Essay by Lis Anna-Langston

Lis Anna-Langston is an award-winning author, storyteller, and culturalbobserver whose work explores love, devotion, and the emotional architecture of everyday life. Her essays and stories examine how people navigate identity, memory, and social systems that have outlived their moral justification in a rapidly changing world. Hailed as “an author with a genuine flair for originality” by Midwest Book Review and “a loveable, engaging, original voice…” by Publishers Weekly,Lis Anna-Langston is the author of five novels, winner of eighteen book awards, a three-time Pushcart nominee, Best American Short Stories nominee, 2026 Coker Fellowship winner, an NYC Big Book Award winner, published extensively in literary journals and a Magna Cum Laude graduate. You can find her in the wilds of South Carolina plucking stories out of thin air. Get social with her @lis.anna.langston on Insta or find more at 
www.lisannalangston.com.

One Motel, One Buddhist Temple

& the Many Corrections to the Geography of Self

I grew up in Memphis in the Evergreen historic district, a short drive from the Lorraine Motel. Everyone knew the story about the motel. In our living room, my grandmother had a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. She called him the Good Reverend. Deeply Baptist, I never heard her swear or yell or say a mean word about anyone.

My favorite uncle lived at home because during a hospitalization in his youth, he had been given a prefrontal lobotomy and shock therapy. He ate candy bars for breakfast, woke up when he wanted, never ate vegetables, and had a driver’s license. He also did not mind sitting in the car while I obsessed over events that could never be undone.

He would drive me to the Lorraine Motel and sit at the curb. I would stare up at the room. I knew the number because I had asked my grandmother. I was a strange kid, a precocious child, too smart for my own good, my grandmother said. I thought a lot. I liked thinking. You could do it without anyone hassling you. So, I would stare up and think.

Murder was such a terrible word. That was fine. I learned how to spell it. But the absolute finality of it bothered me, the deception, the permanence.

When you are eight years old, spilling a glass of milk, sewing a split seam on a stuffed animal, or making Monopoly work with a few lost hotels is doable. Wipe it up, stitch the seam, or put three acorns in and charge rent. Murder is not. It is irreversible. I had not been on the planet a full decade, but I had figured it out, and it bothered me.

My uncle could sit in the same position for hours, but even he would shift around, tell me his butt hurt, and ask if we could leave. He was the only adult who never told me what to do, and because of that, I almost always deferred. We would make the short drive home and enter the house to the smell of coffee brewing. I would go find my grandmother and quiz her like a Harvard professor.

My grandmother knew all about Martin Luther King Jr., a preacher from Alabama called by God to lead his people to the Promised Land. She never saw King as a political figure. Politics was not her thing. To her, he was a man chosen by God. And someone killed him.

Who kills a man of God?

That question bothered me most. The library and the Baptists had answers. It turned out that many people called by God were killed. History is strewn with the bodies of those who came to warn and lead others to a better place, from Jesus to Joan of Arc to ancient prophets stoned to death. Belief, it seemed, was a motive for murder. That bothered me too.A perplexed-looking librarian helped me find them when the card catalog was not enough. She warned me that if I drew on the pages she would find me and hold me accountable. I told her I was not a baby and went off to find my uncle in the reading chairs. He sat upright, snoring, while I tried to unravel the moral quandaries of the world.

People around me thought I was too young to question the world, and I admit I had digressions. The Holy Roman Empire was huge, spanning a millennium. The library had an entire section devoted to the Roman empires. Fascinating and a complete distraction, but not immediate. I could not sit at the curb and stare at the Holy Roman Empire. It was not down the street.

I learned a lot on Saturday afternoons at the library. I listened to recordings of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches. I learned his history, where he came from, the Baptist Church on Dexter Avenue in Alabama. The moral pull was strong. I could feel it in the quiver of his voice, in the assembly of his words. I knew my grandmother was right. I knew he was a man of God.

