Isaac Hayes
Like any other city in the world, Memphis sometimes does some things wrong (if you’re young, ask someone
what Union Avenue used to look like). But then again, it can do some
things so right (100 years ago, in 1977, when I graduated from high school, there were about
three places in downtown Memphis where you could get a drink and something to eat).
This past Saturday, the friends and family of entertainment
superstar and philanthropist Isaac Hayes hosted an open-to-the-public
ceremony to unveil Hayes’ new, bronze grave marker at Memorial Park
Funeral Home and Cemetery, and I was fortunate enough to be involved
and attend. (Full disclosure: I work at the Stax Museum of American
Soul Music.) “Rose for Black Moses: A Celebration and Commemoration of
the Life of Isaac Hayes” was one of the most beautiful things I have
ever seen in Memphis.
For starters, if you’ve never visited the Crystal Shrine Grotto at
Memorial Park, you should. It is an area designed and built during the
1930s by Mexican artist Dionico Rodriguez and it’s on the National
Register of Historic Places. It’s like a fairy-tale land, with a cave
filled with paintings and some five tons of quartz crystal, a serene
Pool of Hebron, trees carved into special chairs, and other things that
make it one of the most special places in the city.
“Roses” took place beside the grotto, with candles lighting the
water in the pool, a stage with Hayes’ covered grave marker, music
floating through the air, old friends and family members gathered, and
large urns which were filled with roses that the guests brought. Hayes’
lifelong friend and songwriting partner David Porter and his widow
Adjowa Hayes worked tirelessly to get all of this arranged so that
people in Memphis could come and celebrate his life (most of the
speakers talked about Isaac, their friend and the man who constantly
gave back instead of always taking). The marker would make his grave a
place for people to come visit and pay their respects.
I won’t gush on, but let me just say that near the end of the
ceremony, at sunset in Saturday’s perfect weather, with white doves
released and circling the sky as the incomparable Shirley Brown was
singing, well, wailing, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” it was something
magical. It was Memphis at its finest and it was something that
everyone who was there will never forget.
This all came at the end of a stressful week for me. Just the day
before, I got an e-mail from a friend who graduated from high school in
the spring and has been accepted at an esteemed college, but is so far
unable to get the loans he needs to leave inner-city Memphis and get
the education he deserves. This young man is one of the brightest, most
polite, most respectful kids I have ever known. He has worked his butt
off to get to this point. He has not been in any kind of trouble. He’s
a good kid with a big heart and now, because of nothing more than
financial circumstances, he may not get to go. I don’t know what to say
to him, other than the system needs a lot of work.
I also know a fellow who served two tours of duty in Iraq and had
part of his leg blown off by a roadside bomb. He came home
psychologically tortured and now he is sitting in a cell on the
psychiatric floor of the Shelby County Jail at 201 Poplar with no
family in this part of the country. To my knowledge, no one from the
United States Army has tried to contact him, no one has visited him,
and no one wants to acknowledge that when you are told to kill pretty
much anyone that you think might possibly pose a risk of any kind, even
if it is a family huddled in squalor behind doors you are told to kick
in, that this can cause severe temporary, if not permanent damage, to
the mind.
But I was so elated when I read an article online in The
Commercial Appeal the other day about a Memphian, Thomas Dyer, who,
in an attempt to stop suffering to the degree that he can, has become
the U.S. Army’s first Buddhist chaplain. The twisted part of me jumped
to the reader comments to see how far the ignorance meter would rise
among those who profess to believe in God but also in the murder of
innocent people, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be,
although there were some real winners condemning him to an afterlife of
what they perceive to be hell. No big surprise there.
I know I’m not making a whole lot of sense here. Sometimes I don’t.
But if more people followed in the generous footsteps of Isaac Hayes,
and if we could possibly find a way to not deny a very deserving young
man a decent education, and if we could help out an Iraq war veteran
who is caught up in a molasses-like judicial system, and if we could
not argue over someone’s choice of a spiritual path to help the
suffering, maybe we could all chill out just a bit and see that it
doesn’t do any good to be close-minded and obsessed with what I see on
a daily basis as just a bunch of bullshit. There.
