The hollowed-out tree trunk by the Mississippi River has become my confessional. As dusk settles over Memphis, the neon lights of the Arkansas bridge flicker across the water like distant fireflies, their reflections fracturing and reforming with each gentle ripple. I press my palms against the weathered bark—this ancient witness that has seen generations come and go—and wonder if the river beneath us remembers what we’ve tried so hard to forget.
There’s a particular quality to Southern light in these moments, golden and heavy as sorghum syrup, that makes everything feel suspended between memory and the present. The air carries the mingled scents of damp earth and distant barbecue smoke, while cicadas hum their ceaseless evening hymn. It’s in this liminal space that I find myself asking the question that anchors my existence here: If these waters had consciousness, would they carry trauma like my Black queer body does?
The Mississippi has always been more than geography. It’s a liquid archive of our contradictions—where baptisms and lynchings shared the same banks, where gospel harmonies once drowned out the creaking of slave ship chains. This duality defines the South I know: a land where sweet tea and systemic violence steep together, where church potlucks feed both community and complicity. My Tennessee roots run deep as cypress knees, nourished by stories passed down like heirlooms no one wanted but everyone inherited.
From this riverside vantage point, I watch a barge push upstream against the current, its progress slow but determined. The parallel isn’t lost on me. Living authentically here often feels like that vessel’s journey—fighting invisible forces while carrying invisible weights. The water doesn’t care about our struggles; it simply persists, carving its path through red clay and collective memory alike. Perhaps that’s why I keep returning to this spot, to remind myself that survival, like the river, requires both flexibility and relentless forward motion.
Three years ago, I came to Memphis chasing the promise of reinvention, only to discover you can’t outrun history when it lives in your marrow. The ghosts followed me down Highway 51—not just my personal demons, but the specters of George Smith and countless others whose names were swallowed by silence. Their whispers emerge when I least expect them: in the way old men at the barbershop lower their voices when discussing ‘those people,’ or how white women still clutch purses tighter when I enter elevators. The South never lets you forget your place, even as it feeds you cornbread and calls you ‘honey.’
Yet for all its fractures, this land holds me in ways nowhere else has. There’s magic in the way golden hour gilds the cotton fields, in the alchemy of a perfectly seasoned cast-iron skillet, in the unspoken understanding between queer Black folks when we exchange glances across crowded rooms. Our joy here isn’t naive—it’s deliberate rebellion, like wildflowers pushing through cracked concrete. As the bridge lights now glow brighter against the darkening sky, I realize this is the South’s lesson: that healing isn’t about escaping the past, but learning to build altars in its wreckage.
The river continues its silent journey southward, carrying my reflection and a thousand untold stories. I stay because leaving would feel like abandoning a conversation mid-sentence, because these muddy waters shaped my ancestors’ dreams just as they now shape mine. Somewhere downstream, the Mississippi will merge with other currents, just as my Black queer narrative intersects with broader streams of resistance. But for now, in this moment heavy with fireflies and possibility, I remain—a living testament to the South’s terrible beauty and its capacity for change.
Blood and Sweet Tea Soil
The cicadas were in full chorus that summer evening when my grandfather decided to share a story that would forever alter my understanding of the South. I remember the way the fading sunlight painted the baseball fields across from our Union City home in golden hues, how the humidity made my shirt cling to my back as I sat cross-legged on the porch steps. At ten years old, I didn’t yet comprehend how family histories could weigh more than the thickest dictionary in our school library.
“Your great-great-uncle saw it happen,” PawPaw began, his voice taking on that particular timber it only carried when speaking of things buried deep. “Back in 1892, when folks thought justice grew on trees outside courthouses.” He told me of George Smith, a Black man whose name never made it into Tennessee history books. How a white woman’s false accusation sent a mob hunting for any Black man with facial scratches. How they dragged someone – maybe George, maybe another unfortunate soul – to the courthouse square where the ancient oak still stands today.
The details emerged like scenes from some grotesque play: the broken jail door, the rope thrown over the sturdiest limb, the cheering crowd that included prominent town citizens. My grandfather’s hands trembled slightly as he described how the victim’s shoes were removed and placed neatly beneath the tree, a perverse Southern courtesy. “That tree’s still there,” he said, staring at his own work-worn boots. “They put up a historical marker few years back. Calls it a ‘site of racial violence.’ Doesn’t mention George by name.
