Meet Titilé, the Queen of Memphis
"Every moment is an opportunity for you to grow and to take someone along with you on that path"
This Friday I fly home to see my family and my friends. Every sad, nostalgic song feels like it’s written specifically for me. There is an electric longing in the cold coastal Aussie air as I watch my breath exit my body at the Maitland train station and count the days until I leave again.
A year ago I was riding buses and trains through southern USA. Slowly but surely I have been typing up my interviews with folks I met along the way. Today’s Substack is dedicated to a generous person I met while spending two nights in Memphis, the unforgettable Queen.
Queen and I never met before. We have no mutual connections, but we find each other on Facebook. She picks me up from my visit to the Civil Rights Museum, on my last day in town. Instantly the mood changes. I’m in a heavy headspace before I see her smiling face. Queen shows me all around. She works for the mayor and takes me to her office in City Hall. We ride the Memphis trolley together. She feeds me Ethiopian food. She answers my questions. She drives me to the Greyhound station where I then go on to Nashville.
Queen is from Ethiopia but has lived all over the place. We sit in her office in Memphis, her southern hospitality shining like the summer July sun.
The first thing she tells me when I sit down to interview her is that she named herself Queen. Her African given name Titilé. Titilé means “purified” and it is the name of her great great grandmother, a woman with a rebellious soul.
”I truly feel like she lives through me,” Queen says of her grandmother. “I added Queen as my first name because people, first they refuse to learn that, or they say ‘can I call you T?’ Or I'll be Tilly to Tittle, Tidle. Tidily. So I didn't change it because I didn't want to replace it because I love it. It's a gift, the fact that I was named after such a powerful woman. But I wanted people to have an option. If you can't learn to to play, then you're going to call it the Queen, right. The name has forced me to be queenly every day. And sometimes there's a power struggle between Queen and Titile. But I’m a very loving, giving, and just happy to be alive and grateful person.”
For Queen, home is Memphis, Tennessee, via Ethiopia, where she was born and raised. Memphis is the place she’s lived the longest, even if it’s not all in one stretch.
She feels Memphis doesn't get a fair judgment. She’s lived in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Miami, Florida, and truly she has met people nice people everywhere. (No surprise if you’re a woman like Queen.)
”But truthfully, the most innocent and kindest (kind to a fault) people live here. They're very friendly and very welcoming. They have the same values when you talk about friendship and loyalty and things like that. It's in the American culture. There's more sincere people here in Memphis. But we get a bad rep with all the crime and things like that that happened, but it really has a collection of just beautiful humans,” she says.
The two bad thing about Memphis are the hot summers and also on a beautiful day, people don’t come out, not even on Main Street. The streets are empty even though the city has so many beautiful places and parks. The City brings free, high quality musicians to the park, and in any other town it would be packed, but not in Memphis. The same few people come out.
“I’m still trying to figure out why that is; I’m still learning the history of the city no matter how long I live here,” she says. “It’s just like, come on Memphis, you know, because the more who show up, the more these types of things will continue to happen.”
Queen avoids the news. She filters her Facebook. She feels things deeply, and she doesn’t want to know about it unless she can help find a solution to the problem.
”Because I think it would even change my feeling about the city if I really, truly followed the news and knew everything that was happening. And that became apparent, really, during the pandemic. The first few days, we were glued to the TV watching CNN, so on. And so every time my throat scratched, I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I'm gonna die.’ Right? So after the first week, I said, ‘No more news!’”
From then Queen spent time reading and wrote a children’s book during Covid as well, also in an effort to please her daughter. The book is called Nubian Mermaid Adventures: Maka Makes New Friends.
Any foodie will love Memphis, Queen tells me. It has great food from all different cultures, with lots of fusions. The two Ethiopian ones she recommends are Shegar and Abyssinia.
I ask her about a nice sunset she’s seen lately. She tells me she’s a member of the Cloud Appreciation Society on Facebook. She loves watching the sky because it’s a new artwork every hour.
”The most fascinating to me is that we will never ever see this in this exact form. Again, like ever. That's mind blowing,” she says.
I ask her what she wishes the rest of the world knew about Memphis.
”A lot of kind people don't have a lot of exposure to the rest of the world. So they don't know. And some of their questions might come off wrong, like people asked me, ‘what are you?’, all the time. And I used to take offense to it. But now I realized, no, it's their way. This (American) culture especially has categories. And they look at me, and I look like a Black woman. And then I open my mouth and I have an accent. So I don't take offense to it. I feel like they're giving me an opportunity to share and teach and introduce myself, introduce Ethiopia, because a lot of people here don't know where Ethiopia is. They think it's one of the islands. They've never even heard of it. When they asked that, then they have opened the door for me.”
I want to hug Queen’s neck for her generosity and patience with people, even the difficult ones. She must get tired of getting asked questions like this. I think and write about the question of “where are you from?” lots, and I’m not done examining it.
Queen tells me she had to grow into this compassionate mindset.
”It took a lot of introspection and just learning about who I am. But believe me, you'll see, when you turn 50, the floodgates of like, ‘what's the purpose of all of this?’ all of it will come, and you have two ways to go. If you go left, then you know, you'll close your door and never come out again. But if you go right, you see every moment as an opportunity for you to grow and to take someone along with you on that path. And I'm grateful because I went right.”
(Queen does clarify she’s not talking about politics when she says right.)
I just can’t thank Queen enough for her kindness to me as I struggled with fear, sleep deprivation and the chaos of not having a car while traveling. I will remember her words and her actions forever and try my best to see every person I meet with an open heart and mind. With every person we meet, we have a chance to build a bridge.
What I’m learning about this week.
On Thursday I started Yellowface by RF Kuang and Saturday night I finished it. The book is ridiculously easy to read. The main character June was detestable, yet I couldn’t put the book down. Like the television show Girls, the Yellowface demonstrated there’s something really disturbing about the desires of a writer that other artistic pursuits better disguise. Still, despite its great capturing of greedy, needy writers and the questionable publishing industry, I didn’t love it. I discovered Cindy on YouTube who summed up my feelings why so well. Honestly the YouTube review was my favorite thing about this book.
Also, I am becoming more and more obsessed with Zach Bryan. Will he take the place of Ani Difranco as my top favorite singer/songwriter, ever? He’s releasing his next album on July 4th, and as I will be in the States, his music (well, his lyrics) are the topic of my next Substack. In the meantime here is a great Rolling Stone article about him. My favorite quote?
At heart, Bryan isn’t a country songwriter. He follows the folk storytelling tradition. The tumbling verse, the cascading imagery, the footloose wanderings, the hard luck and heartaches — they’re the vernacular of a Woody Guthrie, of a Steinbeck or Faulkner, or his hero Bruce Springsteen, not Harlan Howard’s three-chords-and-the-truth. His South is Southern Gothic.
That article led me to another good article about Bryan from the New York Times from 2022. Two things he said I loved are:
”I’m like a Kerouac guy,” he continued. “Like, I think life is reckless and it should be insane. It all ends in agony. It’s all about the outcome, so like, do it, you know? Do whatever it is.”
and
“Music’s going to die out,” he said, characteristically straight-faced. “You either keep going and you fail, or you stop while you’re ahead.”
Safe travels!!!