Tara Fallaux Ralph Lemon toured the South for background for his dance. Click photo for larger image.

Memories come and go in snatches, sometimes frustratingly so, as they appear and disappear seemingly at will in our minds. So it was with Ralph Lemon's "Come Home Charley Patton," a brilliant dance theater work that latched onto the Deep South like it would never let go.

Co-commissioned and presented by the African American Cultural Center at the Byham Theater Saturday, Charley Patton himself, as it turned out, was a Delta blues musician and an African American who was lynched in Duluth, Minn., near where Lemon actually grew up.

Lemon embarked on a tour of the South, where his family had its own deep roots, and particularly Mississippi, where the history of black America was particularly pungent.

His four-year odyssey, talking with those who were there, visiting the locations where freedom rides and lynchings took place and establishing an undeniable link with a living history, was reduced to a mere 90 minutes using a crosshatching technique with video work by Lemon's daughter, Chelsea Lemon Fetzer, text by James Baldwin (here a disembodied cartoon image who conversed from a screen high on the wall to the right of the proscenium arch), liberal doses of the blues, and, of course, dance.

It was a lot to digest, especially in the beginning as Lemon, without being judgmental, laid out images, words and movement like so many atomic particles. It required patience to determine the collective outcome, although a portion of the audience, mostly young adults, reacted with exceedingly bad manners by repeatedly talking and getting out of their seats.

What they missed was authentic movement, the old buck dances succulently re-created then ultimately transformed by violence and fear. They missed Okwui Okpokwasili calmly telling -- no, living -- a story about art class and the N-word. They missed Lemon being shockingly pulverized by a fire hose.

A beautiful and complex collection of remembrances, some borderline humorous, others difficult, all to be treasured.

Still, in the end, if it didn't all make sense, neither did the subject of racism -- and maybe that's what Lemon intended.