protests that boiled over into riots in 110 cities across the country.  The King Assassination riots, also known as the Holy Week Uprising, were particularly destructive in Washington D.C..  Angry crowds of 20,000 or more protestors overwhelmed D.C.’s 3,100-member police force.  President Lyndon Johnson ordered 13,600 federal troops and national guardsmen to the capitol.   Marines mounted machine guns on the steps of the Capitol building and the 3^rd infantry guarded the White House.  On April 5^th rioting took place within two blocks of the White House before rioters retreated.  It was said to have been the largest occupation of any American city since the Civil War.  By the time D.C. was considered safe three days later, 1200 buildings in that city had been burned, including 900 stores.  Damage was estimated at $27 million dollars.

In Chicago, violence centered on the West side.  It eventually expanded to consume a 28-block stretch of West Madison Street with additional violence on Roosevelt Road.  The neighborhoods of Lawndale and East Garfield Park on the West Side and Woodlawn on the South Side suffered the most chaos and destruction.  36 major fires were reported between 4:00 and 10:00 p.m. on April 5^th alone.

Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered 10,500 police sent into those areas, and by April 6^th 6,700 National Guard members sent by LBJ joined with 5,000 regular army troops from the 1^st Armored and 5^th Infantry divisions.  Mayor Daley ordered police “to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand…and …to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in the city.”   He would issue similar orders to his police force in late August 1968 in the wake of demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention held in his city. 

Similar scenarios played out in Baltimore, Kansas City, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Trenton N.J., Wilmington, Delaware, and Louisville, Kentucky.   Such prompt deployment of troops by the military was later attributed to advance planning following the Watts riots in L.A. in 1965 and the Detroit riot of 1967.   The pentagon called it their plan to contain “black insurrection.”

To liberals and civil rights advocates, the riots were a turning point.  The MLK assassination and riots radicalized many, helping to fuel the Black Power movement.

The riots also increased an already strong trend toward racial segregation and white flight in America’s cities, strengthening racial barriers that once looked as if they might weaken.  The riots were political fodder for the Republican party, which used fears of black urban crime to garner support for law and order.  Richard Nixon’s campaign platform solidified following the riots.  Some contend the riots sealed his victory in November of 68.

 

As a 71-year-old sitting on a park bench near the Lorrainne Hotel in Memphis this spring, as the sun set and the sky turned orange, I recalled how I felt in 1968 as a teen aged kid on a farm in Illinois.  I turned 17 in August of that year. 

The Vietnam War was mired in the violence of the Tet offensive.  16,592 American soldiers died in Vietnam during 1968 alone, an average of 319 per week.  Walter Cronkite announced a weekly tally of deaths in Vietnam as anchor of the CBS Evening News. 

I would register for the draft on August 13, 1969.  I felt my country was being ripped apart by forces I never knew existed; some phantom evil I couldn’t identify let alone understand.

I had a friend a year older who joined the Marines and was in Vietnam.  He wrote me letters about villagers in Vietnam fleeing their homes after napalm lit up the grass roofs on their huts.  He sounded like someone else.  Someone I didn’t know.

My brother was an officer in the Air Force and a back seater in an F-4 fighter jet.  He would soon be stationed at an air base in Thailand.  I wouldn’t know the extent of the missions he flew and the danger he faced until he came home.

When Martin Luther King was killed, and the riots raged it felt as if the violence and death of the war in Asia had come home to America.  I could feel the fear in my stomach.  1968 was set on fire by a bullet from a flop house bathroom in Memphis that burned away the hope of America.  I thought we outlived that fear.  Turns out it never left.  

Imagining "The Talk"

After visiting Tyre Nichols’ South Memphis neighborhood, I almost called it a day and headed back to my hotel.  Imagining the details of chaos and mayhem has that effect on me.  Makes me want to hide away in a safe place.

