The Everyday Hero of Memphis

NUSRAT ON THE ROAD IN AMERICA.
Starting April 7, 2019 Nusrat is on the road in the American heartland visiting small towns, meeting ordinary people to bring their stories to the rest of country and the world.

Memphis, Tennessee

With his brooding intensity and lanky good looks Jay W. could have been in the movies. Instead, he struggled out of poverty and became a cop, serving in the Memphis Police Dept. for ten years. One day in 2014, in the call of duty, the young Jay saw a distraught teenager dangling from the edge of the roof a twenty-story building, ready to jump to his death. As a trainee cop, Jay was rattled by what he saw, but drew from the deepest reserves of courage and training and climbed the roof, calmed the man down and pulled him out of danger. “Memphis is cool,” he says, “but it’s a hustling town. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” Jay has been toughened and shaped by the crime, homelessness, drug addiction and poverty in he has grown up around. For him, heroic acts are not always about saving babies from burning buildings, but often the everyday grace of finding a meal or a place to sleep for a homeless man. But in a city like Memphis life is not always simple. Jay has been three ties, and once taken bullets because he stepped in to protect a young woman from being beaten by her abusive boyfriend. 

Jay thinks there is a lot wrong with America. There’s too much mayhem, violence, foolishness going on. Companies making profits while people are dying from lack of healthcare; gun violence and hatred; domestic abuse. He has seen a lot of struggle and fear in his young life. To taste the sweeter side of it, he quit the force and started an ice cream parlor he runs with his mother and sister. Business is booming. Customers stream in and out. Everyone seems like family. The message Jay wants to send to America is – “love conquers all, peace heals the soul, things can work out, let’s talk things over, not everything needs to go from zero to hundred, it can go from zero to three. There doesn’t need to be so much anger and violence.”

I wait my turn for Jay’s ice cream. It’s a long line, but I think it will be worth the wait.