Just off South Third Street, the South Branch Library was where everyone knew me by name. I was there every day. Sometimes the first to arrive, but always the last to leave. It was my refuge. A place where I felt understood in a way I didn’t anywhere else.
Every now and then, with my grandmother’s permission, I’d tag along with one of the librarians. Though well-intended, leaving the neighborhood felt surreal. I understood there was more to life, but, perhaps, nobody, not even me, realized that everything I would become, was already being built right there.
Back then, I believed Memphis started at the Southgate Shopping Center and ended at the Crystal Palace Skating Rink. In my innocence, I mistook Crystal Palace for the Downtown of Memphis. It was the only reasonable explanation for the people, the lights, and the energy.
My neighborhood might’ve been less vibrant, but I still made the best of it. I rode my 10-speed bike up and down the street, played on the swings in Belz Park, and picked pears off the neighbor’s trees like they were mine. At the end of the day, I returned to a small, cramped house where love and chaos looked the same, where people just showed up and stayed as long as they needed. My world wasn’t huge, but it never felt lacking, especially in possibility.
Possibility looked different where I came from. Most saw what wasn’t, but you actually learned from what was. You learned early how to read people. You learned how to move smart. You learned how to hold your own. You learned how to laugh even when things didn’t look like they should. My neighborhood wasn’t polished; it was real. And it built something in you whether you realized it or not.
It built something in me.
After college, I didn’t leave Memphis right away. I stayed and I taught. For 10 years, I stood in classrooms, in the same city, in the same neighborhood, that raised me, often working with students who reminded me of myself.
In 2014, I moved to China to continue teaching. I won’t dress it up — it challenged me. I was in a new environment with new expectations. I sat in rooms where I wasn’t the most traveled, the most exposed, or the most polished. There were moments I felt it, and there were moments when those around me wouldn’t allow me to forget it.
But I never felt incapable. Not even once.
Everything I needed, I already had. Living in Memphis had already taught me how to walk into unfamiliar spaces and figure it out. It had already taught me how to adjust without losing myself. What I thought I was gaining overseas, I realized I had been building all along.
Leaving didn’t distance me from Memphis. It clarified it. It made me see it without apology. It made me understand that what we come from isn’t something to explain away. It is something to stand on.
So now, when I tell people I’m from Memphis, I don’t rush past it. I don’t soften it. I anticipate the pause, knowing full well a joke about our crime rate then a compliment about our barbecue and our musical icons will follow.
And while I can’t deny the reality of our crime rate, there’s so much more to Memphis than what people reduce it to. We’re not just food and music. We’re the Underground Railroad, home of Kings, and second to none when it comes to Southern hospitality. Memphis doesn’t need to be defended. It needs to be understood. It is not just what people see from the outside. It is what it produces.
It produces people who can navigate complexity. People who know how to endure, who know how to make something out of very little. It doesn’t just leave you when you leave.
And that’s where responsibility comes in.
There’s no shame in leaving Memphis. But there is something to question if you leave and never look back, if you take everything it gave you and never pour anything into it in return.
Whether we admit it or not, we carry Memphis with us. In how we speak. In how we move. In how we show up. I’ve been to a lot of places since South Third Street, seen more than I ever thought I would. But I understand something now that I didn’t then. I’m a long way from South Third Street. But everything that got me here started there.
Dequilah Brandon lives in Naples, Italy, and has traveled to over 25 countries, something she never imagined doing as a child.