Image-conscious corporations like Scripps Howard’s cable channels—HGTV, the Food Network, the DIY Network, and Fine Living—are based in shiny offices on the city’s western fringe. As a result, a dozen TV production houses dot the landscape like mushrooms after a rain. At almost any large gathering, you can find at least one person who has wound up on national TV via a Knoxville-based production. Even the Hub and I have had our fifteen minutes, on the DIY network. The show was called To the Rescue and featured a talent staff of home-improvement experts who swoop in to fix a seriously botched project. Our master bedroom was tapped because (a) it is the definition of botched and (b) the network people liked the fact that we don’t have thick regional accents, which I’m told don’t play well on Scripps networks.
Other industries dot the city as well. TVA, the alphabet administration that controls most of the power in the Southeast, has two monoliths in the heart of downtown, near the home of Kimberly-Clark. Most major corporations settle there because it is near everything but doesn’t have all of the hassles and high costs of big-city business. Plus, Knoxville is in a right-to-work state (read: almost no pesky unions to speak of) and has no state income tax. Life in Knoxville is cheap and more or less easy. The rent on our first apartment—a decent, huge place with an amazing view of the mountains—was exactly the same as on our crappy little shoebox in Austin that had a stunning view of the back of a Walgreens. In Manhattan, the same amount of scratch would get us three square feet of sidewalk, but only if we were willing to sublet from the Korean grocery owner whose business it fronts.
Of course, if you are not a Southern Baptist or want to send your kids to a decent school, your day-to-day existence is a bit more tedious in this city on the Tennessee River. Most of my friends in Knoxville were from someplace else, which I knew on meeting them because their first question wasn’t, “Which church do y’all go to?” With the natives, that question is a trap. Answer wrong and you’ll find yourself shunned or, worse yet, visited by well-dressed matrons who will guilt you to their parish one Sunday morning, wooing you with potato salad and sweet tea. If you are not careful, you’ll be dunked in the river for good measure.
Knoxville, like most of Tennessee, never quite cottoned to the idea of providing a decent public education to all of the state’s young, regardless of their parents’ color or marital or income status. Again, there is no state income tax—a point of pride, in fact, for all of the Tennesseeans who are bad at math, which is most of them, since the schools suck so badly. The infrastructure for schools and other social services is only one small step above Bangalore’s. If your family has money, you’ll make it through okay because you’ll be shipped off to a fairly white, fairly affluent private school where you’ll meet only other kids whose backgrounds are just like yours. Public school is home to the kids whose parents work for a living. While most cities have this problem, the class stratification is stronger here than anyplace else I’ve lived. You always know where you fall in the city’s social strata and you are never allowed to forget it.
Not being a native and, at the time, not having any offspring, I didn’t much care about the schools or what others believed about my social class. I was one of those artsy people fresh in from Austin, a city that was in the middle of being strip-mined by Hollywood and the recording industry for all of its cool, indy cred. The now-Hub but then-boyfriend and I had wound up in Austin purely by chance. He’d been accepted to grad school at the University of Texas and I didn’t really have anything else planned for my postgraduation life. After four years of working toward a theater degree, I was slowly starting to realize that I wasn’t cut out for a life on the stage—but I also had no idea what else I would do. So, I moved to Austin with a guy and later married him. My feminist foremothers would be appalled. My parents certainly were, convinced that I would be wasting my life in, of all places, Texas, miles and miles and miles away from green mountains, tall trees, and decent Italian food.
I cried for the first month we lived in the Lone Star State, convinced that I’d made a huge mistake. We moved there in August of a year when it didn’t rain all summer, which spanned from April to October. The heat was a third person living in our cramped apartment, where we slept on the floor because we didn’t own a bed. Once school started, I never saw the man I’d moved down with. Leaving the apartment was a challenge, both because of the heat and the dicey neighborhood, where a needle truck patrolled the streets and always had a line of junkies streaming behind it. I would leave just long enough to go to my crappy job at a Crate and Barrel–esque shop in the mall, then come home and cry some more. Some days, I wouldn’t make it home before the tears started. In the parking lot, they’d hit the pavement and evaporate as the heat stole every last drop of moisture.
