Memphis Blues

— Summer, 1973

This snapshot of me, with its grainy mushiness and my come hither look, frames the reality of my situation at the time – lost in transition.  

Unlit cigarette hanging from my lipstick-less lips. Blonde highlights on my very long hair. A lace-trimmed burgundy boudoir outfit. This is me in drag, a floozie posing on a cheesy sofa in a teensy-weensy well-worn apartment, in the upstairs of a very old post-civil war house near downtown Memphis.  

The photo — taken by a friend from college visiting not long after I arrived — suggests I’m a shade tipsy and a tad high.  My subtle smile says:  Not really that good.  

Much to my chagrin, Memphis wasn’t providing the umph I had been wishing and hoping for. First off, I was sharing a bathroom with a young fella who had rented the other minuscule room in the upstairs. Chipped porcelin pockmarked the aged clawfoot bathtub we shared. It hadn't had a proper scrub in who knows how long. Ditto on the toilet. Fella did not know hygiene. Sadly, this place was all I could afford.  So there I was, the cleaning lady in my off hours. 

The bathroom situation certainly made worse the disquieting solitary life I had contrived; consciously chosen without quite understanding the various consequences, such as a ratty kitchen with a stale smell punctuated by an aging fridge vibrating a nonstop buzz, and elsewhere, cheap beige shag carpeting fraying indiscriminately. My abode surely set the scene and mood for a bad noir novel.

I hadn’t expected to be so bummed out so soon.  My solitary life at this time consisted of waking up, arriving at the newspaper, getting my assignment, making the necessary telephone calls, going to press conferences, writing the story on an electric typewriter, turning in the written pages to the editor on the desk to get marked up and made ready to go to print. Go home, make a drink, play sad songs on the stereo, sing along sometimes, write a letter to my main squeeze, a hippy journalist guy from college.

If memory serves, the newspaper’s insulting dress code prescribed by the patriarchy required me to wear skirts or dresses. My body rarely felt at home in straight women’s wear lacking in slacks.

Not wanting a tussle with The Man over the matter I pulled out my clothes that fit the dress code and continued in the role of a heterosexul woman – not yet hoooked into the full-on lesbian in me.   My metamorphosis away from an assigned gender role would continue over the next half dozen years.

Memphis. First stop as a lonesome hetero in young adulthood.

So, there I was in Memphis, Tennessee, home to the blues and lots and lots of Black folks.  But how did this Texas gal get there, to this city on the Mississippi River?  Carting my credentials – a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Journalism and a burning desire to learn heartily while practicing the art of journalism in the heart of the Deep South – I took a deep breath and chased it with a leap of faith.     

Freshly graduated from Southern Methodist University in May of 1973, I packed suitcases with clothes, filled boxes with plates, pots and whatnot, put it all in the back of my brown Chevy Vega and headed east from Dallas to Memphis, where a general assignments reporter job awaited me at The Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper, one of the half-dozen newspapers in the Deep South I had identified as a clarion of democracy and equality during the Civil Rights Movement, and then held to that reputation going into the 1970s.

Following graduation, many of my college journalism pals took jobs at The Dallas Morning News.  But not me. I took a gamble. 

Uprooting myself from Dallas, I had put my own self in a time and place bubble that was languid, in spite of my successful designs to make my first job as a journalist happen upon graduation, the first step to making my career a bestseller. The goals had been lofty — driven by an independent spirit and the notion that I was golden. 

I went to Memphis to work at the Commercial Appeal for two reasons — to prove that I could — be by myself, far away from friends and community and carve out a career as a newspaper reporter, because I had drive, perseverance, and the necessary qualifications for the world I would be living in.

Among them:  I was already a pretty darn fierce feminist, having been ginned up by Gloria Steinem, a key leader of second-wave feminism that swept through the 1960s and well into the 70s. As a student, I heard her speak at SMU. 

With a white family history of plantations and enslaved labor I was now ready to learn more about racism and figured the best thing to do was immerse myself in America’s Deep South – in this case the city where the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated on April 4, 1968.  

