Memphis: Restricted District (Location Key)

Sanctuary describes Red's funeral procession "moving slowly through the restricted district where faces peered from beneath lowered shades, toward the main artery that led back out of town" (249). The narrator seems to assume readers will understand this designation, and why the people in the neighborhood seem both interested and anxious about the funeral. We assume this district was the all-white, middle class Normal Station neighborhood in the area of the University of Memphis. In 1911 'business houses and negroes' were 'restricted' away from this area for a period of 25 years. Racial and zoning restrictions like this were common in more prosperous parts of cities in both the south and the north, which would explain why the narrator feels no need to explain further.