But, as I got farther from the scene of the crime in Memphis that pull began to fade.  I’d nothing to eat since a do-it-yourself waffle at breakfast.  When we were in Memphis years before, my wife and I found a good BBQ joint close to the National Civil Rights Museum.  I had no idea of its name or address.

Instead of using Google Maps I just drove in that direction hoping for the best.  I thought if I put myself in the general area, I’d find my way to the restaurant by recognizing something familiar.   Time didn’t matter.  It was mid-afternoon and I had nothing to do but drive into Mississippi the next day. 

There’s an old part of town past Beale Street that’s being made new.  Good old buildings shown some love are coming back from near death.   I turned down one of those streets and there were a pair of white Cadillacs from the 60’s parked by an old building.   Above them was an open balcony.  Hanging from the balcony rail was a large wreath. My plan worked.  I knew where I was.   

It was the Lorraine Motel, and the balcony was the site of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968.  The Lorraine Motel is part of the National Civil Rights Museum.  Also included is the building across the street from where Dr. King’s convicted killer, James Earl Ray, fired a single bullet that ended the life of America’s greatest civil rights leader and activist.

I was sure I was near the BBQ joint.  I went around the block, expanded my search, circled around for a while longer, and found nothing.  I drove by the white Cadillacs again.

As I remember that day years before, after my wife and I ate at the elusive BBQ joint, we walked to the museum, spent a long time there, and upon leaving found a brand new bar down the street that had just opened.   The bar and stools were in place, but the bartender was unpacking glassware and arranging bottles.  Another guy was setting up tables and chairs.  If I couldn’t eat BBQ, I reasoned, perhaps I could find that bar, have a drink, and regroup. 

I parked the Chevy and strolled down the street.  It felt familiar.  I walked two blocks, looking in the windows and trying to recall the bar I imagined from the past.  No luck.  I stood on a corner by an old brick building painted bright red, Pearl’s Oyster House.  Past that corner, neighborhood improvements began to peter out.  The prospect of a well-stocked bar looked dim farther on. I was 0-2 in my quest to visit old haunts.  But the possibility of oysters was appealing.  I went in.

The middle of the afternoon wasn’t busy at Pearl’s.  Two tables were occupied by couples having lunch and the bar was completely empty.  I’m not self-conscious about being alone, but the bar seemed like the place for a guy by himself to be.

As I picked out a comfortable stool, one of the couples caught the bartender’s attention and drew him to their table.  After a short exchange, he headed towards the kitchen, speaking to me as he walked past.

“Sorry.  Be right back.”

The bartender was also the waiter. 

As I waited, I scanned the bottles behind the bar.  Lots and lots of liquor up there.  Some bottles I knew by their shape or the color of their labels.  I needed more light to read the labels well. 

The bartender brought a bottle of hot sauce to one of the couples and took his place behind the bar.  I swear that smiling kid didn’t look old enough to be serving alcohol.  Does everyone look younger and younger to you as you age?  Or is it just me?

“Sorry ‘bout that.  What can I get you?”

“I think you got Old Grand Dad up there.  I’ll have him.”

“OK.”

He turned and scanned the bottles.

“I know it’s here.  I poured some last week.”

“Orange label, black letters, a little green in the background.”

He kept looking.

“Picture of an old guy in gold.  Could be up there on the right.  See?  Second shelf?”

“Yep.  Knew it was here.  I got 80 proof and 100 too.  Which’ll it be?”

“Hundred.  On the rocks.”

“Good choice.  More bang for your buck right?”

Bottle in hand, he scooped up ice in a rocks glass and filled it full of bourbon. Big pour.

“Want a water back?”

“Sure.”

“Need a menu?”

“I might.”

“Here’s one in case.”

He laid a spiral-bound sheaf of laminated pages on the bar stool next to me.  Pearl’s Oyster House has a big menu.  I looked through it quickly.  One of the couples paid their bill and left.  I checked my phone.  No messages.  The bartender began to wash glasses and dry them carefully, holding them up to the light from the window to check for smudges. I had a sip of Old Grand Dad.  Nice and cold.  My Dad kept a bottle of OGD on the farm.

