To Read Before You Go

I just booked a flight to visit my lovely sister in Nashville in a couple weeks. Of courses she moves to Tennessee as soon as I leave. I thought in honor of my trip and in honor of my recent home (Memphis), I’d write a post about Peter Taylor’s novel, A Summons to Memphis.

This is about a man who got away from Memphis. He lives in New York City with his girlfriend of many years but gets called home when his mother dies and his father begins dating and possibly marrying a younger woman. When his spinster sisters are concerned about their father’s behavior to the point that they think their inheritance is in jeopardy, they call the narrator, Phillip Carver, home to Memphis.

I’m not sure how interesting this book would be for someone travelling to Memphis for the first time. It was interesting to me when I lived in Memphis so it may be better for those familiar with Memphis or if you plan on travelling to Tennessee and want a gist of the history.

The book never takes into account Memphis’ black population but gives an interesting look at the affluent population of the city in the early 20th century. It also helps describe the differences between Nashville and Memphis. The Carver family, before reaching their current predicament, was once forced to leave Nashville because of a bad business deal. When the children were young, they made a pilgrimage across Tennessee, from the more desirable Nashville to the peculiarities of Memphis. It is suggested that this move not only ruins the oldest’s sisters prospects of marriage, but also throws Mrs. Carver into depression. Her family occupied a prominent place in Nashville society before her marriage.

This book is personally fascinating to me as well because of the are of Memphis the family moves to. Their house is near the intersection of Cleveland and Madison. Anyone who has been to this intersection in present day Memphis knows you wouldn’t want to sit at the stoplight without your doors locked or your windows rolled down; you would also not want to veer to the south of Madison.

When my boyfriend and I made the trek from our downtown loft to Midtown (usually to our favorite Indian restaurant) we would always drive down Madison swerving around on the trolley tracks. At Cleveland, near the end of the Madison Street Trolley Line, there is a cluster of buildings which line the street. Most of the buildings are two story with a store at street level and boarded windows on the second floor. I’ve always been fascinated by this stretch of Madison because of the stores that occupied the ground floor. You’d think in Memphis, a city where most of the buildings downtown are empty (maybe becoming less true), these little storefronts with peeling paint and bars on the windows would also be empty. But these little stores were always full.

These were the types of places I would have loved to discover in my suburban teenage years which seem painfully authentic and gritty. Over the three years I lived in Memphis, the stores changed: a little Italian place became a chicken wing restaurant, an empty store put up signs that they now sold cookies, the African religion store was a standard, as well as the African braid store. There was a phone/internet/money transfer store and a hardware shop that seemed to have been there for a long time.

If I wasn’t driving, I would always hope we got the red light or ask my boyfriend to drive slow so I could look more closely at the shops, perhaps see something that I’d never seen before, some corner of life I wasn’t familiar with.

A Summons to Memphis is a good introduction to Tennessee’s largest cities. Taylor explains their differences well; these differences still seem to hang on today. While Taylor ignores a whole part of Memphis, the part of its history he does described is equally important in understanding the city and told in an authentic manner. While I usually don’t like novels written in first person where the narrator is a writer (gee I wonder who “Phillip” is), A Summons to Memphis is worth a read. If you find yourself in Memphis, you may want to seek out the intersection of Madison and Cleveland, but unfortunately, it’d probably be best to stay in your car.