MEMPHIS, Tennessee—Ghosts drew me to this old river city.
I first rolled into Memphis 40 years ago. I rode my motorcycle down from St. Louis, where I was attending grad school, running parallel with and occasionally crossing the Mississippi River.
I was young then, not far north of 21, and had yet to see much of my own country, much less the world. The ride south on a crisp October day felt like a release from a cage.
The purported reason for the trip to this city on the bluffs above the river was an academic conference. Several fellow grad students and I made plans to attend the conference on a shoestring budget, renting only one hotel room and taking turns sleeping on the floor.
The real reason I wanted to come was that I thought of Memphis as a haunted place.
I’d been an Elvis fan since childhood. He served as a beacon of possibilities, proof that a young man from an undistinguished background could ride talent and energy to far, even unimagined places. I wanted to walk the streets he’d walked when he was not much younger than I was—and had begun to shake the world.
Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed here when I was in third grade. I watched the news with my parents, then listened in the days that followed to the adults talk, their tones shifting from sadness to horror to terror. Not for the last time in my life, I feared that my country could fly apart.
I wanted to visit the spot where King had died, to pay my respects and perhaps find some solace for the grief that lingered within my soul.
The night I rolled in, a friend and I rode out in search of Graceland, Elvis’s home. It was deep dark, and the surroundings were strange to us. We weren’t sure we could find it.
Then she shouted in my ear, loud enough to cut through both the wind and the buffeting of our helmets, “There it is.”
I wheeled up to the famous music-themed gates. An older man in a security guard’s outfit walked out. I later learned he was Elvis’s uncle.
He said the mansion’s grounds were closed but that we could come back in the daytime and visit the grave.
During a break in the conference, I rode back out.
Graceland then was not yet rock ’n’ roll’s answer to Disneyland. It hadn’t been commercialized with buses depositing tourists at the front door on a schedule of military precision.
The house then was closed to the public. On a tree as one walked to the grave a bucket had been nailed. A handwritten sign asked for donations to help keep up the grounds. It was signed by Vernon Presley, Elvis’s father, who had outlived his son by less than two years.
While I stood at the grave, I saw a middle-aged woman, wracked with tears, try to leap onto it. Elvis’s uncle and another security guard corralled her, then led her away, gently, consoling her and guiding her to the exit at the same time.
I pondered how a man who inspired such adoration also could seem so lonely.
The next day, a group went to the Lorraine Motel, not yet the site of the National Civil Rights Museum. It was the spot where Martin Luther King died. It was a sad, shabby place.
I wandered off by myself to look at the spot where King had fallen. I bowed my head and thought about how easily—how tragically—a moment of madness and malice could end and undermine so much hard work, promise and hope.
I’m back in Memphis again, much older now, walking the streets and seeing the sights my younger self did. Elvis has been gone for nearly 45 years, King more than a half-century.
But they still haunt this place.
I close the night on Beale Street, home of the blues. An all-Black combo does a blues cover of the Marshall Tucker Band’s “Can’t You See,” a group of Black men appropriating a song made famous by a bunch of Southern white boys. The crowd, Black and white, stomps and shakes in time with the music.
God, I love this town, this country.
Even its ghosts.
Especially its ghosts.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. Send comments to [email protected].
