Memphis

Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and discusses the source text’s treatment of domestic abuse, racism, racist violence, and child sexual abuse. The study guide quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word.

Miriam is in the kitchen of her family home and observes the hand-painted walls her father, Myron, made. Among the wall’s hummingbirds and flowers, there are hidden dates. She discerns her parents’ wedding day.

August sits in a booth, smoking. Miriam pours some whiskey she kept from the Officer’s Club for both of them. August keeps a bottle of whiskey herself for when she wants “to clean out the men in [her] life” (52). She says that no real men have ever entered the house, beyond their fathers. Miriam asks if she hears from Derek’s father, and August says that he was stabbed to death in a fight. Miriam criticizes August because her sister does not share her religious faith, even though Miriam also doubts God. Miriam is content that she made it home on her own with her daughters but wonders why God put her on this trial.

Miriam and August try to keep a distance between Derek and the girls.