About the time I was convinced I was going to cover all of the windows with aluminum foil to block out the oppressive sunlight, it rained, a glorious downpour complete with thunder and lightning and floods. When it started at 2 a.m., we poked our heads out of the bedroom window and could see our neighbors dancing in the streets. A few days later, I quit my job and found one at a bookstore within walking distance of our squalid place. Life improved. About three years into our Austin sojourn, I figured out that I like writing better than anything else and went to UT to pick up a second degree.
After five years there, I was ready to leave. Austin is a great place to live, as long as you don’t mind the constant heat and oppressive hipsters. But it was time for me to go. I’ve never even been a good fake Texan and am completely unable to embrace the expansiveness that is their birthright. There’s too much sun and too much sky and too much space. Give me a good narrow mountain holler any day.
Scott was done with grad school and had his first teaching gig two thousand miles away near Philadelphia. I was hanging out in Austin for a few months to finish up my degree, then I would either join him or, if the market was willing, find my own job and he would join me. Our working theory was that, since I had followed him to Texas, he would follow me now. The day he left, I started to cry again, the same unstoppable sobbing that had plagued me when we’d first moved down. Part of it was the knowledge that I’d truly be alone for months on end, for the first time in my adult life. But most of it was the knowledge that I’d have to take a plane to visit him or, worse yet, ride in a car for more than an hour.
Sometime during the last decade or so, my mild fear of flying had turned into a full-blown terror of any kind of lengthy trip in any kind of conveyance. I’d spend nights wide awake, hearing planes fly overhead—our Austin apartment was on the airport’s approach path—or dreaming of ways they’d crash. I could barely drive the five miles from my bedroom to the campus without picturing my car in a mangled heap, with my limbs splayed and bloodied out the open window. The temptation just to close my eyes behind the wheel and let the accident come was undeniable. It whispered to me, like a lover with a new come-on and sex toy.
After one particularly gruesome drive to campus, I delivered myself to the health center, which promptly delivered me to a student shrink. She agreed to take me on gratis as long as I let her use me as a case study for her final course work. Somewhere, deep in the bowels of UT’s Psych Department, I am the secret star of a dissertation. This amuses me.
My shrink decided that I needed meds, which I fought against with every last fiber of my pathetic being, convinced that they’d turn me into a happy little zombie who’d never write another word. But wouldn’t it be nice, she’d ask, to not feel like death was waiting at every turn? Yes, I’d say, but that’s what gives me my edge. Without that, I’m boring. And one day, on the way to an appointment with her, I stepped out into traffic with a reckless disregard for where the cars were. I came within inches of a trip to the ER (or worse) and scared myself so badly that I was sobbing and shaking and ranting the rest of the way to her office. I agreed to take the damn drugs, which made me dizzy and queasy and sleepy and a couple of other dwarves. Yet, within a week or so, I could focus on s
omething besides my death. I finished my classwork, freelanced my fingers to the bone, and found a real editing gig in Knoxville for the weekly paper. Thanks to the pharmaceutical industry, I was able to take a plane to that interview and back without clutching at the flight attendants like a toddler grabbing at candy.
Almost to a person, everyone I met during my first weeks in Knoxville apologized for it not being as hip as Austin. No matter how many times I explained that if I’d loved Austin’s hipness so much, I would have stayed there, everyone felt compelled to provide condolences for their scruffy town. Then, they’d launch into a spiel about how great Knoxville is, how friendly the folks are, and how gorgeous the mountains can be. You could get whiplash from the quick turn.