America’s civil rights movement was a pushback of great proportion powered by people and federal law aimed at eradicating the odiousness and ugliness of racism and sexism.

In a letter of recommendation he penned, the Dean of SMU’s Journalism Department warned The Arkansas Gazette, one of my chosen papers, to expect me to “bleed on paper,” code during those raucous race baiting and feminist-belittling days it translated to “bleeding heart liberal.”  My, oh my.  It was a label I wore with pride.

In the end, the Arkansas paper did not offer me a reporter position and l was not surprised.  I figured they took the Dean’s description of me as a red-flag warning – taking me out of the running because they didn’t want a liberal bleeding her heart out in the newsroom. 

The Dean’s concerns most likely came from the many opinion pieces and editorials I penned while working at The Daily Campus, SMU’s student newspaper.  As an assistant editor, a weekly columnist and as Editor in Chief, I wrote many times about equal rights, the dearth of Black students at the university except when it came to the football team, and the availability of birth control pill, finally.  Six months before I graduated, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a woman’s right to an abortion.  Those were heady days.

As a newbie reporter at the Commercial Appeal, I was determined to keep engaging in the searching of facts, the finding of the story, while acquiring invaluable skills. Learning street smarts, and other ways things worked in the world of reporting, which is the real nitty-gritty of learning on the job — by the seat of your pants.  Reporters puzzle-out stories from existing bits and pieces, sources can be tricky, and there are always those pesky bureaucratic roadblocks. 

So, with those lofty goals in mind I did the best I could with what I was offered and began learning the ins and outs. As an intern for the first few months, I did a little bit of everything – reporting on price gouging going on at gas pumps, writing movie reviews and obituaries.

Those obits, as we called them, became a worthy challenge for me when I was told it was near impossible to talk to Black folks because they never answered their telephone, an excuse pulled out I would guess, to explain why so few Blacks were remembered in the newspaper’s obituary archives.  So I tried a little something to re-arrange that situation. True, very rarely did the phone get picked up when I called a Black residence, but after hanging up I would immediately call back, and almost always someone said hello.  I flooded the obituary section with Black folks.

My one and only front page story while I was at the Commercial Appeal featured a five or six year old girl flagging the police because the cigarettes her mother and her mother’s friend were smoking smelled funny.  Mom and friend got busted for the MaryJane. Holding that stuff back then was a felony.  Would it have been front page news if the two women and the little girl were white?  Certainly not.

Electric typewriters had just arrived on the scene and the newspaper was in step with the transition into the emerging world of modern technology.  Having only typed on a manual machine, it was a treat to meet the new gal on the block. There was barely a learning curve, and I made a smooth move from the manual typewriter – my first love – to the new gal. 

At the newspaper I didn’t meet many of any kind of folks and carry no memories of seeking out friends in the newsroom where we all worked at desks crunched together, but rarely talked with each other. I had no clue if the reporters around me socialized after hours at a preferred bar. If they did I don’t remember being invited.  

I did most of my imbibing “in my solitude,” as jazz and blues singer Billie Holladay describes in her signature song. For me it was less like solitude and more like intensly deep loneliness. My evening ritual was sippin’ booze and listenin’ to country music, probably had one drink too many on many a night while singing along to one too many Willie Nelson songs and Tammy Wynette’s biggest solo hit, "Stand By Your Man.”

Never mind, though, I was up bright and early the next morning ready to do some serious reporting! Youthful zest provides stamina that doesn’t last all that long and often leaves bruises, some scars. Just sayin’.

The lack of a social circle, small group of friends, or even just one friend was difficult. Parsing this out from memories — I was unprepared to live by myself, in isolation, driven only by the reporting and the challenges of the profession. It wasn’t enough to feed my true being. I went to Memphis ostensibly to give depth to my life, to make it rich. But that didn’t appear to be in the cards. Or maybe it was.

