Ghetto Gospel

As mentioned in my previous entry, the beginning of the semester saw me undertake a perilous adventure in a downscale part of Memphis with my international chums. You may accuse me of melodrama - and you'd probably be right - when I say that this episode represented one of the few times (certainly the only time in Memphis) that I've genuinely feared for my life. I wouldn't dare suggest I've had a tough upbringing, growing up in a largely safe and uneventful area of Glasgow, but I have borne witness to violence on several occasions. Gun crime, however, is still quite rare in Scotland so the following encounter represented the first time that being shot was a distinct possibility for me. I tried to find solace in the words of Goldie Lookin' Chain, who proclaimed, "Guns don't kill people, rappers do". Unfortunately for me half of Memphis think they're 50 Cent.

As part of our immersion into southern culture we had decided to attend a gospel concert arranged to raise money for St Jude Children's Research Hospital (a very worthy cause might I add). I have sat through church services before both with my school and when visiting my Catholic grandmother, but the born-again, "Praise tha lawd!" evangelism preached by Baptists in the south is wholly (or should that be holy?) different to the drab Presbyterian and Roman Catholic services I've experienced back home. The largely atheist group of exchange students saw the concert as a good opportunity to see what worshipping God in the Bible Belt was all about.

Before we could do this we had the challenge of getting to the venue and since none of us possessed a car, we were left with the option of calling a taxi for or going the European way - by foot. Contrary to what Marc Cohn will tell you, walking in Memphis is an activity seldom undertaken by the locals. The reason being Memphis, like a lot of American cities, is fairly spread out making walking a laborious, unpleasant task and car ownership a necessity not a luxury. Even if Memphis was more pedestrian friendly it would still be ill-advised to walk through much of the city due to the high crime rate. Whilst on the subject of being ill-advised, I was informed by a local that the route we had to take was relatively safe and we "had nothing to worry about". I can only assume that the resident in question must either view one's personal safety as something so frivolous that it's not worth worrying about or had never actually taken this route before. In light of this advice, we chose walking.

The journey started out fairly smoothly with your humble servant acting as navigator due to my being in Memphis the longest. However, as we got closer to the church we noticed the houses becoming more dilapidated and the amount of cars fewer. If that wasn't a sign we were entering the ghetto the next five minutes or so sure was! I can only imagine what entered the residents' minds when they saw a large group of foreigners marching through their neighbourhood dressed entirely differently and from a culture completely alien to them. It was a bit like June 14, 1940 but with fewer Germans.

Their first act was to hurl insults at us. At the time I could barely understand what was being said but was fairly certain we weren't being invited into their home for a cup of tea and a chinwag. I have since been told they were inquiring as to whether we were scared or not. It doesn't take a University of Memphis graduate to work out the answer was a collective yes. Two men then decided to approach us, one dragging a metal stick against the ground menacingly as if to say, "We don't take kindly to strangers especially white ones". I teamed up with Mark and Andy in an attempt to plan our escape. It was decided if a gun was brought out we would shove the French students to the ground, leaving them to fend for themselves, then run off to the sanctity of the church. If ever there was a time for the French to renounce secularism and start believing in a God, this was it.

Luckily matters didn't escalate any further and no gun was presented as we made it to the concert with no injuries incurred only slightly bruised egos. The event itself was entertaining and allowed us to see a Baptist minister preaching the bible with all the vivacity Baptist ministers are known for. This involved a lot of posturing, sloganeering and even some dancing in a fairly demagogic fashion. I can't say I learned much from this but the experience prior to the concert certainly did teach me and my foreign friends a valuable lesson. Walking had been the wrong decision to take that day, we have since found out taxis in the city are incredibly unreliable making the best method of transport getting a ride from a friend. I think this form of decision making is ostensibly American. As Winston Churchill once said, never doubt Americans' ability to do the right thing, after exhausting every other alternative!