The schizophrenia about the city is telling something best illustrated by the writers that Knoxville has turned out. James Agee grew up in Fort Sanders, the neighborhood that fronts the university. His Pulitzer prize–winning “A Death in the Family” gently and poetically examines all of the city’s contradictions—between black and white, rich and poor—while nudging at larger issues about families and death. Frances Hodgson Burnett was British born but Knoxville bred and her The Secret Garden could be pictured easily in one of the city’s tonier districts. But for each quiet tale told by elegant writers, there is a Cormac McCarthy, whose dark, violent southern Gothic tales like Suttree and Blood Meridian come the closest to getting at the heart of Knoxville. While McCarthy quit the place in the early 1970s, you can still feel the echoes of East Tennessee in his more brooding passages. The weird band of beer drinkers I used to hang with in town annually reenacts scenes from Suttree, turning it into a drunken stagger to all of the grimy places McCarthy vividly depicts. A watermelon in lingerie is given a prominent place on the bar of the last stop, a homage to one of the book’s more colorful characters who happens to enjoy carnal knowledge with these ripe melons on slow summer days.
Knoxville is also known for the musicians who died after stops there. Rachmaninoff played his last recital in Knoxville in 1943, then died of cancer. Hank Williams’s last night on this earth was spent being driven around greater Knoxville by his chauffeur, who may or may not have realized that his charge had OD’d in the backseat. Some day, I want to write a play called Driving Mr. Williams. There will be heartbreaking ballads and lots of morphine.
On a good night, you can almost feel all of these ghosts lingering along the center city’s streets, whispering ideas to you as you pass. A dark, creative spirit is nearly tangible when you get down by the river, which has inspired many a bluegrass ballad about drowning. For that reason, Knoxville always pulls part of you back, once you’ve gotten to know her. It’s not the corporate office blocks or the shiny new convention center, which was sold to the city’s movers and shakers like so much snake oil. It’s the city’s grimy, lovable heart that beats dark poetry to those who can hear it thumping. To quote Knoxville-based songwriter Scott Miller, who has spent most of his career capturing the town’s spirit:
Hank Williams and James Agee hiding back in the hills
A bottle full of whiskey and some sleeping pills
Hank tells Jimmy, “If you write me a book,
I’ll write you a ditty with a real mean hook
Called ‘You Can’t Shake Knoxville.’”
And you can’t shake it, no matter how far you run, which makes it just like other parts of Appalachia. Unlike Parkersburg, Knoxville makes a point of playing up its hillbilly character. It’s a defense mechanism, making fun of itself in a preemptive strike so that you won’t feel badly about making fun of it as well. Just down the road from the city is the region’s true spiritual center, where Dolly Parton’s theme park and tacky-ass Gatlinburg meet in an unholy amalgam of outlet shops, Thomas Kincaid paintings, tattoo parlors, and “family entertainment.” Dollywood itself continually winks at you, as if the park itself knows how branded the “hillbilly experience” has become. The Aunt Granny’s eatery is a must-visit on the park’s grounds, where you can get fried chicken, greens, and biscuits while pondering what shape a family’s tree must be in to have an Aunt Granny. Down the road a spell is Christus Gardens, a small theme “experience” devoted to dioramas about the life of Christ. You can even buy a Christus shot glass in the gift shop, if you are so inclined. On any given Saturday, you can stroll the streets and see what most Americans—the folks whose opinions aren’t important because they live in a fly-over state and have mullets—look like, WWE T-shirts and all. It’s not pretty, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
But what do I know? I’m a card-carrying member of the liberal elite. I know the secret handshake and everything. Still and all, natives of Knoxville adopt an outlaw swagger and throw off a vibe from a Steve Earle song populated by moonshine runners and petty thieves. This covers up a deeper insecurity about feeling unworthy because they grew up in the hills, surrounded by kinfolk and Bibles.