The stark loneliness that clouded over me in Memphis quickly morphed to a beatdown of my very soul. It could have been a self-esteem issue hampering me. The thought of being on an extended lone adventure out in the real world, kicking off my adult life, made my stomach flip. So I popped a peppermint candy and took another leap of faith. 

Moving into early adulthood, I continued in the role of a straight woman. I hadn’t grasped it yet.  My psyche.  My true self.  Uncomfortable in my skin but not to a place I could give voice to it, I held on to a culturally-designated heterosexual role because it was all I understood at the time. My essential lesbian nature was not yet poised to come outside and play. Yet.

It would happen in slo-mo, and perhaps already was happening.

The lesbian in me was hiding out and nowhere in my line of sight. I was too busy being lonely and reporting the news.

Goin’ to the Chapel……and no babies, please.

Less than three months at The Commercial Appeal and I was longing for my friends in Dallas, in particular Mase, a fellow I had been dating for well over a year before we graduated, at which time he accepted a job offer from The Dallas Morning News as a general assignments reporter. We had talked of marriage before I left Dallas.  I called him one evening from Memphis and we chatted a bit before I made my suggestion.

“Want to get married?”  

“Do you?” I suspect that was his reply, but I don’t recall.  Thinking back, I’m sure I cut to the chase.  

Mase was a catch for me – a wonderful man with smarts, a very good lover who held women in high regard and with respect. An artful and talented guitar player, he was a bleeding heart just like me.  I loved all of that about him.  He was all good with us getting married.  I was a catch for him too – good lookin’ with a feminist bent he relished, a host of perseverance, a strong-will and a sense of humor.

It was late August when I packed the Chevy Vega with my small cache of belongings – including a wedding dress purchased in Memphis – and headed back to Texas, where on day one or two I applied for a general assignments reporter job at The Dallas Morning News. Lickity split I found out there would be no job offer because nepotism was forbidden at the newspaper for the most part, and since I was about to marry a general assignment reporter at the paper, I was out of the running.  The nuptial festivities hadn’t even happened.  

Guess I didn’t know the rule was to keep quiet about the marriage until after the job is secured.  The news that I was declined put me out on the street, pounding the pavement looking for another newspaper reporter gig.

After returning to Dallas I put my Memphis malaise on the back burner in order to focus on job hunting and getting hitched.

While planning the wedding, I reached out with telephone calls, made copies of my resume and examples of my work at The Memphis Commercial Appeal, doggedly setting about to find that job in the North Texas area. There were some options, The Dallas Times Herald, Fort Worth Star Telegram, Fort Worth Press, none of which came through with an offer. I was loath to expand my search to the suburban papers. I wanted the big time.

And as is often the case, there’s a trade out in wagers. While I  did end up with a job it was for a TV reporter slot at WFAA in Dallas. Brand new territory for me, writing to video, and it was nowhere near what I had learned “real” journalism to be. 

There’s plenty more to that story, but first the nuptials and some reflective words from Simone de Beauvoir’s powerful feminist treatise, The Second Sex.

The wedding was held in Perkins Chapel on the SMU campus.  It was a memorable time that lovely autumn Saturday evening, October 20, 1973, but not just because Mase and I were exchanging vows, rings and, if memory serves, reading sweet words we’d written to each other. 

Lots of family had come to celebrate. Mase’s parents and two brothers, my mother, Mozelle, two sisters, some cousins, aunts and uncles and my grandfather, Papa we called him.  He was there specifically to “give me away,” a tradition that had the father walking his daughter down the aisle arm-in-arm then handing her off to the next man in her life.  Since my father was not in my life at that time, the job of giving me away went to Papa. Gotta keep those patriarchal rules and regulations best as you can in order to keep the machinations running smoothly.  Thankfully, not so much any more.     

Just prior to our wedding ceremony, Mase and I stood outside the chapel with our wedding guests — mostly it was our journalist comrades — exchanging words synched to animated gestures about the jaw-dropping news we had just heard.  One of the newly-arrived guests quickly shared what he heard on the radio while driving to the chapel.

