Tara Stringfellow’s fictional family brings a real city to life

The Douglass community in North Memphis was founded in 1907 on 40 acres of land given to a freed slave, William Rush-Plummer. Plummer named the area for Frederick Doug­lass, a man he’d befriended and admired. Initially conceived of as an all-Black community, Douglass is the setting for Tara M. Stringfellow’s radiant debut novel, Memphis.

The North family lives in a house on Locust Street that was designed and built by their beloved patriarch, Myron North. What gives the house its breath is the front porch, alive with blossoms, birds, bees, butterflies, and stray cats lying around. A hairstyling shop is built onto the back of the house, and those who enter through the shop’s screen door see a sign overhead that reads, “NO CHILDREN, NO MEN, & WE EAT WHITE FOLK HERE.”

The story opens with Miriam and her two daughters, Joan and Mya, standing before the house, looking for safety and a place to belong. Miriam’s black eye is evidence of what has driven her and her girls back to Memphis from Chicago. Her younger sister, August, takes them in and makes a meal of warmed-up lamb chops. Table scenes throughout the novel establish the family’s foundation of abundant love and belonging to the place they call home. The women provide comfort and inspiration to each other as they try to recover from physical and sexual abuse at the hands of men in their lives. Violence is no stranger to this family. A few days after becoming the first black homicide detective in Memphis, Myron North was lynched. “Beaten beyond recognition. Body thrown in the Mississippi.”