It’s all of a piece, this place. You can drive from Pittsburgh to Parkersburg to Knoxville and feel you haven’t really changed locations. While the size of the cities changes (and Pittsburgh’s culture has also been shaped by its thriving immigrant culture that neither Knoxville nor Parkersburg can claim), their spirits are the same. In any restaurant, you can hear nearly identical harsh accents, pocked with exclamations of “yinz,” the Appalachian equivalent of “y’all.” Start a conversation about the town’s history, and you’ll stumble into a discourse on how they didn’t pick a side during the Civil War and how the local economy has always been based on small, non-plantation farms and outside industries like steel and coal and decades of extraordinary poverty. The mountains never really change, cutting across the landscape like rugs bunched up on hardwood floors. As you drive farther south, they simply get greener. And the people, once you get to know them, will always tell you that the place they grew up in makes them feel somehow “less-than,” as if all that America stands for doesn’t apply to them.
For outsiders, Knoxville is a place you end up when you’re not paying enough attention. I wound up there because it was just time for me to get out of Austin and find a real job. Once I got to Knoxville, it was hard to leave. The city’s low self-esteem meshed ideally with my own personality quirks. I never felt hip enough in Austin. I didn’t smoke enough weed or go to the right shows or geek out in the cool bookstores. But in Knoxville, where any vaguely artsy person is immediately granted outsider cachet, I fit right in. While some far “out-eclecticked” me, I found a comfortable middle ground where I didn’t have to work too hard to keep up with the city’s avant-garde.
For my cousin Joan, Knoxville—technically Halls, a bedroom community just outside of the city proper—was the ideal spot to retreat from the world at large. She found herself there because of her husband, who had a nebulous-insurance industry job that I’ve never really been able to grok and was transferred every few years. Our Tennessee tenures didn’t overlap. Her Halls stint preceded my Knoxville time by two years. The first year I was in Knoxville, she was living just outside of Nashville, again because of her husband’s work-related promotion. Still, it was the closest I’d lived to my mother’s side of the family since forever, and it was nice to be able to drive out to her place just after Christmas and see people I’m related to.
By her own account, Joan loved Halls. Everything anyone could ever need was there—including a Wal-Mart and a variety of fast food—and you never had to drive to the city proper. It was a nice, safe place to raise her kids, who were just at the age when they get into all-American activities like cheerleading and softball. But Halls wasn’t the Eden Joan had thought. Even the most quaint town has its secrets. In 1994, Halls was the site of a good old southern tradition, a cross burning, which took place on the lawn of one Dennis Willis, a black man. Willis and his wife have three kids, two of whom were too young at the time to understand the threat. The twelve-year-old, however, was distraught. The local church members, of course, denounced the act and the Willis family was reportedly heartened by the
outpouring of support. Still, the hand-wringing didn’t change the fact that parts of Tennessee harbored hate groups, which jumped into the fray and papered the neighborhood with antiblack literature. The Willises were continually harassed by cowards who’d leave threats on their doorstep under cover of night. The FBI was called in but, ten years later, the case is still unsolved and the Willises have moved. But this wasn’t the last episode in the area. In 2001, a cross was burned on the front lawn of Roland Dykes, nearby Newport’s first black mayor.
Like towns, families have their hidden shames, too. On the surface, Joan and her brood seemed fairly content. Big gatherings were common and full of laughter. As a writer, I’m supposed to set up the fall at this point, where I point to all of the outward trappings of success like a big house and healthy, smart kids. I find it oddly exhausting to paint the picture for you, because I know how it ended. Suffice to say, Joan’s family was exactly what you’d expect for the upwardly mobile middle class. And, yet, something eroded the foundation.
If you ask Joan’s former husband, no doubt he’d claim it was her fault that he sought refuge in the arms of his young French coworker, who recently bore his third child. You’d have to ask him yourself, though. After so many years of being an integral, trusted part of the family, he now makes me spit when his name is mentioned because of his betrayal of my cousin. I mean, if you’re going to leave, at least try to be original about it. But dumping your wife of many years for a pretty young thing is just so clichéd. Why not break the mold and leave so that you can join the circus to find your inner clown? Or travel to the forests of Oregon to find Bigfoot? We all make choices, but some are just so very predictable.
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