It was a journalism dream come true  — the date of our wedding would live on through political history as the Saturday Night Massacre, the turning point of the Watergate scandal, an outrageous D.C. wrongdoing filled with cover-ups, lies, and a tantalizing eighteen and a half minute gap on a tape recording.  President Richard Nixon’s secretary said she erased it accidentally. 

“I am not a crook,” President Nixon would say to TV viewers around the country. In order to avoid impeachment, Nixon resigned from office.

Mase and I left the day after our wedding and flew to San Antonio for our honeymoon. We stayed a few days, checking out the city’s famed river walk, ate delicious food, and drank tangy Bloody Marys. We also had sex a time or two while we were there. 

I started taking birth control pills halfway through SMU, and before I began dating Mase. They had been prescribed to me by my mother’s gynecologist. He told her the pill would bring down the softball-size cyst I had on an ovary. Now isn’t that softball image fortuitous? 

In just a short decade I would put together a softball team to play in a Dallas city league. That experience would be the conduit through which I found Lesbianland.

But about those birth control pills I was popping. Can’t remember exactly when, but I decided to get off of them, probably by the time I was 24 or so. There was a big dust-up going on in the national news about high levels of hormones. I wanted nothing more to do with a daily rush of hormones on steroids. My choices for a replacement were diaphragm or IUD (Intrauterine Device) which was flexible, a T-shape inserted by a doctor into the uterus through the vagina. IUD didn’t sound fun to me.

I picked the diaphragm, which is a barrier that keeps sperm out of the uterus, aka womb. It was easy to slip it in and out. A dome-shaped silicone cup, I found I could flawlessly insert it simply by folding it over, making it into a taco and slipping it in. Que bueno! The sperm deterrent was in place. 

The social grooming done by the patriarchy during my time as a young girl, and as a young woman, flooded us gals with the notion that our primary role was to birth children. I’d never felt the need. Not a flicker of maternal instinct ever tickled my fancy. Ever. I puzzled through it a couple of times — when Mase and I decided to give it a try — and tried to imagine how fabulous it would feel to be pregnant. Couldn’t go there. Not ever. Not once. I thought at times there might be something curiously amiss with me. 

Nevertheless, and in spite of everything in the paragraph above, I had been brainwashed enough to broach the subject one day when Mase and I were in the car on McKinney Avenue, headed for University Park, a lovely neighborhood with a host of shade trees lining the street.

“Do you think…we should think…about having a kid?” I asked the question as if it would be a favor to the patriarchy. 

Mase kept his eyes on the street. “No. I think we still have more things we want to do. It would get in the way.” I couldn’t have aagreed more and breathed a sigh of relief. At the time I did not know my body was unable to get pregnant. I just thought I didn’t get imbregnated thanks to the birth control pills, the taco diaphragm and good fortune. 

As time went by, Mase and I did try to get me pregnant — nothing happened. 

Must admit, I have realized over the years how fortuitous it was for me to not be able to get pregnant. A blessing for me and other women. A curse for those whose prayers for motherhood were never answered. 

While I did not understand why I had no yearnings for motherhood — why would I if all I ever heard from the culture was the drumbeat for it — I did not let it fester or get under my skin. I rather bathed on the goodness of it and was not ashamed. 

Recently, I was reintroduced to Simone de Beauvoir at a literary workshop and took a liking to the French existentialist’s groundbreaking treatise on feminism, The Second Sex, first published in 1949. While I knew of it, I had never read it. In it, de Beauvoir suggests women seriously consider that, in fact, they are not ordained by the “cult of motherhood” to reproduce. De Beauvoir argues motherhood places limitations on women, sucking away at a woman’s own vitality.

That I would risk getting pregnant at the very moment I was gaining traction in my young adult life blows my mind today, and I reckon a child in my life would not only have stiffled my career as a journalist but would have put the brakes on my coming out as a lesbian, my vitality would have been sucked away.

So I thank Lady Luck for being around when I needed her. I scored big time!