Memphis Afternoons by James Conaway

Author:James Conaway [Conaway, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: tennessee, bourbon, 1950s america, elvis, memphis, debutantes, growing up southern
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Girls generally fell into groups complicated by social standing but not ruled by it. To begin with, they were either chaste or unchaste. The former were the sort you would someday marry and whose designation you meanwhile halfheartedly sought to alter. Chastity tended toward the right side of the tracks, yet some of the most unchaste girls came from the right families. Curiously, a good girl's designation didn't necessarily change if she slept with someone she loved. Then she was a good girl touched with tragedy.

"Bad" was an imperfect concept when applied to girls, the word itself rarely used unless it pertained to those with names obviously — to us — sexual. They would make love to most anybody who came by to pick them up, and sometimes to two or three boys in succession, events I only heard about. Most girls who "did" were judged by the level of enthusiasm they brought to the act. Enthusiasm with more than one partner meant the girl was either bad or hopelessly sophisticated. Perceived variation in performance allowed each boy to think of himself as the best, the embodiment of valor or good looks that had at last fulfilled her expectations.

Years later, reading Peter Taylor's story "The Old Forest," set in Memphis, I realized that what had seemed to us a novel division was in fact standard operating procedure. We didn't refer to girls who did, or those who came from the wrong side of the tracks or the wrong side of the river and worked in thoroughly respectable jobs, as "demimondaines," wouldn't have known what the term meant, but we did treat them differently. Taylor's may have been an earlier generation, but the categorizing of girls according to current availability, connections, and future matrimony hadn't changed.

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