That night, I dreamed of trees with roots drinking from crimson puddles. For years afterward, I’d catch myself studying white classmates’ faces during history lessons, wondering if their great-grandfathers had been in that crowd. The story became my personal ghost, explaining why my mother always made me change into “presentable clothes” before going to town, why we took backroads after dark, why my journalism professors later remarked on my relentless fact-checking compulsion.
What they called professional diligence was really the terrified child in me ensuring no story I told could ever be twisted into someone’s death warrant. The South teaches its Black children these lessons early – how quickly sweet tea politeness can curdle into violence, how the same hands that pass you cornbread at church picnic might have tied a noose generations back. Our inheritance isn’t just land or heirlooms, but this cellular knowledge of how to survive places where your name can become synonymous with threat.
Even now, when I visit that courthouse square for work assignments, I can’t help running my fingers over the oak’s bark, half-expecting to feel the grooves left by that long-ago rope. The marker mentions no names, but the tree remembers. The South is like that – its beauty and brutality growing from the same soil, its hospitality and horror served on the same china plate. That’s why I became a journalist: to etch the missing names back into history, one careful story at a time, before the river washes them all away.
The Discipline of the Body
I remember the exact moment my childhood fantasies collided with Southern reality. It was fourth grade, and I was walking home from school cradling my books to my chest the way I’d seen Zendaya do on Disney Channel – shoulders relaxed, hips swaying slightly, lost in a daydream where femininity wasn’t a punishable offense. For those few blocks, I wasn’t a Black boy in rural Tennessee; I was a character in my own glittering narrative. Then came the voice that shattered the illusion.
“Boy, why you holding them books like a damn sissy?” My grandfather’s shout carried across the street like a gunshot. The books suddenly felt heavy as anvils in my arms. That moment taught me what every Black queer child in the South learns eventually: your body is a battleground, and survival means mastering the art of performance.
The Cost of Code-Switching
We become fluent in translation before we learn algebra. By age ten, I’d developed an entire vocabulary of survival:
- The “sports slump” – shoulders hunched forward to minimize my natural grace
- The “deep voice drill” – practicing masculine tones until my throat ached
- The “selective silence” – biting my tongue when conversations turned to crushes or dating
Audre Lorde wrote that “your silence will not protect you,” but in the rural South, silence often buys you another sunrise. I learned to wrap my queerness in layers of acceptable Black masculinity like armor – basketball jerseys, exaggerated swagger, feigned disinterest in anything “too soft.” The performance was exhausting, but the alternative was unthinkable.
The Disney Channel Dilemma
Those stolen moments mimicking TV characters weren’t just childish play; they were acts of rebellion. Beneath the bleachers during PE, I’d practice the dance moves from “The Cheetah Girls,” my body remembering what my mind tried to suppress – that joy lives in movement, not just in stillness. The irony? My grandfather’s generation had used blues and jazz the same way – transforming oppression into art when direct resistance meant danger.
The Uniform of Survival
By middle school, I’d perfected the uniform:
- Oversized hoodies (to hide my frame)
- Baggy jeans (no room for sway)
- Beige everything (avoiding attention)
The greatest tragedy wasn’t the clothes themselves, but what they represented – the systematic erasure of a child’s instinct toward self-expression. I often wonder how many Southern queer kids still dress their truths in shadows, how many Beyoncé albums play on secret headphones beneath church pews.
The Breaking Point
The real violence of assimilation isn’t in the loud moments – the slurs shouted from pickup trucks or the pastor’s fire-and-brimstone sermons. It’s in the quiet erosion:
- The way you stop reaching for glittery notebooks
- The jokes you laugh at but don’t understand
- The relationships you never let yourself imagine
When Tennessee lawmakers passed their latest anti-LGBTQ+ bill last year, I didn’t rage at the politicians. I cried for the 10-year-old still hiding his Disney Channel dreams beneath a baseball cap. Then I did what Southern queer folks have always done – I found my people. We gathered in a Memphis backyard, Johnny Taylor crooning from blown-out speakers, and for three humid hours, we held space for every version of ourselves we’d ever hidden.
