Sweet St. Louis

by Omar Tyree

  “Are you gonna see your aunts while you’re down here?” her father asked her.

  Sharron looked and grinned. “Daddy, you know I can’t come home without seeing them. How’s Mia doing?”

  “She’s doing better,” he answered. “She hasn’t tried anything crazy lately. She’s just working and trying to take care of those kids. I’m sure she’ll be dying to see you.”

  “Please, don’t use the word ‘dying.’ I’ve had enough of that in my life already,” Sharron snapped.

  Her father nodded. “Sorry, baby. I know what you mean.”

  Anthony looked at both of them, dying for an explanation. Sharron planned on giving him one, just as soon as they left that morning.

  Before they did, Mr. Francis pulled Anthony aside. “Now, her aunts are the kind of women you don’t express yourself to. Because the more you say to them, the more they want to know. So, you watch what you say over there. Okay?” he warned with a grin.

  Anthony smiled back at him and nodded. “All right. I’ll do that.”

  When he walked out to join Sharron at the car, she smirked. “My father told you to watch out for my aunts, didn’t he?”

  He shook his head and grinned, feeling like a pawn in the middle of a father-daughter chess game. “If you know already, then why are you asking me?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” she grunted. “Men!”

  “Women!” he shot back.

  When they climbed into the car, he asked, “Who is Mia?”

  “My first cousin,” Sharron answered, guarded.

  Anthony sensed the guardedness in her tone and left it alone.

  “She tried to commit suicide,” Sharron added. “She has three kids, two girls and a boy, all out of wedlock, and none of the fathers do anything for their kids, and my aunt just can’t figure out what went wrong with her.”

  Anthony looked out the window as they headed through the city of Memphis and was silent.

  “I know you’re probably thinking that I have a lot of baggage in my family, right?” she asked him self-consciously.

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “And it doesn’t turn you off?”

  Anthony looked at her and said, “Would you try to commit suicide?”

  Sharron frowned. “No way in the world.”

  Anthony nodded and thought of an even tougher question. “Have you ever thought about having cancer like your mom?”

  A dagger, but it was fair to ask, and meaningful.

  “I used to think about that a lot when she died. So I get checked now regularly.”

  Anthony nodded. “And you’re okay?”

  She smiled. “Yes, I’m okay. Sometimes I even used to think that my mother stressed herself to death, outside of the breast cancer. She was never satisfied with anything.”

  “My mom could have been satisfied. But my father just wouldn’t act right,” Anthony added with a chuckle.

  Sharron said, “Will you act right with me?”

  Another meaningful question.

  He smiled at her. “I hope so. That’s all I can say. I could ask you the same thing, and what would you say?” he asked her back.

  “I’d say that I would do everything in my power to.”

  He nodded. “It’s just one of those things where you can’t really predict the future. You just have to live it day by day and find out.”

  “Well, how come we’re able to have same-sex friends for so long?” Sharron questioned. “What’s the difference?”

  “Sex.”

  They laughed.

  “Is sex that powerful, where two people can totally change opinions about each other?”

  Anthony said, “It used to be. But now … I just think of it as a part of life, instead of a mission. But when sex is a mission, as soon as you get it, you’re ready to move on to the next mission.”

  “See that? And sex is not ‘a mission,’ as you call it, with most women. We’re more into the man.”

  “You mean, the fantasy of the man,” he argued. “That’s why I was able to get with so many women. They started making up their own dreams about what they wanted, and I always knew how to take advantage of that. Women need to come back down to earth and stop fantasizing so much.”

  “Yeah, and then when you come back to earth, you end up with sorry men who don’t want to do much with themselves,” Sharron countered. “Then you try to motivate them to want more, and they complain about you not accepting them for who they are, and all kinds of other nonsense. So my friend Celena tells them outright, ‘If you don’t have what it takes, then don’t even open up your mouth to me.’”

  Anthony shook his head thinking about Dana Nicole Simpson again. “That’s a hard way to live, too,” he commented.

  “Don’t I know it. I’ve seen her going from man to man for years now, like there’s no tomorrow. But I want a tomorrow. And I want one man.”

  Anthony grinned. “I’m glad you do. Especially if that one man is me.”

  They shared a smile as they reached the downtown area and parked near the legendary music scene on Beale Street.

  “This is Beale Street, a tourist area for music lovers and Memphis’s pride and joy,” Sharron announced as they walked out onto the lively street of restaurants, music stores, and memorabilia shops.

  Anthony looked around at all of the reminders of Elvis Presley and smiled.

  “This is where The King lives forever, hunh?”

  Sharron frowned and said, “Elvis lives forever, everywhere. At least in America. They have a statue of him further up the street.”

  “A statue?” Anthony asked her, surprised.

  Sharron chuckled. “Yeah, we have a life-size statue of Elvis Presley here.”

  “And people are not supposed to touch it, right? But they can’t help themselves.”

  “You know it,” Sharron told him. “They have a lot of cops who patrol this area though. And they don’t play that.”

  “Yeah, because the entire police force probably has Elvis’s whole collection at home.”