It took a while, but eventually I learned about Martin Luther. Even though I was little, I did not think the name similarity was a coincidence. I wondered if King had been named after the fifteenth century radical who challenged kings and proclamations. That meant this idea of rousing people to action was not new. We had been doing it for a long time. They killed Martin Luther too.

That realization sent me back to the curb. Staring up at the room, I contemplated how to fix that nightmare, the nightmare of people killing the very people who came to help them. The problem felt epic throughout human history, at least as far as I could tell, and the history section at the library was enormous. I had only made my way through about a quarter of a shelf. I imagined those aisles as a terrifying account of ignorance so hot it kept people burning in hell.

That was what my grandmother believed, and she knew everything.

The summer I turned from ten to eleven, my grandmother had surgery for cancer. My uncle and I had to run the household. I did not press him to go to the Lorraine Motel as often because meal planning, grocery shopping, and the fear of his mother dying stressed him out. Not me. Death was something I had been contemplating at the curb. I worried about my grandmother, but not in the same way my uncle did.

By twelve, I was attending a creative performing arts school. I had auditioned for the theater program. There I discovered the Greeks. Euripides. Aristophanes. Aristotle. Homer. The myths and the gods. I learned that they wrestled with the same moral quandaries I did. That felt strange but oddly comforting.

I would sit on the carpet in the aisle of the library and read more. The more pages I turned, the bdeeper I descended into the rabbit hole. Human history is riddled with stories of the human condition. Our entire history is a morality play with winners and losers, and many of the winners were not truly winning. I hoped someone else had taken note of that. History is written by the victors and very often they were cunning liars. The Greeks opened a new world for me. I began reading King’s speeches on the weekends.

Blending King with the Greeks worked for me. Surely Plato had an answer. I went looking for answers, but all I found were riddles. Still, I was up for the challenge.

Back to the Lorraine Motel I went. By then, the city was threatening to tear it down. A woman named Jacqueline still lived there. She refused to leave. She had worked there before King was murdered. The motel stood as a crumbling piece of history, a final question no one was ever going to answer for me.

Because the question always was, how do we fix this?

My grandmother could fix anything with tape or a butter knife. This proved more complicated.

“We don’t” was the popular answer. Adults were such quitters. Can’t. Don’t. Won’t. The contractions irritated me. I had been raised by a grandmother who constantly said, “Can’t never could.” She would tell me to do something, and if I whined that I could not, she would give me that familiar line. She could see it visibly prickled my intellect. Then I would do the thing I could not do five seconds earlier.

But King was different. I could not undo that day in front of room 306. I kept thinking there had to be a million ways around it. By then, I had learned there was more. JFK, RFK, and MLK Jr.

Letters on a page. Dates in a book. A legacy, yes, but incomplete. Struck down. Finished before the end.

The Lorraine Motel loomed large in those days. I was terrified the bulldozers would be allowed in and, in the crush and rumble, everyone would forget. Forgetting made being dead worse.

Broken windows, fading paint, cracked pavement with sprigs of green pushing through at least meant it was still standing. At least meant it stood for something.

I felt the motel was a call to action. Jacqueline did too. When she was physically evicted from the Lorraine Motel, she camped on the sidewalk in a tent.

Someone told me about a Buddhist temple, and I caught the bus there. I walked in and announced that I wanted to be a Buddhist. They did not simply bless me and welcome me in.

There was work to do. A year of it. Morning chant began at six. My mother considered me a nuisance. The idea that she would wake at five to drive me was delusional. So, I woke at four and walked a block and a half to the bus stop. On Poplar Avenue, a bus ran every twenty minutes. Twenty past, forty past, then on the hour. It was efficient.

The bus gave me freedom. It gave me time to think. My grandmother had never driven a car. At four in the morning, she had walked to that same bus stop to work as a cashier in the cafeteria at the city hospital. She was gone on those dark mornings, gone to that place wherever King had gone. I lived in a city full of ghosts.