That’s the paradox of the Southern queer experience – the very place that tries to erase you becomes the canvas for your boldest self-portrait. The sweet tea and Sunday school hymns that once confined us now season our liberation. We take what they tried to use against us and make it art. Make it armor. Make it home.
Blues, Barbecue, and the Art of Resistance
The Memphis summer air hangs thick with the scent of hickory smoke and possibility. On nights when the Tennessee legislature feels particularly distant, we gather – Black queer bodies carving out space where the law says we shouldn’t exist. The backyard speakers pulse with Johnny Taylor’s ‘Last Two Dollars,’ his raspy voice wrapping around us like a protective spell. This is how we rewrite the South’s narrative, one secret cookout at a time.
The Soundtrack of Survival
Southern resistance has always had a rhythm. From the fields to the juke joints, Black folks turned suffering into song. The blues weren’t just music; they were coded maps for survival. When B.B. King sang ‘The Thrill Is Gone,’ we heard the unspoken verses about Jim Crow’s cruelty. Now, when my friend Jamal cues up Bessie Smith before our monthly queer poetry slam, that same legacy lives through us. The music becomes our underground railroad – not leading north, but inward, toward each other.
We hold these gatherings in shifting locations – sometimes a shotgun house in South Memphis, other times a borrowed church basement. The locations change, but the ritual remains: someone’s auntie brings her famous dry-rub ribs, the cheap wine flows, and for a few stolen hours, we exist outside Tennessee’s anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Last June, as Governor Lee signed the drag ban into law, we hosted a ‘Rebel Revue’ featuring kings, queens, and genderfluid performers lip-syncing to Ma Rainey. The cops never found us that night, though the neighbors definitely heard the commotion when Miss Thang did her show-stopping rendition of ‘Prove It On Me Blues.’
Smoke Signals of Community
Nothing says Southern resistance like a proper barbecue. The act itself is revolutionary – taking the cheapest cuts of meat, the parts white folks threw away, and transforming them through time, fire, and ancestral knowledge. Our cookouts operate on the same principle. When the state tries to erase us, we marinate in our joy. The tangy vinegar-based sauce becomes our protest sign, the collard greens simmering with turkey necks our manifesto.
I learned this alchemy from Ms. Clara, a seventy-year-old lesbian who runs the only Black-owned BBQ joint in North Memphis. Her pit has been a safe haven since the 1980s AIDS crisis. ‘They wanted us to disappear,’ she told me once, flipping ribs with hands that remember Stonewall. ‘So we made sure they could smell us coming from three blocks away.’ The smoke curling from her chimney doesn’t just signal lunch – it’s a beacon for anyone needing reminded that queer Black Southerners built this culture.
Secret Handshakes and Spades Games
The elders at our gatherings play cards with the intensity of wartime strategists. Their spades games are more than recreation – they’re living archives. Between bids and Boston’s, stories emerge about pre-Stonewall queer networks, about how they used fish fries as cover for organizing during the Civil Rights Movement. Aunt Pearlie, who’s been out since Eisenhower was president, deals cards while dropping wisdom: ‘Baby, we been doing this resistance thing since they thought a hot comb was just for hair.’
These unspoken traditions form our inheritance. The way we pass plates becomes a lesson in mutual aid. The exaggerated reads during Bid Whist tournaments teach verbal self-defense. Even our dance moves hold history – when we twerk to Megan Thee Stallion, we’re channeling the same hip movements our ancestors used to mock slave masters at Congo Square. Nothing is just entertainment here; every laugh contains a lesson.
The River Remembers
On difficult days, I walk down to the Mississippi’s edge near the old cobblestone landing. The water carries echoes of all we’ve survived – slave ships and steamboats, floodwaters and freedom seekers. Now it bears witness to our new forms of resistance. Some nights, when the bridge lights reflect just right, I swear I can see the ghosts of queer ancestors dancing in the ripples. They remind me that Southern Black joy was never passive – it’s always been a radical act of remembering, a way of saying: We’re still here. The land tried to break us, but we turned its sorrow into songs, its oppression into opportunity.