  Sharron playfully pushed him away as they walked. Anthony noticed the brass music notes cemented into the ground that honored legendary singers, like Hollywood did with their stars.

  “Lou Rawls,” he read one of them. “So they give props to the black singers here, too?” he asked.

  Sharron looked at him as if he had lost his marbles. “Are you crazy? You can’t celebrate American music without bringing up black people. And B. B. King may not have a statue here like Elvis, but you have to give him respect. And he has just as much stuff on this street.”

  “B. B. King, hunh? What’s his guitar named again?”

  Sharron smiled and said, “Lucille. Just like my father’s girlfriend’s name. At first I didn’t like her. I used to call her Lucy.”

  “Lucy? Why didn’t you like her? You thought she was taking your father away?”

  She nodded, embarrassed by it. “Especially thinking about my mom dying. But then I just had to get over it. At least my father didn’t bring her into our same house. He moved into the new one like a year after my mom was buried.”

  Anthony looked down again and read, “Ike and Tina Turner.”

  Sharron smiled. “Yeah, they have them, too. And I know, they started off in St. Louis, you don’t have to tell me. But Tina was born in Tennessee.”

  He just smiled and kept walking. “I should buy one of these shirts or something,” he commented, looking through the shop windows.

  “You all need a tour guide?” an idle black man asked them.

  “No, we’re not tourists. I live here,” Sharron told him.

  “Okay, just checking, sister.” He headed by them for the next excited couple.

  “That’s what you deal with when you come back down to earth, Anthony. Men who don’t know what to do with themselves.”

  He shook his head and countered, “That’s everywhere. But don’t think that the white man doesn’t have anything to do with that.”

  Sharron sighed
and looked away for a second before coming back to him. “Here we go with that white man stuff,” she commented. “When are we ever going to stop blaming white people for stuff and just get on with our lives?”

  “When they stop holding the deck of cards away from us.”

  “Well, we’re gonna have to make our own deck then, Anthony.”

  “They didn’t make their own deck. They stole it. Then they studied and reproduced it. Now they go around talking about they originated it. And that’s with a lot of things they do.”

  Sharron said, “They did originate a lot of things.”

  “And like you said, so did we,” Anthony argued. “Including rock music.”

  Then he smiled at her. He was just pulling her leg. He knew what he had to do, regardless of oppression. He would take care of his own time, space, and destiny.

  He said, “Naw, for real, I don’t dwell on it. Some people do, some people don’t. But I don’t forget about it either.”

  “I didn’t say to forget about it,” Sharron told him. “But if you have your own life to live, what are you gonna do, live your life or use them as an excuse not to?”

  Anthony continued to grin, viewing the other Friday morning tourists, who were mostly white couples and families, along with the police, and the hangers-on, who were mostly black men.

  He thought about it and said, “Women don’t seem to be as affected by it anyway.”

  “Yeah, because we know we have to eat. But black men would rather starve, beg, and complain about shit.”

  Sharron was getting a little testy. I’m tired of hearing all these excuses about four hundred years ago! she thought. Are we gonna talk about the white man for another thousand years or what? I mean, when do we ever move on from that?

  Anthony noticed her sour mood and grabbed her by the waist. “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m gonna do what I need to do. Okay? I’m just teasing you. I feel the same way you do. It ain’t always about race. I tell my boy Tone that all of the time.”

  “And what does he say?”

  “He says, ‘That’s bullshit. It’s always about race!’”

  They laughed again, right as they made it to Elvis’s statue.

  “So, here he is,” Anthony commented, taking a look. “They got him in full swing and everything. But we have a holiday for Martin Luther King. And now we have a stamp for Malcolm X of all people,” he said. “I thought white people would never give us a stamp of Malcolm X.”

  That reminded Sharron of the National Civil Rights Museum that she planned to visit with him.

  “Actually, we have an entire museum just down the street from here. They still have the room and the cars parked outside where Dr. King was shot.”

  “You mean assassinated,” Anthony corrected her with a grin.

  Sharron grinned back and agreed with him. “Okay, assassinated.”

  “You don’t believe he was?” he asked. Anthony did. With all of his heart.

  “Yeah, I believe that. I mean, I may not blame white people for everything, but I’m not crazy either,” she told him.

  Anthony laughed out loud and said, “Good. Because I can’t have a woman who thinks white people can’t do any wrong, whether I decide to live my life without blaming them or not.”

  “Everybody can do wrong. And after visiting this museum, I know they’re far from being perfect,” Sharron responded.

  Anthony said, “You needed a museum to teach you that?”

  “No. But it just reminds you and puts it all into perspective, so that we don’t forget as you say.”

  She led him just a few blocks east to the National Civil Rights Museum and paid the small entrance fee.

  “Who’s that standing across the street?” Anthony asked as they entered the museum that was modeled after a sixties hotel with two old cars parked out front.

  “They’ve been protesting the museum since it opened up, saying it capitalizes on the tragedy of King’s death,” she told him.

  Anthony nodded, half-agreeing with it. “Everything in America is for sale anyway. Don’t they have a holocaust museum for the Jews?”

