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"Memphis"
1965 Ford Thunderbird
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“[When
I think of Memphis Minnie] . . . expensive dresses, family portraits, prayer,
tobacco, 'When the Levee Breaks', delta blues”.
-Natachee Momaday Gray, poet
He found out about her when Bob retrieved a crumpled wad of paper from his pocket with the words “1965 T-Bird, call Jimmy”. Bob was a stubborn Dodge man, so he had to pass.
So, he went to see Jimmy, an eighty-year-old black
Seminole. The T-Bird was his mother
Minnie’s. She bought it new from the Ford
dealer in Wewoka in ’65, but she passed away years ago. And Jimmy had been restoring the car ever
since.
The car in his dreams was an old T-Bird and the music was the Delta Blues. Although he now owns Minnie’s T-Bird, he’s just a caretaker, driving it down the country highway that is his life; belonging to the missed because he lives well, a way of moving in the world with Thunderbird feet and feathered wings.
He imagines Minnie was as beautiful as Memphis Minnie, the great blues musician, and was as tough too.
10/29/17
Tampa, Florida
The blues musician Johnny Shines recalled, “Any men
fool with her she’d go for them right away.
She didn’t take no foolishness off them.
Guitar, pocket-knife, pistol, anything she get her hand on she’d use it
. . .”
-from Woman With Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues
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