1880-09-21 “Wrong Memphis” by Emma (born 1965)

My name is Emma Knox, and I was born in Vicksburg MS in 1965. I am now living in Memphis, TN, but it is 1880. I, along with two friends, Hannah and Merritt, are time travelers.

We decided to journal our experiences, so this is my first official entry. I wrote down something earlier, and that’s what gave us the idea to make journals.

It was July 4,1984 when I time-shifted. Before the shift, I was more or less normal for a poor Mississippi girl. My daddy was a tenant farmer outside Vicksburg. Momma worked in a nursing home as a nurse assistant.

I was a pretty good student. I took some AP classes like history, biology, and chemistry. I took physics and would have taken calculus, but mom got sick and had to stop taking shifts. When I turned 17 I got my equivalency diploma and got a job doing dishes at Shoney’s. 

Mom finally got too sick to work and we lost our insurance. Meanwhile this boy named Sean wouldn’t leave me alone. He had a stocker job at a Kroger and thought I’d make a good wife. I called him Stocker Sean the Stalker. 

I decided to see about a better job, and FedEx was growing fast, hiring people for everything. I had an interview for a job doing maintenance work in the hub. I got on a bus one afternoon planning to spend the night in the bus terminal. I fell asleep not far out of Vicksburg, and when I woke up, I was sleeping in a boxcar in South Memphis. It was 104 years in the past.

Well, I wandered toward the middle of town. In 1880 Memphis had just over 33K people. I come to a place where there was a theater on one side of the street and a burlesque show on the other. There was a nice looking man and one of the dancers talking. We locked eyes.

I don’t know how, but I knew they were time-shifted, too. I couldn’t keep from walking right to them.

Of course, they were Merritt, from 2024 and Hannah from 1984 (like me). There was some sort of intense, immediate connection between us.

Merritt explained how we are now living together in his house, so I’ll close this entry.

That’s how I got to 1880.