Jerry Goulart

"When I was walkin' in Memphis. I was walkin' with my ten feet off of Beale."

Marc Cohn's got it. Memphis is a beautiful, tragic, hopeful, mystical, American city.

Memphis is the capital of the Mississippi delta; Beale Street's the birthplace of the WC Handy, his Blues, and their child, rock 'n' roll. "Long distance information, give me Memphis, Tennessee, help me find the party tryin' to get in touch with me." I was drawn there by some powerful, unknown forces.

For Thomas Jefferson, the Mississippi was the Nile, so this high-bluffed city, this place where the bounty of this fertile delta would be gathered and transported to world markets would be Memphis.

Blues was born of Negro spirituals sung by field slaves harvesting that bounty; rock 'n' roll was born when a white Elvis Presley recorded a song by black Arthur Cruddup, "That's All Right Mama," at Sun Records on Union Avenue. Graceland, a sad place unbefitting a king, just down Union, has displayed a model of the sharecropper's shotgun house where Elvis was raised. You'll recognize the style in images of flooded, impoverished, neighborhoods in Katrina, New Orleans. Someone once told me that "Elvis was nuthin' but poh whate trash anaway."

On Union's river end is St. Jude's Hospital. Children stricken with cancer come there from the world over to receive free, state-of-the art, care and cure. Lebanese-American Danny Thomas, down to his last buck, prayed to St. Jude that if he ever became successful he would generously repay his blessing. A beautiful Mosque-like building on his hospital's grounds is the memorial to the kept promise. While reading the mosque's teachings inscribed in gold arabesque, I dodged a bald, beautiful 3-year-old young lady racing a bright red tricycle, followed closely by a proudly smiling father.

At the Peabody Hotel, 149 Union, I was halted crossing as the motorcade bearing Nelson Mandela passed heading to the National Civil Rights Museum to receive the International Freedom Award. The museum, the former Lorraine Hotel, is a few blocks south, past Beale. Its tour a historical timeline of, among other things, slave ships, auctions, lynching, Jim Crow, KKK, a Little Rock school, a bus ride with Rosa Parks, crossing a bridge at Selma, a Birmingham jail cell, a recording of JFK and Mississippi Gov. Ross Robert Barnett about James Meredith, etc.

Looking from the deck into Room 306: trays, plates, cups, saucers and silverware are strewn on beds, on night stands, and on chairs. Below sits a white-finned Cadillac. Straight across is a small, single window garage. At our feet, and the dark stained concrete, the tour ends, "Early morning April 4" on the spot where Martin fell. "Free at last they took your life, But they could not take your pride."

"Touched Down in the land of the delta blues."

In a few months we lost Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King. If you get to Memphis, and Beale, and the Delta, you'll know their power. You'll know their work goes on.

Jerry Goulart is an affirmative action and outreach officer and a member of the Gloucester Democratic City Committee.