This is why I stay. Not for the politicians or the prejudice, but for the people who taught me that survival can taste like sweet tea and sound like blues drifting through a screen door left purposely ajar. The South may write laws against us, but we write louder with our lives. And when history tries to erase that truth, well – we’ve got barbecue sauce-stained napkins and mixtapes to prove it.
Why I Stay
The neon lights of the Memphis-Arkansas bridge flicker across the Mississippi’s dark waters as I trace circles in the mud with a broken twig. Three years ago, I came here chasing freedom from rural Tennessee’s suffocating expectations, only to realize the river currents carry more than just water – they bear the weight of history, identity, and an unexpected belonging. For Black queer folks in the South, staying isn’t surrender; it’s strategic resistance written in barbecue smoke and blues chords.
Reclaiming Sacred Ground
“Occupying oppressive spaces is revolutionary,” declares Marla Williams, founder of Southerners On New Ground, her voice cutting through the hum of our Zoom call like a gospel singer testifying. We’re discussing the 23% increase in Tennessee’s LGBTQ+ population since 2020, a startling contrast to the broader Black migration northward. “Our ancestors bled into this soil. Why should we abandon it to bigots?” Her words echo against my laptop screen, punctuated by the distant wail of a freight train – that timeless Southern soundtrack of movement and rootedness.
Statistics from the Brookings Institute reveal the paradox: while Black families continue leaving Southern states seeking economic opportunity, queer communities are transforming cities like Memphis into unlikely sanctuaries. The Williams Institute reports a 189% surge in Southern LGBTQ+ organizations since 2015, even as state legislatures pass record anti-trans bills. This tension lives in my body daily – the gravitational pull of ancestral land versus the centrifugal force of marginalization.
The River Remembers Differently
At dusk, I return to my hollowed-out tree throne, watching barges push upstream. The Mississippi has witnessed centuries of trauma – lynched bodies dumped in its currents, enslaved ancestors transported along its spine – yet it persists, carving new channels through stubborn earth. My therapist calls this “post-traumatic growth,” but Southern Black folks have always known how to alchemize pain. We see it in how blues musicians turned field hollers into Grammy-winning albums, how grandmothers transformed scrap vegetables into soul food feasts.
Last June, I attended a secret drag show beneath a Downtown Memphis overpass, where performers in homemade gowns lip-synced to Bessie Smith as police sirens wailed two blocks away. The air smelled of fried catfish and glitter, the concrete vibrating with stomping feet and snapping fingers. In that moment, I understood what scholar bell hooks meant about the South being “a place where we could imagine freedom.” Not freedom from struggle, but freedom within it – the audacity to sparkle while the world tries to extinguish your light.
The Algebra of Belonging
Migration patterns tell one story: the Pew Research Center notes 57% of Black LGBTQ+ Southerners have considered leaving. But our lived experiences whisper another truth. At Sunday dinners in South Memphis, where collard greens share table space with hormone pills and protest sign cardboard, I’ve learned community isn’t about geography but about chosen family. The auntie who saves me a plate despite her Baptist misgivings. The cousin who teaches me to two-step while warning about new anti-drag laws. These contradictions form a fragile ecosystem where survival and joy perform their delicate dance.
Data becomes poetry when you break it down:
- 3 generations of my family buried in Tennessee clay
- 17 queer friends who’ve moved away
- 246 Saturday nights spent dancing at Atomic Rose
- 1 river that keeps calling me home
As fireflies begin their evening performance, I press my palm against the tree’s weathered bark. This trunk survived storms that uprooted mightier oaks – not by resisting the wind, but by bending. The South has taught me similar resilience. To love what harms me. To find sweetness in bitter soil. To understand that sometimes, the most radical act isn’t leaving, but staying – and thriving – where they never wanted you to bloom.
The bridge lights shimmer like promises on the water’s skin. Somewhere downstream, the Mississippi carries my ancestors’ dreams toward the Gulf. Somewhere upstream, a Black queer kid learns to two-step in their grandmother’s kitchen. The river connects us all, this relentless, remembering water. And like the current, I’m learning to hold multitudes: the sorrow and the sparkle, the leaving and the staying, the wounds and the wonder. Life flows forward. And so do we.
