Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee
By this particular point in the evening, the light illuminating the fields whizzing by outside my window had become as red as the soil beneath them.
“What is that?” I wondered aloud about the vista extending to the horizon of a crop I didn’t recognize.
A fellow passenger, making his way slowly down the car with that particular ambling wide-stanced gate that one soon adopts while moving about on a train, overheard me and paused to lean over and take a look.
“That’s milo,” pronounced my new, agriculturally-astute friend. Milo, I was to learn is a grain sorghum grown to feed cattle in parts of the south where corn doesn’t do well.
And there it is…the wonder of train travel. It provides a window to a constantly changing world outside, and the time to make new friends with whom to discuss that world.
I was aboard Amtrak’s City of New Orleans bound eventually for Memphis on a long weekend trip that started out earlier that afternoon at the tiny, historic train depot in downtown Hammond. Several nice things about that particular starting point: free parking, access to Hammond’s vibrant outdoor dining scene for a lunch prior to the mid-afternoon arrival of the train, and access to downtown Hammond’s free wifi network to check on the train’s progress with your smartphone. And that’s important, because the train was indeed a bit delayed, as is often the case for a variety of reasons that range from the weather to the fact previously unknown to me that freight trains have priority on the tracks over passenger trains.
But this trip wasn’t about getting anywhere in a hurry, and just a bit behind schedule, we were on our way for to Jackson, Mississippi—three hours away— the first leg of the trip. Time enough to wander a few cars forward, grab a cup of remarkably good coffee and settle in to the lounge car where I’d planned to read a book. But instead it turned into sort of a mobile cocktail party, filled with conversation (often sparked by the changing landscape through which we passed), a hand of cards or two, and convivial new friends.
And before we knew it, the train was pulling into Jackson’s handsomely renovated station. And conveniently, just a block away, was that evening’s accommodation, the King Edward Hotel.
The historic hotel is one of several that have occupied this block, dating back to before the Civil War. This, the latest, is a Beaux Arts structure built in 1923. After sitting abandoned for forty years, a ninety million dollar renovation began in 2007 and the hotel reopened as a Hilton Garden Inn in 2009. The lobby recalls the grandeur of the hotel’s early days, while the rooms are comfortably contemporary.
But no time to dawdle in the room just now, it was time for dinner.
You can’t miss the Mayflower, illuminated as it is by the multicolored glow of a huge vintage neon sign. If you’ve seen the movie version of The Help, you caught a glimpse of it, chosen no doubt by that movie’s location scouts because it has changed little in decades. This is classic Southern comfort food from a menu I suspect hasn’t changed much in decades either. It was here that I first discovered comeback sauce, the highly local, all-purpose condiment that’s used for everything from salad dressing to French fry dipping. Comeback sauce was invented in Jackson by a Greek restaurateur, and the taste falls somewhere in between Thousand Island dressing and rémoulade.
The trip onward to Memphis would resume late the next afternoon, which gave me much of the next day to explore. I devoted most of that time to the Mississippi Museum of Art.
I’ve seen several of the blockbuster exhibits this museum is noted for staging over the years, like the Palaces of St. Petersburg and the Splendors of Versailles. But I realized on this trip that the museum’s own collection is eminently worthy of a trip all on its own, with work by Walter Anderson, George Ohr, Sam Gilliam, William Dunlap, John McCrady, Richmond Barthé, Eudora Welty, William Hollingsworth, Marie Hull, and William Eggleston, among many others.
The museum has also recently unveiled a new art garden, and its Palette Café sports fresh fare in a bright contemporary setting. I had the Southern Sideboard Salad which tosses black eyed peas and fried okra into the usual fancy salad mix.
Nearby too are both the new and old capitol buildings, a planetarium, the Smith Robertson Museum housed in the first public school built for African Americans in Jackson, and the Museum of Muslim Cultures. Plenty to fill a day and broaden your knowledge base.
And before I knew it, it was time to gather my luggage and make it to the station. Another four hours, and several chapters in my novel later, and we’re in Memphis.
Like Jackson, downtown Memphis is a work in progress, a renaissance not fully accomplished, but well on its way. For a dollar, a vintage trolley shuttles you from the train station all about to the iconic Memphis “must-dos.” The National Civil Rights Museum is just a block from the train station. A free shuttle will whisk you to Graceland. There’s Beale Street of course, and if you’re not staying at the Peabody Hotel, the obligatory stroll through the lobby where indeed there are ducks swimming in the lobby fountain (not to mention a gift shop stacked to the ceiling with every duck themed souvenir one could imagine).
But I’m a fan of pressing on beyond the obvious, and so for me it was out the other side of that lobby to stroll the streets beyond, now starting to be dotted with lofts and galleries, in search of what I didn’t already know about Memphis.
And there it was. A sign that read: Belz Museum of Asian & Judaic Art. Now THAT’s an arresting combination. And down at the end of a long office building corridor was indeed a collection of galleries, some housing the more than nine hundred Asian art objects collected by local entrepreneur Jack Belz and his wife Marilyn, which range in date from 202 BC to the early twentieth-century and include intricately carved jades, ivories, sculptures, paintings, ceramics, lacquer, textiles and funerary art.
Across the hall is a gallery filled with the couple’s other passion: art and historical pieces related to Judaism, including the work of some of Israel’s most celebrated contemporary artists. In addition to modern Judaica and contemporary Israeli art, works by Samuel Bak, Marc Chagall and Mane Katz are on display.
Then it was on for a stroll down Beale Street where, beyond the blues and BBQ, way at the end, I wandered in to the Withers Collection Museum and Gallery—the repository of more than a million images captured by African-American photojournalist Ernest C. Withers over the course of his sixty-year career. The photos that line the walls are stunning documentation of the Civil Rights Movement, the Negro Baseball League, Beale Street, Elvis, and African-American social life over many decades. Not what I expected to find on Beale Street. And therefore all the more fascinating.
There are not surprisingly at least a dozen BBQ joints in the downtown dining scene, but there’s also an emerging gastro pub scene with chef-driven fare at places like South of Beale. But once again it was the completely unexpected moment that most amused me that day—the discovery of the Canadian-themed Kooky Canuck restaurant, with moose heads on log cabin walls, and a menu that included “poitine,” that beloved Quebecois snack that piles cheese curds on top of French fries then smothers the whole thing with gravy. Actually it’s the sort of thing I’m surprised wasn’t invented in the South.
You could easily spend two or three days exploring just downtown Memphis, but I crammed all I could into one, and early the next morning boarded the train home.
This leg would be straight through, six and a half hours. Every minute of which, I intended to savor.
Details. Details. Details.
The City of New Orleans operates daily with a scheduled departure from Hammond at 2:45 pm and a return from Memphis at 6:50 am.