“What brings you down to Memphis?  Graceland?”

Down to Memphis.  He’d immediately pegged me as a Yankee.

“No, I was to Graceland last time I was here.  I’m driving to Florida to meet my wife.  I stopped mostly to learn more about Tyre Nichols.”

“What are you finding out?”

“Not much.  He shouldn’t have died.  I’m sure of that.  I’m trying to figure out why the cops stopped him and why they were so angry.”

“Where you from?”

“Small town in Illinois.  About 90 miles southwest of Chicago.”

“Chicago cops killed a kid like Tyre, right?  Laquan McDonald?  Only Laquan got shot. 16 times, I think. They held back the video for months.”

“More.  They delayed releasing that video for over a year.  The Mayor’s Office and the States Attorney held it up till after the mayoral election.  After that the mayor didn’t run for another term and that States Attorney got beat.  Yeah.  That was a while ago.  Let me Google that.”

“I was in high school I know.”

This is why smartphones are addicting.  No need to wonder about anything.

“Laquan was killed in 2014.”

“I would have been 15.  I’m 24 now.”

“So, you been keeping track of these things for a long time.”

“Hell yes.  When you’re a black kid in America it’s self-protection.  We gotta learn from each other’s mistakes man.”

“What was Tyre’s mistake?”

“He ran.”

As the bartender was saying that, the last couple came up to pay their bill.  After they left, he bussed their dishes, carried them to the kitchen, wiped down their table, then came back to the bar.

“You need another bourbon?”

“No.  But I think I’ll have something to eat.  How’s that oyster po boy sandwich?”

‘Great.  The oysters are fresh from the Gulf.  Hand shucked.  We make our own remoulade.  Spicy.  The cook is serious about the details.”

“I’ll take it.”

“Fries with that?”

“How about double Cole slaw instead of fries?”

‘You got it.  Let me put this in.”

He left for the kitchen.  I was still thinking of him listening to the news as a black kid growing up in America and keying in on other black kids getting killed.  The bartender came back with silverware and hot sauce.

“So, you think if Tyre hadn’t run from the cops, he’d be alive now?”

“He woulda had a better chance.  Used to be, before the cameras and shit, if you ran, they’d just shoot you.  The official line would be ‘Shot while fleeing police’ or ‘disobeying a law officer.’ Cops never got charged.  All they had was police reports to go on.  Reports the cops wrote.  Now we can see what happens with our own eyes.  Makes it all different.  But it keeps happening.”

“I watched those videos over and over.  The cops were all over Tyre from the get-go.  There was no civil conversation.  They pulled him over and yanked him out of the car right away.  Put him on the ground and started in on him.”

“That I can’t figure out.  Maybe it wasn’t his car?  Maybe he had a warrant?  Nobody knows.  But every black kid in the South knows you can’t run from the cops.  You do what they tell you and take their shit.”

“How’d you learn that?”

“My parents.  It’s all part of “the talk".  You’re a guy that knows stuff.  You’ve heard of the talk, right?  Ta Nehisi-Coates wrote about it.  Barack Obama talked about it.  And all of a sudden, it’s a thing in America.  It took a hundred years for white people to realize black parents sit their kids down and teach them about police brutality so that they won’t get killed.  I’m hoping if I ever have kids, I won’t have to do that. But the way things are going I bet I will.”

Sometimes I get stuck thinking and can’t talk.  I was thinking of him as a kid listening to his parents.  I was imagining myself giving that talk.  I’ve handed out plenty of advice to my kids, but nothing on that level.  But then I didn’t have those fears as a white parent in our community.  He went on.

“Think of the long talks black parents must have had with their kids to keep them alive during slavery.  Think of keeping your kids alive during Jim Crow, so they didn’t get lynched.  Explaining those rules.  Teaching them how to go all Uncle Tom.”

