Midnight in the Garden of Good and (Boll) Weevil

As the sun deliberately seeps out of view over the horizon, making even the dusty wasteland of East Arkansas look picturesque beyond the silver ribbon of the Mississippi, the the collective Memphian hayride shuts down the tractors, one day closer to the cliff, one day further removed from the triumphs and atrocities of its martyrs.

Grey leaks into the cold lavender of the sky, pouring into a trapezoid reflected by the four facets of the great Pyramid, striated by ribbons of rust pointing straight back into the pavement from whence it came. Cranes stretch up into the britches of the I40 onramps and offramps as welders work into the early evening, cars overhead apathetically ignorant to their evident peril.

They're going home now, and the parking lots are gradually losing their tenants back into the outerlands of Bartlett, Cordova, Southaven, and Collierville. At one time you might have called downtown Memphis an island of commerce in a sea of blight, spanning from the suburbs to the river. These days, the distinction doesn't seem to be quite as clear.

To say that MTV and the War on Terror left this deceptively small outpost of Southern metropole behind is beside the point; cable television and the Cold War beat them both to the punch decades before. While the trappings of cotton wealth have long since been hushed behind the gates and curtains of the University Club, the tramps and vagrants still bed down on hot afternoons beneath the shadow of Jefferson Davis in Confederate park.

He's still here, his back to a limestone buttressed outcropping of the Chickasaw bluff leading twentyfivish feet down to the riverbank below, memorialized in bronze next to the old Customs Court House. Just a mile or so down Union, his old charge Nathan Beford Forest keeps watch from horseback of another municipal park. The former is now immediately next to the law school; the latter the medical college.

Their progeny - whether by purchase, parenthood, or both - struggle to coexist in the inconsistent progress that has since begun the erosion of Confederate sins from the grudges of memory. But for today, the clock has struck the straw that will break the camel's back, if only til morning. After a nocturnal diet of preservatives and television, they'll do it all over again tomorrow.