  Sharron looked surprised. “I didn’t know you knew about that.”

  He frowned and said, “What, I can’t read and watch news reports? I may not be the smartest guy in the world, but I’m not Gomer Pyle over here either.”

  “I didn’t say that you were.”

  “Well, stop being surprised by what I know.”

  She smiled and said, “Gomer Pyle wouldn’t be with me anyway.”

  They walked through the first museum room filled with the documented history of scholar, athlete, actor, and singer Paul Robeson. Then they moved along to the second room of college protesters on a North Carolina campus, climbed aboard the bus where Rosa Parks made her historic stand, and walked through southern prison cells where black men either committed suicide or were more than likely hanged by their bedsheets. Then they eyeballed the intimidating white sheets of Klansmen and viewed the black sanitation workers in their fight, while reading the newspaper articles that were posted to the walls, regarding black men, women, their work, their words, and the lectures that all added to the framework of American history. At the conclusion of their tour, they climbed the stairs to the second floor and took a good long look at the modest hotel room where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. rested on his last day with the living before being shot and killed on the hotel’s balcony.

  Sharron looked at her man, who had been surprisingly quiet throughout their tour, and asked him what he felt about the museum.

  “It’s much bigger inside than it looks from the outside,” he commented. “From the outside, it’s deceiving.”

  “They did a good job designing it,” Sharron said. “But does it make you want to go after white people?” she asked him. It was her turn to play devil’s advocate. She sure felt like getting some retaliation with white Americans after she first walked through the museum.

  Anthony shook it off and responded, “Not really. It just makes me understand that I have to keep on working to move ahead. It wouldn’t make no sense to go out here and do something stupid. I’d end up arrested, and it wouldn’t change a damn thing.”

  Sharron smiled, thinking, Now that’s a black man! We can’t dwell on the past. We have to keep moving forward. The best that we can do is use the past as fuel for the future.

  After the museum, they walked outside and up to Main Street and rode the twenty-five-cent trolley, jumping off farther up to walk in and out of Memphis’s downtown shops.

  Anthony looked in the showcase windows at many of the six-button, colorfully striped and tweed suits and laughed.

  “What, y’all got the return of the mack down here in Memphis?” he joked.

  Sharron smirked and said, “Don’t even try it. I saw some of the same kind of suits in stores in St. Louis.”

  “Yeah, and nobody was wearing them.”

  “So, you wouldn’t wear a six-button, double-breasted, wide-collar suit?” Sharron asked as if she were serious.

  Anthony said, “You trippin’. Then on top of that, they got all of them crazy colors: big, thick yellow and orange stripes. You see the kind of outfits I wear. I’m into solids.”

  “You wouldn’t even wear one of these suits if I bought it for you?” Sharron asked, hinting with a smile.

  He nodded. “You make sure that you keep your receipt. Because you’ll be taking it right back to where you got it.

  “What if I bought you an orange sequin dress with both legs hanging out and a big orange bow tie on the shoulder? Would you wear that?” he asked her.

  Sharron broke out laughing. “If we were going to a costume party.”

  “All right then,” he told her.

  They crossed the street and went into a furniture store just to walk through.

  “Damn, look at how big these bedposts are,” Anthony said, grabbing ahold of bedposts with knobs the size of soccer balls. “Who would want these giant things on their b
ed?”

  “Evidently, somebody thought people would,” Sharron told him. “Just like with the six-button suits.”

  “What kind of bed would you buy for us?” Anthony asked.

  “It would be more of a we thing, and I probably wouldn’t shop here. We just came in here to be nosy.”

  “Oh, is that why we came in here?”

  “Yeah, just to look,” Sharron repeated, loud enough for salesmen to overhear her and leave them alone.

  “There’s no charge for looking,” an eager salesmen in a cheap blue tie responded.

  Anthony walked over to the sectional sleeper-couch area and sat down.

  “I’d buy one of these for my sixty-inch color TV, to watch the World Series, the Super Bowl, the NBA finals, the Final Four, and a couple of X-rated movies,” he joked.

  Sharron sat down next to him and said, “Yeah, me too. I’d even have some live X-rated dancers so me and my girls could stick money in their jock straps.”

  Anthony frowned and said, “Not in my house you won’t. What are you talking about?”

  “Well, what’s with the ‘X-rated movies’?” she countered.

  “They’re not real people.”

  “They may as well be.”

  Anthony smiled and said, “Would you dance naked and put on a show for me then?”

  “Would you do it for me?”

  “If you didn’t tell anybody.”

  Sharron started to laugh. “Still worried about your rep, hunh?”

  “So worried that I would never do somethin’ like that.”

  “I wouldn’t either.”

  Anthony said, “So, we’d be a conservative couple then.”

  “I guess so. Why, is something wrong with that?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I guess it can get boring after a while, you know.”

  “Well, you find ways to liven it up by going different places and experiencing new things together, not by acting all freaky.”

  Anthony smiled. “What if you can’t just jump up and fly off to Jamaica or somewhere though?”

  “There’s other things that people can do. Most of the time they just don’t try it. Like when you first took me out to watch airplanes. That was original.”