“You remember your talk?  You remember what it felt like?”

“I remember my parents’ faces.  My dad was pretty matter-of-fact, but my mom was looking at me so close.  She was scared.  I don’t think I’d ever seen her so serious.  She wanted to make real sure I understood.  It worked.  Scared me, and I never forgot it.”

“How old were you?“

“I think like twelve?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“No, you can’t.  There are your parents saying don’t stand up to the cops.  Be meek.  My Dad is a tough guy.  But there he was telling me to do whatever they say.  If they hit you, they hit you.  Don’t fight back and whatever you do don’t run.  I don’t know what it feels like to be a parent but to realize how much they believed in following the rules put down by white people. It’s…”

His voice trailed off.

“It’s rules that apply to me but not to you.  It’s demeaning man.  I didn’t even realize how small it made me feel till I got older.  And then it felt so wrong.  You don’t get over that stuff.”

Someone from the kitchen appeared with my oyster po boy and set it in front of me.  It was big.  The remoulade was in a small bowl on the side.  Next to it was a big mound of Cole slaw. 

“Anything else we can get you?”

“I think I’m good.”

He went back to the kitchen.  The bartender filled my water glass.

“Sorry if I got carried away there.”

“It’s OK.  I think you had good parents.  They risked appearing weak to protect you.  They were preparing you for life.”

“I know.  And here I am.  24 and still alive.  I got to say, I haven’t had much trouble in Memphis.  Not with cops, not with anybody.”

“Is this your full-time job?”

“Part time.  I finally got back into school.  I’m at Southwest Tennessee Community College.  Hoping to transfer somewhere in the fall and get a degree in business.”

“That sounds like a great idea.”

I spooned some remoulade over the deep-fried oysters nestled in a warm French roll, sprinkled some drops of Crystal, a Louisiana hot sauce, over that, and had a bite.  To quote many wise men who have gone before me “it don’t get no better than that.” 

The bartender went on.

“Something else about Tyre.  He was from Sacramento.  Maybe it’s different in California.  I hope it is.  Maybe in his world, you could run from the cops and get away with it.”

“Think of this,” I said.  “There are the cops with his car.  Surely, they identified him.  Why not go to his house later and arrest him.  Track him down at work.  What could be so urgent?  Why run him down and beat him like a dog?”

“Because they’re cops, and he pissed them off.  I don’t think they probably believed they were killing him.  But if you beat someone that badly it’s always possible.  They were out of control.  But until they show me different, I'm  believing that’s what cops do in the South.”

“I’m afraid cops do that all over.”

“We’ll know the details about Tyre at some point.  But for now, what happened to him just reinforces what black people have always thought about the police down here.”

I had some Cole slaw.

“I’ve been trying to learn more about the South every year on these trips.  I’ve gone to a fair number of Civil Rights Museums, been to Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma.  Done some reading.  Along the way, I came across something both weird and disgusting.  I could have gone my whole life without learning this, but that’s the way it goes.”

“When black people were slaves in the South, their owners didn’t want them to die because they were their property.  They whipped them and some treated them like animals, but they rarely killed them.  So, the risk for black people being killed by whites actually went up after the Civil War.”

“The way white folks came to control black people shifted to terrorism. That’s when the lynchings started. That’s when the Klan was formed.  And police officers as agents of white governments were an extension of that entire process.  The whole deck was stacked against you, all the way through to the courts. There was no way out.”

“Yessir, the great state of Tennessee!  We got Memphis with Graceland and Beale Street, Nashville the Country Music Capital of the World, Jack Daniels Whiskey in Lynchburg, and the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan; Pulaski, Tennessee.”

“No kidding?”

“Yep.  Dirtball town south of Nashville.  Don’t bother going there looking for no Klan history.  They don’t own up to it.  Big thing for them is the Wild Turkey Festival.  Real birds, not the whiskey.”