The temple room was small. An altar at the front. Folding chairs. A low ceiling. A few minutes into chanting and I would pass through my awkward rhythm. At the crack of dawn, I would weave my prayer beads into the shape of infinity, touch my fingertips together, and align myself with the universe. Chant was not like the melodic Latin prayers of Benedictine monks. It was real and immediate.

The room never fully synchronized. Each person found a rhythm and stayed with it. We never became one single cadence. And yet we did. A room full of people on separate paths created a unified sound. I loved it. It was like prayer but alive.

My God was not one who wanted me quiet in the back row. My God wanted me awake before dawn, feeling my soul vibrate with the notes of the cosmos. My God wanted me real and raw and ready.

I discovered old Christian monks who wandered the desert, fasting for forty days. I read their books on choosing, life, and prayer. I began to consider the possibility that King was still leading us to the Promised Land, that we simply had to be open enough to receive the transmission.

My mother was on welfare for most of my adolescence. We did not have much, certainly nothing extra. She was not a Christian in any sense of the word, yet she lived off free food from church pantries for as long as I could remember. She seemed to take a certain satisfaction in outmaneuvering the very people who handed her bags of groceries. I never understood the anger she carried toward those who helped her. The hypocrisy bothered me. Rejecting a God who provided for you while accepting His provisions felt like a contradiction.

I learned a great deal about contradictions, paradoxes, and riddles. I also visited Jacqueline a few times each week. I believed she was right. If we bulldozed uncomfortable truths, we would drift into complacency. Bury the facts, bury the message. And the message was all that remained of King.

I had long believed that to honor the dead, you take what they taught you, what they imparted and bestowed, and you put it to work. Jacqueline had been at that motel long before I was born, and she would not give up. The cause had taken root in her heart, and that was the hill she was willing to die on. She pitched a tent, and the universe seemed to respond. At least I did. Others did too.

The Good Reverend was still leading us. I simply had to quiet the noise in my head and listen.

Chanting helped me do that. For a mind that produced a billion thoughts a minute, the ritual of showing up each morning began to organize my feelings in a way I had never experienced. It was an unexpected gift. I started to see that the legacy of King was a ministry, and all we had to tend the eternal flame.

No small task.

I was willing.

Rising at four thirty in the morning at seventeen cultivates a resolve most people never imagine.

Already suspicious of comfort, especially the numbing kind, I embraced a life that did not include extra hours in a warm bed.

My home life was near constant chaos. My mother, who had once at least been predictable in her harshness, began to shift into something more dangerous. As much as she disliked me, I was tiedto her welfare check. On paper, she was a single mother. Off paper, she sold drugs and cleaned houses for cash. She did not want to lose that income.

As a child, I sensed her shame at checkout counters. As a teenager I understood it. Paying with food stamps humiliated her, yet she would never relinquish them. Not voluntarily. That pattern extended to everything else in her life that carried shame. She held onto what she hated and hated what she held. What she allowed to hold onto her she hated the most.

Before, I had been a burden, a hassle, a money drain. But when I began preparing to leave, it threatened her fragile equilibrium. She refused to help me in any way. She had always been physically, emotionally, and mentally abusive. As college approached, that intensified.

I began to see her organizing situations so that if I defended myself, she could call the police, lie, and have me arrested. Since lying had never troubled her, I knew it was possible. There is a difference between being a teenager and being legally an adult. That distinction terrified me. I understood exactly where that strategy could lead.

I did not wake before dawn to chant in order to escape her. But later I realized how much that discipline protected me.

I was in my senior year, trying to graduate, when she abruptly refused to take me to school or pick me up. The campus was more than half an hour away by car. I became fluent in the city bus system. A team of teachers helped me navigate everything, and some even gave me rides.

Then my grandmother died. My uncle who’d been driving me to the curb was suddenly alone.

My mother moved swiftly to take power of attorney over my uncle. He had money in the bank and received monthly checks.

