By mixing dark secrets reminiscent of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! with the strong sense of place Conroy created in South of Broad and the class distinctions depicted in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Martin Hegwood has crafted a truly iconic multi-generational novel, Queen of Memphis (Spanish Moss Publishing LLC 2024). The manuscript deservedly won the first-place award in the William Faulkner Literary Competition in 2022.
Hegwood’s characters clash over their desire for money, power, and prestige. Old moneyed families fight to hold onto what they have and to make sure no sneaky newcomers creep into their tightly controlled social circles. There are only two ways to join the most prestigious country club: you are either born into an old-money family or you marry into it. And marrying into it might admit you to the country club, but you are still suspect. The elite turn their noses up: you are really only as high class—or low class—as your people were.
As the story opens, LuAnn Collier, a small-town beauty queen from the Delta, elopes with Burniss Winnforth, the most sought-after bachelor in Memphis Martin Hegwood. He is old money. LuAnn is nobody. Maybe worse than nobody. Her granddaddy ran a gambling operation and was rumored to own a bawdy house. LuAnn’s new mother-in-law Maggie is appalled at her son’s choice of bride—but is it only because LuAnn comes from a low-class family, or is it because her daughter-in-law refuses to give up her job as a popular television meteorologist? Or are there other reasons—secret reasons—Maggie is against this marriage? Maggie lies and says she’s never heard of LuAnn’s grandfather, Hard Way Harry Collier, owner of the El Dorado social club across the river. It had to be a lie. Everyone back then knew of Hard Way Harry. He was “the closest thing to Hollywood Memphis had before Elvis hit the scene.”
As the years go by, LuAnn and Burniss raise one son, Wesley. But no matter what her mother-in-law thinks of LuAnn or “her people,” LuAnn is not about to let Maggie dictate her behavior. LuAnn is all too aware that “to some, she’ll always be the flashy little gold digger, the beauty pageant type who came from small-town white trash.” But she will sing when she wants to sing, dance in a red-sequined dress when she wants to dance, and she will make love to the man she loves. Who may not be her husband, even if he is a Winnforth.
The Winnforth law firm where LuAnn’s husband Burniss works is just as layered as Memphis social life. There’s the eighteenth floor where new hires like Burniss’s son Wesley slave for long hours over grunt work hoping to get promoted to the nineteenth floor where the job might become a bit more challenging. Then there’s the twentieth floor where the real money and prestige lie. That’s where Burniss’s new office is—not that he’s happy about it. His new corner office isn’t the one he wants. It doesn’t have the best view. Still, as it is being redecorated by Wesley’s wife Ainsley, seeing to it that twenty ancestral paintings are hung is “job number one.” It is of paramount importance to remind everyone that Burniss is, after all, a Winnforth.
LuAnn is not the only character who has climbed the social ladder. Ike Seater and Cass Peeler have as well. Ike first gained fame as a quarterback at Memphis State and went on to make “scads of money in lots of different ways.” Cass Peeler, on the other hand, came from a struggling middle-class family but is now the youngest district attorney ever to win office in the state. He aims to become governor in four years—unless Wesley Winnforth gets in his way. Another layer of Memphis society is represented by Manny Montgomery, a Black farmer who lives next to Ike Seater’s ranch. Manny and Ike’s families go way back together.
All the different social groups come together at Ike’s annual birthday barbecue at the ranch, the place to see and be-seen. Manny and Wesley serve as barbecue pit bosses. Cass comes to campaign for reelection. Wesley’s mother LuAnn entertains the crowd by singing “Memphis.” The family, Wesley says to Ike, wishes she would tone it down some, but Ike knows better:
“Ain’t gonna happen. People who grew up like her and me did, they’re gonna go for bright and glittery every time. We never had anything growing up, but when we did, we wanted the whole world to know about it. Kind of like Elvis. You know what his favorite color was?”
“I’ve heard different things, “Wesley said,” but Mama says It was electric blue.”
“I’d call it fluorescent blue. Gaudy as hell, and it jumps right out at you, which is exactly why he loved it. Folks who grow up rich, they go for the understated look; go for stuff so low-key that nobody but some other rich guy would even notice it. But that’s only because they’ve always had plenty of everything. If they only had one nice thing to their name and it happened to be their car, they’d be putting wire rims and racing stripes on that sucker the same as we do.”
Another serious theme that runs throughout the story is the environmental damage wrought by concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and the devastation caused by such operations to rural communities across the country. Wesley arranges for the family law firm to represent one of these huge hog farms. Another serious concern the novel addresses is what happens to those families like Manny’s who don’t have access to health care through insurance.
The novel abounds in powerful scenes. There’s a Black funeral where the choir sings “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” “with a tone unmistakably African, that vocal distillation of pain and alienation with a faint undercurrent of hope that haunts the dark soil of the Delta.” There’s elderly Maggie Winnforth mentally lost in time in a department store. She thinks she’s a teenager again, trying on hats and feather boas and different shades of lipstick. There’s LuAnn discovering long-buried secrets about her family when she visits a nursing home. The novel has enough cheating husbands and wives, legislative shenanigans, dramatic deaths, and whiskey drinking to populate episodes of a television soap opera like Dallas for several years. And yes, the multi-generational story told in Queen of Memphis would make a riveting, entertaining television series, but by all means, cherish it first as the must-read Southern novel of the year.
Martin Hegwood
Martin Hegwood has written four previous novels, including Jackpot Bay, Massacre Island, Green Eyed Hurricane, and Big Easy Backroad. He is a government attorney who works at the State Secretary’s Office in Jackson, Mississippi.
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