I shook my head.

“You learn something every day.”

I took the last few bites of my sandwich and finished the slaw.

“It’s been good talking to you.”

“No problem.  An old guy who trained me to tend bar says it comes with the job. He says bartenders used to be the therapists of their day.  Paid to listen, he says.  But today I’m afraid I did too much of the talking.”

“It’s OK.  I got a lot to learn.”

“Enjoy the rest of your trip.”

“I will.  Good luck to you.”    

Chasing the Ghost of Tyre Nichols

I don’t expect “free” hotel breakfasts to be good, but you couldn’t call the morning buffet at the Union Street Holiday Inn Express in Memphis bad.  I was cutting an OK waffle into bite-size pieces with a flimsy plastic knife and fork when a young man from the front desk walked over and pasted a Post it Note next to my coffee cup.  It said:

I looked up at him.  He smiled.

“Claire wanted me to make sure you got this message.”

I’d forgotten.

“How nice of her.  How’d you know it was me?”

“She described you pretty well.  I knew it had to be you.”

“Tell Claire thanks when you see her next.”

After breakfast, I google mapped House of Rhythm and Blues+Memphis and headed to 2558 Warren, my first stop of the day.  I arrived at a sad building on a dead-end street in South Memphis.  There were weeds and no cars in the gravel parking lot.  I walked all around it.  No mural.  Back to the Chevy.

Next, I added Steve A. Castle to my House of Rhythm and Blues search.  This time the address popped up as 2536 Jackson Avenue.  Not far away.  As I drove down Jackson  I saw the mural, with a large smiling Tyre Nichols, from half a block away.

As I was in the street taking pictures, a middle-aged man came out of the building with a stack of Styrofoam clamshell containers and walked to a pickup truck parked near me. 

“You must be Steve Castle.”

He stopped and turned.

“That’s my business name.  I’m Steve Adams.”

“I just came from the House of Rhythm and Blues on Warren Street.”

“That’s my old club.  I had to shut it down during the pandemic.  I got this place about a year ago.”

“You delivering take-out food?”

“Yeah, my wife’s inside cooking.  We added a Soul Food restaurant.  We hope to start booking bands again come summer.  The pandemic was hard on the music business.”

Steve put the clamshells in his truck and came to where I was standing.  We both looked at the mural.

“I’m just passing through.  Woman at a hotel downtown told me about the mural. It’s beautiful.”

“The credit goes to David Yancy.  He was the force behind it, I just supplied the wall and the paint.  He worked closely with the family.  We didn’t want to do anything without their approval.  They gave us that picture of Tyre.  David and the Memphis black arts community took it from there.  We had a nice crowd at the dedication.  His Mom and Dad came for it.  Good people.  I’m glad I could do it.”

“It says “Hello Parents” up there.  What’s that mean?”

“That’s what Tyre always called out when he came in the house, to let his parents know he was home.  They were close, the three of them.  Sometimes he came home from work on his lunch break to eat, check in with them.  Not a lot of twenty-something kids would do that.  They can’t believe he’s gone.  My heart goes out to them.”

“He worked at FedEx, right?”

“Yeah.  FedEx is the biggest employer in town. Something like 33,000 employees.  Memphis is their world hub.  FedEx is a huge part of the airport.  24-hour operation, three shifts.”

“What kind of kid was he?”

“Good kid.  Skateboarder.  He was into photography.  If you Google him, you’ll see links to his FaceBook page and his photography website.   Crazy about sunsets.  I didn’t know him before he got killed.  Wish I had.”

I looked back at the mural.   

“You a reporter or something?”

“Just a blogger.  Small group of readers.”

“You gonna write about this?”

“I probably am, yeah.”

I fished a DaveintheShack business card out of my wallet and handed it to him.  He looked at it closely.

“I’m heading to where the cops stopped Tyre next.  Do they think he was coming home from work when he got stopped?’