Living in my grandmother’s house after she died felt strange. On one hand, it was the place of my childhood. On the other, it was a blank slate. Fresh paint covered the walls. Old furniture was dragged to the curb for the city to haul away. The backdrop looked new, but the ghosts remained.

My uncle was unraveling. The voices in his head came more often.

In the middle of all that turmoil, I continued visiting Jacqueline. A wise woman. A true believer.

Others may have seen her as an activist or a nuisance, but I felt I saw her clearly, a woman on a righteous mission, someone who had been in the fight far longer than I had been alive.

She was extraordinary. No paragraph can capture her smile, the way her face lit up when she saw me walking toward her. And she never complained. Not about the cold. Not about the heat. Not about sleeping in a tent. Everyone in my life complained, especially my mother.

Not Jacqueline. She was my hero.

I began to understand that legacy is more than what we build. It is also what we are drawn toward. Like attracts like. Jacqueline refused to give up because King had not given up, not in darkness, not in setback, not even in the face of a society aligned against him. Not even in death. An abandoned motel, the city bus, an old steel bicycle from a yard sale, and a set of prayer beads became the anchors of my life. I realized that, used properly, they could carry me anywhere.

One of my friends moved into a studio apartment just around the corner from my grandmother’s house. I started spending more time there. The health food store sat between my house and her apartment. I would grab steamed vegetables and brown rice, then climb through the window she left unlocked for me.

Gautama saw the suffering of the world and set out to find its cause. Desire. Desire was the root of suffering, wanting what you could not have or might never have. The answer was neither subtle nor simple. The answer was to not want what you wanted. It was a paradox of oneness, surrender, and flow. A practice of letting go by entering something so completely that you become it, and then it dissolves because it is you. Paradoxes, riddles, nothingness, all of it suited me. Strange and unexplainable things began to make sense. A shift in perception. The idea that itbis not about the world, but about how you see the world. What a doorway. What a gift. I began to sense how sentient life truly is, not only people and animals, but life itself. The value of life.

Buddhism is not particularly popular in the West because it does not promise equality of outcome. There are ten worlds. Each person is born into one, some into lower states, others into higher ones, shaped by choices. No one is coming to save you. The first world is hell. I thought often about hell. We are all born into hell and there was evidence of that everywhere if I searched.

Reverend King stayed in room 306. To me that room was a code, a key, something that if I studied it long enough, I might finally understand. The motel had originally been owned by Walter Bailey and named after his wife, who was the switchboard operator the day the reverend was shot. She died of a heart attack that same day. That’s why no one called for help.

Bailey continued running the hotel. He closed rooms 306 and 307 and turned them into a memorial. But the motel declined and eventually closed in 1982. A group called Save the Lorraine purchased the hotel to turn it into a museum. The last resident was Jacqueline Smith. She had lived there since 1973, working as a housekeeper and at the front desk. She locked herself in her room when the eviction came. In 1988, she was forcibly removed. Her belongings were placed on the sidewalk, but she refused to leave.

I made a habit of bringing her food or whatever money I could spare, so she could remain there and protest. I had my own protest unfolding at home. After eighteen years of living with a drug addict, I was ready to leave, but my mother was not making it easy.

My uncle was not making it easy either. The voices in his head told him to smash a neighbor’s car window. He tried to kill my mother with a hammer.

I leaned further into Buddhist potlucks and macrobiotic meals. I let go of almost everything except that motel.

One afternoon, standing at the curb beside Jacqueline, I realized I had been circling that spot for a decade, since childhood. I knew it intimately. The walkway that refused to crumble told a story of trauma and endurance. It did not matter if most people turned away. As long as a few fixed their gaze on that façade, it retained presence. A law of the universe.

That winter, a friend invited me to Florida for Christmas. My mother never celebrated holidays with me, but she also disliked my doing anything alone. To my surprise, she said yes. I boarded a bus heading south. I wanted distance from the weight of a city I was beginning to outgrow.