The River Remembers
The neon lights of the Memphis-Arkansas bridge flicker across the Mississippi’s dark surface, their reflections fracturing and reforming with each ripple. I trace the patterns with my eyes from my usual perch – the hollowed-out trunk of an old cypress tree that’s witnessed more Southern sunsets than I ever will. The river smells of wet earth and forgotten histories tonight, carrying whispers of everything it’s absorbed over centuries. This is where I come to remember that trauma and tenderness can coexist in the same current, just as they do in this complicated place I call home.
Three years ago, I arrived in Memphis clutching two suitcases and the naive belief that leaving rural Tennessee would mean leaving behind the weight of being a Black queer body in the South. The river knew better. It watched as I slowly understood what veteran activists here had long recognized – that geography doesn’t determine belonging, and that liberation isn’t found in escape but in transformation. Like the blues musicians who turned oppression into art along these very banks, we who inherit the South’s contradictions must learn to sing our whole truths into the spaces that tried to silence us.
A breeze carries the distant sound of Beale Street’s nightly revelry, mixing with the rhythmic lapping of water against the shore. Somewhere beyond the bridge lights, a group of queer Black youth are probably gathered in someone’s backyard, the way we’ve done for generations – finding pockets of freedom where the map says none should exist. Their laughter rises like the steam from a fresh pot of greens, defying every billboard and politician that claims people like us don’t belong below the Mason-Dixon line. I think of the elder who mentored me during my first Pride here, their face lined with stories of Stonewall-era protests and underground juke joints. “Baby,” they’d said while painting my cheeks with glitter, “if our oppressors can have fun, why can’t we?” That simple question became my compass, redirecting my anger into something more sustainable – joy as an act of resistance, pleasure as political warfare.
The river current shifts, drawing my attention to a cluster of fireflies dancing above the water’s edge. Their intermittent glow reminds me of the coded signals queer Southerners have used for centuries – a certain tilt of a hat, the deliberate choice of a hymn in church, the strategic placement of porch lights after sundown. These tiny beacons say what the South still struggles to voice aloud: We were always here. We built this place too. The proof lingers in the blues songs borrowed from Black queer pioneers like Ma Rainey, in the culinary traditions preserved by gender-nonconforming chefs, in the oral histories kept alive by aunties who loved in shadows. Our roots run deeper than the trauma.
A cargo ship’s horn echoes from downstream, its industrial growl momentarily drowning out the cicadas’ song. The sound transports me back to childhood summers when my grandfather would tell stories on the porch, his voice competing with similar boats passing along the Tennessee River. I can still feel the wooden planks beneath my bare feet, still taste the tartness of the lemonade he’d sip between sentences. Even then, before I had language for queerness or systemic oppression, I understood the South as a place of dualities – where sweet tea could share a table with unspeakable violence, where the same hands that picked cotton could later knead dough for the most delicate biscuits. This cognitive dissonance used to feel like a burden; now I recognize it as a peculiar gift. To love the South while acknowledging its sins requires a emotional agility that, ironically, makes us more human.
My phone buzzes with a notification about today’s legislative session in Nashville – another anti-LGBTQ bill advancing through committee. The headlines never stop coming, each one a fresh reminder that the tree outside that old courthouse still casts its shadow. But when I look up, the bridge lights shimmer across the water like scattered stars, and the scent of someone’s backyard barbecue drifts through the humid air. Somewhere nearby, a Black queer poet is probably scribbling verses in a notebook, a drag queen is rehearsing for Friday’s show, a young activist is planning the next mutual aid distribution. Life, in all its messy glory, persists.
I stand and brush cypress bark from my jeans, taking one last look at the river’s ceaseless movement. The Mississippi doesn’t ask permission to flow; it simply claims its rightful path, carving canyons through resistance. There’s wisdom in that. As I turn toward home, the activist’s words echo again: “If our oppressors can have fun, why can’t we?” Why indeed. The South may never fully embrace people like me, but I’ve learned to embrace myself here – to find power in the in-between spaces, to build family among fellow outcasts, to plant joy in soil still stained with blood. The work continues, the stories accumulate, the river keeps its own record. And life, relentless as the current, flows forward.
So do I.