Sharing the Great Outdoors

T. O. Fuller State Park feels removed from the rest of Memphis. Tucked into the far east corner of the city, its border is defined to the north by McKellar Lake, a tributary of the Mississippi River; to the west, by fields of industry—steel and gas plants, with ports on the great river; and, to the south, by South Third Street, leading away from Whitehaven, the neighborhood where I grew up.

Whitehaven, where Graceland is located, was a former-farming-community-turned-suburb before Memphis annexed it in 1969. The area experienced white flight in the 1970s, around the time of Elvis Presley’s death, and my family moved in during the mid-1980s. My experience of Whitehaven was relegated to school and our backyard. It was considered to be a dangerous area, but that never seeped into my psyche; it was just home.

One day in May, a few friends and I decided to visit T. O. Fuller, rehashing childhood trips there. Chasing these memories was akin to trying to catch lightning bugs in a season that wasn’t summer. Turning off South Third onto Mitchell Road, houses began to give way to foliage, and the park emerged. The Sunday morning dew, already evaporating in the Southern heat, gave the park its lush shimmer. City noises were far away and forgotten.

There were a few baseball fields and a basketball court; beyond them, I could see phone lines and industrial wire. It was like entering an alternate dimension. T. O. Fuller had been a destination for the school field trips of our youth; buses would pull up to the park’s Chucalissa archaeological site, and kids would pile out to poke around its museum’s small exhibition of pottery and tools.

The park seemed so much more expansive now. The unexpected quiet and stillness were unsettling. Occasionally a park ranger drove by, slowing down to catch a glimpse of the camera in my hands before speeding off. The community blackboard advertised a barbecue held a few weeks back.

The sun rose high over the trees, and it felt as though summer were on the horizon. Scientists, hikers, and hobbyists tend to use the park to seek out all forms of life: butterflies, frogs, birds. I came across a former park ranger and his mother, who had just finished their Sunday morning bird-watching session. They obliged my camera, the woman undoing her hair tie to reveal a cascade of hair. “My husband cut off five inches, so now I’m not speaking to him!” she joked.

Her son told me that he’d spent three years working at David Crockett State Park, which is some 200 miles away in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. Like T. O. Fuller—which was first opened as an exclusively African American park—David Crockett was segregated when it was opened in 1959: there was one park manager for the black side, the ranger explained, and one for the white. When the park was integrated in the mid-1960s, the African American side fell into disrepair. When he arrived as a park ranger in 2015, the area had been abandoned, reclaimed by the wilderness.

Parks in Memphis are changing. Starting in 2013, the city council voted to rename three parks, replacing Confederate memorials with more innocuous names: Confederate Park became Memphis Park, Jefferson Davis Park became Mississippi River Park, and Nathan Bedford Forrest Park became Health Sciences Park. The equestrian statue of Forrest—a Confederate general and the first leader of the Ku Klux Klan—was only removed in 2017; the city had to sell the parks to a nonprofit called Memphis Greenspace in order to remove the statue without getting approval from the Tennessee House of Representatives. (In what some saw as retaliation, the House later cut $250,000 from Memphis’s bicentennial planning budget.) But T. O. Fuller State Park—named for Thomas O. Fuller, who fought for education and integration for Memphis’s black community during the early 20th century—has had the same name for more than 70 years.

As I watched, a few college students arrived to use the park’s empty basketball court. They began to form teams, dribbling and passing; one ball flew past me, as an invitation to join in. I explained I wasn’t any good athletically, but they remained just as welcoming. I made a group portrait and walked back to my car. I passed a sign on the way out that had one arrow pointing to Memphis and another pointing to the Chucalissa site. I later found out that the word chucalissa comes from Choctaw and means “abandoned house.” This park is anything but.

Tommy Kha is a photographer based between Brooklyn and his hometown of Memphis. Kha’s work often addresses queer identity and all things Memphis, including Elvis. He has a BFA from the Memphis College of Art and an MFA from Yale.