“I don’t know what they think, 'cause they’re not talking but he was stopped at like 8:30 at night close to home.  Makes sense to me if he worked an afternoon shift.  But like I say, we don’t know.”

“I appreciate you letting me interrupt your day.“

“No problem.  Here, have a takeout menu.  I’ll write my email on it.  Maybe if you write about Tyre you can send it to me?”

 

“Sure thing Steve.  Thanks again.”

Please meet the artist who created Tyre’s memorial mural by holding your control key and clicking on this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0tTTtwhKG8

Tyre Nichols was stopped by Memphis police offers assigned to the MPD Scorpion Unit at 8:24 p.m. on January 7, 2023, at 6679 E. Raines Road near the intersection of Raines and Ross Roads.  A reason for the stop was never articulated by the police or cannot be heard on video and audio from police body cams. Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis later stated that the department had reviewed camera footage and could not find any evidence of probable cause for the traffic stop. 

A small memorial has been created there, in front of Prospect Christian Methodist Evangelical, a large 154-year-old Memphis church led by Rev. Dr. Robert H. Washington, Sr..   Across the street from the CME church is Kirby Middle School.  338 sixth through eighth graders attend Kirby, a newly established charter school.

Tyre was driving east on Raines.  There’s little doubt that he was about to turn south onto Ross Road.  800 yards south down Ross Road is the main entrance into Brandywine subdivision where Tyre lived with his parents.  A left turn through that entrance takes you onto the curved streets and cul-de-sacs lined with Brandywine’s tidy brick bungalows.

Tyre’s vehicle never made it past the church.  Body-worn camera footage shows an officer pulling Nichols out of the car as Nichols says “I didn’t do anything.”  An officer shouts “get on the fucking ground”.  Tyre complied.  Moments later another officer shouted “I’m going to tase your ass.”  Tyre was tased in the leg.  Officers simultaneously yelled numerous commands.  While Nichols was on the ground an officer continued to yell for Nichols to lay down.  Nicols responded “I am on the ground.”  Pepper spray was deployed against Nichols which hit several of the other officers as well.  At that point, Tyre broke free from the police, ran down Ross Road, and cut left through the gates of his subdivision.  He nearly made it home.   

Tyre was caught in a foot chase and wrestled to the ground inside Brandywine subdivision at the corner of Castlegate Lane and Bear Creek Lane.  Brandywine subdivision is in the Hickory Hills neighborhood in South Memphis.  A brick home near where Tyre lived was listed online with an asking price of $247,000 at the time this blog post was written.  

A sign not far from the second memorial reminded Brandywine residents that HOA (Homeowner’s Association) fees were due quarterly.   A swimming pool and a tennis court, part of the perks that their HOA fees make possible, were directly across the street from where Tyre was beaten so brutally the second time.

Video of Tyre’s apprehension and beatings were all taken in the dark. I watched the video many times, trying to make out the surroundings, and the context, and listened closely to the audio.  I was there in broad daylight.  A second memorial stands where Tyre’s final dash to make it home ended.  I could see it all clearly.  I could imagine it happening.

Of most interest to me was determining the location of Tyre’s house.  During his beating, Tyre can be heard shouting out for his mother three times.  Information supplied by the police at a news conference described Tyre’s home, where he lived with his parents as being “within a hundred yards.”  No address was released that I could find. 

The thought that you could suffer a life-ending beating so close to home is what brought me to Memphis.  That Tyre called out for his mom made me think he was close enough to think she might actually hear him and come to his rescue.  I understand that.  Children count on moms throughout their lives.  I wanted to see just how close Tyre was to safety.

George Floyd called out to his mother as he was dying on the street in Minneapolis, his neck under the knee of policeman Derek Chauvin.  George Floyd’s mother had died two years before his fatal interaction with the police.  He may have imagined joining her.  There is a boy inside every grown man.  All of us are at times desperate for help, crying out to the person in life we count on most.   But that night Tyre Nichol’s cries, like George Floyd’s, did not save him.