On the Gulf Coast, I spent the holiday worrying about my future. The condo towered above the beach. The people were kind, but I did not belong there. I did not know how to inhabit that level of comfort, and I did not care to learn. Social hierarchies felt hollow. I stood at the window, looking across the flat expanse of ocean, and longed for that cracked curb.

I returned home and kept searching for a way out. A friend handed me a brochure for Webster University.

I could not picture myself in college, carefree and studying for finals. But I kept looking.

Webster was in Missouri, straight up the Mississippi River from Memphis. The Assistant Dean of Admissions drove down to interview me and one other student.

I arrived wearing men’s boxer shorts over purple long johns. The other student wore a suit and tie and rolled his eyes when he saw me. I answered honestly, swore once, adjusted my the waistband of my men’s underwear, and left.

I was accepted.

He was not.

That exchange taught me something about authenticity, about showing up as yourself and nothing else.

At one point, my mother tried to have me locked in juvenile hall because I was rarely home. The experience was absolutely terrifying, but absence is not a crime. We were sent away. She threatened me the entire ride back.

She did not know I had applied to college. Given her recent attempts to orchestrate my arrest, secrecy felt wise.

When the acceptance letter arrived, I saw the return address and could not bring myself to open it. College was not a childhood dream. A degree was not the goal. I wanted a future. I wanted to walk toward something instead of running from it. College seemed like a beginning. Webster was my only choice. I had no backup. I applied nowhere else.

I walked upstairs and tossed the envelope on the floor next to the electric typewriter I used because I fancied myself a mid-20th-century writer, and I went back to work composing the poem I'd been working on for weeks. Hours passed. A friend showed up, and we left to go to the health food store. I ate and laughed, but everything I did was behind a screen. The letter on the floor was all I thought of. Finally, when I ran out of ways to avoid destiny, I went home, stood outside my bedroom door, took a deep breath, then another, held that breath long enough to push my way inside, and walked straight to the envelope.

I didn't have to turn it over. The entire front side of the envelope was cellophane. Inside the envelope was a certificate. Congratulations, you've been accepted. Big bold letters. Breath spun out of me. I laughed awkwardly. In my moment of unwillingness, I had tossed it on the floor, and all along it was face up, just waiting to give me the news.

The mail lady knew I’d been accepted to college longer than I did.

I made myself even more scarce. Morning chant began at six, which meant leaving the house at four thirty. I went straight from school to a bar where friends gathered and avoided home entirely. My mother had taught me how to disappear. Scarcity became strategy.

After more than a year of study, ordination day arrived. A monk in an orange robe blessed us at the altar. I bowed my head and breathed deeply. What felt like a finish line was only a beginning.

I still had to survive the summer.

Knowing my mother would discard anything I left behind, I began selling possessions and giving small sums to Jacqueline. Five dollars here. Ten there. The inventory of a life. The cost of the curb. It was not much, but it mattered.

I graduated. My mother, who had never finished high school, was openly resentful. As a child, her cruelty had been inescapable. She gave away my dog. My books vanished. She burned my toys in the fireplace and made me watch. She stole my money. Removing these avenues of torture made her even more resentful. She loved cruelty.

When I began leaving early and returning late, she retaliated with handwritten cleaning lists that covered an entire sheet of notebook paper, filled with exclamation points and capital letters. This better be done by the time I get home.

By the time she returned, she was often too high to notice details, but I never risked it. Each list required two or three hours of work. I timed my return carefully, completed every task, and finished long before I heard her VW bus tearing down the street.

Two weeks remained before I left for college. I convinced a friend to drive me up the river because he loved road trips. I did not tell my mother I was leaving.

On an ordinary afternoon, the moment I had avoided all summer arrived. I was vacuuming the living room rug when the machine started to smoke. I had been cleaning since I was a kid. My mother believed I had to work for my rent. The vacuum was at least as old as I was. I knew the difference between dust and smoke.

