Summer in the South can kill you, kill you dead. It’s hot. It’s humid. It’s sticky.
It does rain some, but unlike everywhere else I’ve ever lived, this rain brings no lasting relief. The rain can even fall at a seeming shower-like temperature, and barely cools the skin.
The sun does set, and dangers like sunburns or melting asphalt cease, but the ambient air temperature does not get much cooler. The heat hangs on the water in the air, air you near swim through.
I grew up in Memphis, TN, which is never not humid. And I loved the summers.
My little sister’s birthday is in June, right after school got out for the year, and it always seemed to start the season. Mid-June is Memphis is already hot of course, but it is pleasant, manageable. There is usually a breeze.
And there are always swimming pools.
As I talk about all the time, I consider Memphis, TN, my hometown but in fact I wasn’t actually born there. Of me and my siblings, only the youngest, my brother Peter, was born in Memphis. My father grew up, but also was not born in, Southeast South Dakota, and I was born in his adopted hometown.
My parents first moved to Memphis from Wisconsin in August of 1975, in a car with no air conditioning. I think this experience was traumatic for them, as Memphis nears hellish conditions as a general rule in August. Then and now, August is the worst of it, with even pre-climate shift temperatures consistently in the high 90s with the month’s average humidity (mid-60s) regularly hovering in the 80 and 90 percent range.
So we would leave, head north to South Dakota, where our grandparents lived. They were on a farm outside of town and had also turned a one room school house into a tiny cabin on a rural lake further in-state. It was paradise.
I’ve written about this before, but it was in this place, the Dakota plains, that I first suspected there was something wrong with white people. I suppose that I’d been so immersed in the plantation culture of the South that I didn’t notice any white people acting any which way but when I encountered a clear antipathy towards the Lakota and Yanktoni kids playing in the pools and parks with us, it made me pause.
I loved those August trips to South Dakota, and it meant that for the most part, we missed much of the August heat. Schools in Memphis weren’t generally air conditioned in the 70s and 80s, so classes didn’t start so early in the year. But even with that trip to the Plains, we had plenty of time to languish in the August swelter.
I left Memphis in 1989 to go to college at University of Kentucky in Lexington. (That summer’s August is a book chapter unto itself. Wry smile.) I returned five years later, and started that summer newly married, and ready to get to know my beloved Memphis again. We went to our first Elvis Presley Memorial Candlelight Vigil that year, something we would do a few times before leaving Memphis for Denver, CO.
One year, my church made a pilgrimage out of the evening. We rented a small bus, the kind that picks you up at the airport, and about 2 dozen of us took a journey. We went to the public housing projects, Lauderdale Courts, where Elvis and his family lived when they arrived from Mississippi. We went by his high school, and the places where he worked. We went to Levitt Shell, the site of one of his first concerts, and we ate jelly doughnuts along the route.
Once there, we joined the thousands of others who had shown up to pay tribute to a singer who changed their lives. The evening included testimonials from people who knew Elvis, or who’d been affected by his famous and often odd local philanthropy, favorite Elvis songs sung on stage and also by the crowd, a parade of Elvis impersonators from all over the world, and the opportunity to file past Elvis’ grave and pay respects.
And that really is how it went. It was very clearly run by the fans for the fans. People cried. Speakers rambled too long. It was amateurish and a little chaotic and very sweet, authentic.
And Elvis Presley Enterprises hated it.
They hated the SROs and motels whose front windows became Elvis displays. Said it was tacky, when I found it deeply endearing.
They hated the multitudes of diverse and eclectic Elvis impersonators who poured into town. Said these people diluted the meaning of Elvis.
Whatever that was supposed to be.
Growing up in Memphis in the 70s and 80s meant that everyone had an Elvis story. Elvis was iconic in that he was ELVIS PRESLEY but also he was a working musician in a town of working musicians. My 6th grade teacher tutored him in math. A friend’s mom dated him in high school. A neighbor’s aunt had one of his cars. And these stories came from white and black Memphians alike. I met people all the time, and people from all walks of life, who had a personal Elvis story.
So the idea that he could even be owned or contained by his estate was ludicrous. And I suppose that things were necessarily different when Elvis’ Aunt lived on the property at Graceland until her death in 1993. Priscilla couldn’t totally clear house. But eventually she did.
The first time I caught wind that things had radically changed for International Dead Elvis Week and the Vigil was 2016. A Black Lives Matter protest was peaceably holding its own counter-vigil to what they saw as exclusionary practices by Elvis Presley Enterprises. White Memphians wanting to attend the Elvis Candlelight Vigil were ushered and escorted through the crowds. Black Memphians were detained and barred from entering Graceland, even detained from standing on the public road out front of the mansion.
I started hearing murmurs from friends about the whitewashing of Elvis. I started noticing the super creepy and very white “Christmas at Graceland” movies. The new Elvis biopic is apparently as mayonnaise as one *could* tell a story about music, especially in the South.
I’ve always loved International Dead Elvis Week and the Candlelight Vigil because for a time, about 20 years, they truly were expressions of grief and celebration from a community of fans. A Spontaneous American Death Ritual, I used to call it.
It pains me to know that the virus of whiteness has crept in to re-write not only Elvis’ narrative but also the story of those who love his music, or who were affected by him and his life in some way. The exploitation of the dead for personal gain is always a problem, but the shift in the underlying racial narrative is worse.
August in Memphis can make anyone a little crazy. But it’s also beautiful -a sacred time when music goes long into the night chasing after breezes, when sweat pours from bodies and carries away all that separates us, when it’s too damn hot to do anything other than just be, exist. There is something equalizing about this shared immersion in the power of the planet to make us stop. Not move so fast. Take our time and our breath and slow ourselves down.
May it be so for all of us.