As I stood there on the street, at age 71, I thought of my own mom, big and forceful.  I could picture her running down that street seeing her son in terrible trouble.  In my mind, she screamed at the cops, threw herself on top of me, put up her own arms to stop their blows and keep me alive. 

But it was, after all, January 7^th.  Memphis was deep into winter. The sunset, Tyre’s last, happened at 5:05 p.m..  The air temperature was 50 degrees.  Not cold for Memphis in January but cold enough to keep the windows closed.  If anyone in the neighborhood heard the commotion, there is no evidence they came out of their houses.

The cops caught up to Tyre on foot at 8:33 p.m..  He was taken to the ground once again, pepper sprayed a second time, kicked in the upper torso numerous times.  More cops arrived quickly.  On the videotape, an officer can be heard yelling “I’m going to beat the fuck out of you” before striking Tyre several times with a baton.  One officer punched Tyre five times in the face even though officers had control of his arms.

Tyre’s conduct has been described as non-resisting and nonviolent.  There is no indication he struck back at the officers.  The accumulation of blows Tyre absorbed both there and in front of the church most likely led to his death.  An autopsy has not been released.  

I tried to imagine it all as I stood near the spot where it happened.  As I did, a car drove by slowly, parked on the driveway nearest the memorial shrine, and honked.  The car was driven by a middle-aged African American woman.  A much older silver-haired African American lady came out of the house walking with a cane.  She walked slowly to the car and stood by the driver’s side door.  The driver, presumably a relative, rolled down the window.

“Honey, go in the house please and get my sweater.  I didn’t know it was this cold.”

The driver went up to the house and open the door with her own key as the gray-haired lady walked to the passenger side door.  That’s when she saw me.

“Three doors up,” she said.

“What’s that ma’am?”

“Three doors up on the right-hand side.  That’s where his parents live.  When people like you stop, that’s what I tell them.  Three doors up.”

She pointed past the memorial on the street where I stood, making an arc with her hand and arm.  I looked in that direction.  Castlegate Lane made a gentle turn to the right, a bit uphill.   I saw the first house plainly and counted two more rooftops.  It wasn’t a hundred yards.  It was barely fifty.

“Oh my God.”

“Yes sir.  That close.  I don’t know the parents.  They’re fairly new here and I don’t get out the house like I used to.  But I hear they’re wonderful people.  I can’t imagine they’ll stay.  Nobody deserves that.”

The younger woman came out of the house with a sweater over her arm and both got in the car.  I was still standing there, stunned, looking towards Tyre’s house when they pulled out of the drive and drove away.

I lost all desire to discover more about the senseless death that occurred that January night in America,  this time in Memphis.  Not from a gun this time but a brutal beating.  Not  a black life snuffed out at the hands of white aggressors this time but black-on-black crime.  Cops let their unchecked anger play out violently for reasons I cannot fathom.  It’s beyond reason.

Someone else might have walked up to the Nichols house and described it for his readers.  A true journalist would have knocked on the door, given whoever answered his card, and asked if he could speak to them.  Not me.  Not that day or any other.

We can picture Tyre’s ordeal because of the video and the police reports.  But we will never see videotape of the Nichols family’s grief.  There will never be a detailed account of the loss that will haunt his mother and father for the rest of their lives.  Their son was murdered by the police on the street corner nearest their house, closer than the corner where my kids waited at the bus stop when they went to grade school.  Can you imagine any justification for that?  Is there any rational reason why Tyre Nichols is dead?

If there is an answer, it’s this.  Americans, you, me, the Nichols family, all of us, live in a terribly violent country.  Yet we do nothing about it.  Not only do we fail as a nation to confront violence and change our violent behaviors, we don’t even admit to them.  Is this the kind of country you want to live in?