Over the years, the Mississippi River has borne witness to many a journey. Furs from Minnesota. Lead from Illinois. Souls in search of a new beginning. It’s seen Black folks on flatboats, sold off to the highest bidder. White folks too, drifting along its currents seeking honest work.

From Memphis, the sun sets over the river. It ain’t much for width or depth. But it stretches out long and bent like a bony finger, pointing out sinners from saints. People been settling along her banks as long as she’s been flowing. That river is why folks know the same ’Memphis’ at all.

Around the time that young girl met her end, we were seventy years past Memphis finding its name on a map and forty since The War Between the States and Yellow Jack left us penniless. We had to rebuild our city brick by weary brick. Cotton was king then, but Lord knows we’d seen troubles. Floods and massacres - Nathan Forrest’s Slave Mart on Adams Street, where they’d auction off lives come Saturday morn.

Folks from outside might think of Memphis like a charming Old South relic like Savannah or New Orleans. But this town? The dirt is soaked with the restless spirits of the unheard. They say the Mississippi River runs thick with silt; I say it’s thicker with blood.

Downtown buildings reached for the sky – near twenty stories high – and some folk had motor cars to take them around. The city proper stretched several miles East from the Mississip’, but outside of town, neighborhoods turned to farmland and roads turned to dirt.

And, people’s ways changed, too. In the city, even the boogeyman knows to hide his face. But out in the country? The devil himself would look you square in the eye and share a pew with you come Sunday service.