I turned it off, flipped it over, and checked for anything caught inside. Nothing. I flipped it back and turned it on. The same awful screech. More smoke. I switched it off and stood there. The motor had finally given out. I could not hide a broken vacuum for two weeks.

I considered trying. I would sweep. Just two more weeks. That was all I needed. Then, like the climax of a horror movie, I heard her van tearing down the street. I had lost track of time.

With six years of method acting under my belt, I decided to play it cool. I yanked the cord from the wall and rolled it to the closet.

The end began the second my mother walked in.

“What is that smell?”

“I don’t know,” I said, grabbing my messenger bag and avoiding her eyes.

“Why hasn’t the floor been vacuumed?”

For a second, I wondered how she could tell. Then I looked at the rug. The neat lines left by the vacuum’s suction were absent.

I stopped trying to leave.

Turning to face her, I said evenly, “The vacuum cleaner died.”

“You broke it?”

“No. It broke. It’s old.”

The smell was the motor finally giving out.

She stomped to the closet, yanked the door open, and plugged it in. The same scream. The same smoke.

“I have to go,” I said.

“You’re not going anywhere now that you broke my vacuum cleaner.”

“It’s as old as I am.”

“And you broke it.”

I closed my eyes. In that split second, I knew she was going to hit me. I went upstairs to my room, called a friend, and waited. Those seven minutes were the longest of my life.

When his car pulled into the driveway, I checked to make sure it was him. To my horror, my mother chased him across the yard, swinging a garden hose and screaming, “Get off my property. I’m calling the police.”

I waited until he made it back to his apartment and called him again.

“Your mother is batshit crazy,” he said.

I could not argue. He would not return, but he offered to pay for a taxi. The driver helped me carry everything from my second-floor bedroom down to the cab. My mother followed behind him, screaming threats about police reports, lawsuits, theft. She did not attack him only because he was twice her size.

“Man, she’s crazy,” the driver said as he shifted into drive.

I met his eyes in the rearview mirror. “If you only knew.”

An eighteen-year ordeal was over. Everything I owned fit into the trunk of a taxi.

I went to see Jacqueline and told her I was leaving for college. Her smile lifted the entire exchange.

“You’re going to make this happen,” I said. “You’re going to get your wish.”

“I’m not leaving this sidewalk until I do,” she said.

In that moment, I felt I could still hold that space with her, even in my absence.

Even as I rode north. Even as I left. Even as I drove toward the future.

All of us were still there, outside room 306. That is how life works.

Jacqueline got her wish. We all did. The motel became a museum.

Years later, I found myself on the phone with Dexter King. For a split second, I wanted to blurt out everything, the years, the vigil, the peanut butter sandwiches. I fangirled internally. I listened to the cadence of his voice. In a distant echo, I almost heard his father. But that was not fair. Dexter King is his own man. He did not need a stranger unloading years of curbside devotion onto him.

I kept it professional. Focused on the work.

After we hung up, I sat silently at my desk. My grandmother had been gone for years, yet I imagined calling her and saying, breathless, “I just spoke to the Good Reverend’s son.”

“Oh my,” she would have said. “Isn’t that something?”

Something, indeed.

The little girl at the curb circled back to me, smiling.

I realized I had not gone to the motel to conjure miracles or repair the past. I went because it was the only place where no one could lie to me. The curb was my truth. Safety does not come from softness. It comes from standing in the center and refusing to let delusion take root. That curb was the only place in my life that could not be sugarcoated.

We held the line. All of us. A team of archivists against erasure.

The future does not change the past. That is not its function. Time either smooths the cracks or widens them. Belief can destroy or endure. The choice is ours. The real work is standing inside the cracks that cannot be fixed and refusing to leave. All those years at the curb taught me that sometimes we have to pitch a tent and pray.

Sometimes we have to pitch a tent and stay.