Connor pushed open the door open for her. “If you’re looking for souvenirs, you’re not going to find any place better than A. Schwab’s.”

“Oh god, none of that meretricious crap, please.” She stepped in behind him, peering out cautiously over her designer sunglasses. “I don’t want go home with a suit case of obese plush toys wearing Memphis t-shirts.”

“Really, Bryce? Could you sound more like a pretentious grad student if you tried?” He shook his head at his girlfriend. He loved her, but sometimes he wanted to strangle the entitled New England out of her.

“Straw hats, corn cob pipes, snow globes, obscene vanity license plates? This is where you bring me?”

“That’s because you’re not looking in the right place.” He lead her over to a neglected, dusty corner of the story. An array of religious candles, fetishes and small pouches of dried animal parts covered the tables and peg boards in front of them. “Maybe if you can’t finish your graduate thesis, you can voodoo them into thinking that you did.”

Bryce’s eyes went wide. “My inner high school goth is so hot for you right now.”

“I’m really not sure how to take that.”

Memphis Note
The voodoo corner of A.Schwab’s has sadly gone the way of the dinosaur as they ready themselves to be sold, but for many years it was a source of curiosity, wonder and an endless supply of presents for people that didn’t want anything from Target.

The house was tiny, unremarkable, in a neighborhood that a woman of her worth would not normally be seen in. Children chased after her car as she pulled up, their mothers watching suspiciously from the porches of the other shotgun houses.

She steeled her nerves before walking up to the front door of the house and knocking.

The door opened, just a crack. “Yes?” A pair of dark eyes peered over a chain latch.

“I…I”m here for tea.” That was the code she was told to give. The door closed in her face, the chain rattled, then swung open again to let her in.

Inside, intricate arabesque patterning covered the walls of the room, twisting and turning into itself. When she blinked, she swore the pattern moved, like it was alive.

“Hello.” Said a girl standing before her, barely on the cusp of womanhood, yet with a child hanging off her hip. “Twenty dollars. Now”

She put the cash into the girl’s hand, who promptly shoved it down her shirt.

“Ghede Loa rides Mama.” The girls said opening the door to another room. “Drugs in tea bring her back. You have ‘til then to speak wit’ your dead.”

Memphis Note
In the same way it was at the crossroads of white and black culture to create rock and roll, Memphis is also at the crossroads of African and European religions. Voodoo and belief in the supernatural permeates the region, and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of small churches with their own specific takes on spirituality and ritual.