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Blackberry Crisp

by Mag-pies proprietor Peggy Hambright

For those of you who have some blackberry bushes in the backyard and feel inspired by a Knoxville summer, but can't quite commit to making a crust:

4 cups blackberries
3 tablespoons flour
1/3-1/2 cup sugar
grated rind of one lemon
1/4 teaspoon salt

Toss together and put into an 8-inch glass pie pan or baking dish.
Then, pulse the following together in a food processor until coarse (or blend with a pastry blender or two knives) and sprinkle over the berries:

1/2 cup flour
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon each nutmeg and salt
6 tablespoons cold butter, cut into pieces

Bake at 375 degrees for 30-40 minutes, or until thick and bubbly. Serve with ice cream, if desired.

And other signs of summer in Knoxville

by Jay Hardwig

The thing I remember best about summers in Knoxville is Phil Hamlin's blackberry pie.

A falsehood, actually: I remember very little about that blackberry pie. I remember combing the brambles that grew wild by the railroad tracks, searching for those deeply purple patches that meant ripe blackberries. I remember the plucking, then the heading home with the harvest in plastic peanut butter buckets. I remember watching Phil's red mustache twitch as he calculated the number of pies that could be made from the day's work. I remember, vaguely, the baking of the pies. Mostly, though, I remember the anticipation.

In other spots, there are holes. Was the crust homemade, or store-bought? (Homemade, I'd guess.) Was there ice cream involved? (Vanilla, I'd like to think, although Phil did have a strange predilection for Black Walnut and the more brightly colored sherbets.) Were there whole herds of pies, gleaming golden in the sun, an embarrassment of midsummer riches to spoil every appetite? Or were there only one or two lonely pies, solitary soldiers that, despite their game nature, could never satisfy a whole household? I cannot recall.

What it is, then, is this: the thing I would most like to remember about summers in Knoxville is Phil Hamlin's blackberry pie. For what could speak more clearly, more forcefully, more poetically, about summers in Knoxville, and the hope and affection and innocence involved, than homemade blackberry pie?

You see already that I am a hopeless romantic. Summers in Knoxville, you well know, have more to do with ticks, chiggers, and skunks than with such sentimental concerns as dandelions and blackberry pie. It is hot, oh yes, and humid, with little to recommend it to the fellow traveler. August is the worst. It bores straight into the bones. There is no hope in August. That much I remember. And yet from this distance—ten years and a thousand miles gone—I cannot help but bathe those summers in a golden glow, and find in them meaning that was never intended. From this distance, summer in Knoxville seems charmed indeed.

The thing I most like to remember, after those pies, is catching fireflies on the front lawn. Objection!, you say. The defense is pulling on heartstrings. But I did. I was the very picture of earnest and tousle-haired youth: jelly jar in hand, air-holes punched in the lid as a matter of course, I stalked my quarry through the gathering dusk, waiting for a slow-moving firebug to betray itself with an ill-timed flash of light. I was humane in the most part, but I'll admit that more than once I smeared an unfortunate fellow between my thumbs to better plumb the mysteries of his glow. Wonderful, wonderful, although the lawn in question, a spectacular spread on Kingston Pike, has long since been paved over; you'd be hard-pressed to find a firefly there now.

I remember, of course and also, Little League baseball down at the Polo Fields; all-star games, Vance Link's patient pitching, the time Paul Companiotte hit a ball clear into the Tennessee River. I played for the mighty A-House, and donned the red and blue proudly, and pulled up my stirrups just so; a good team, we were, but always bridesmaids to Ed McSwine and the dreaded Copper Cellar squad, unbearably drab in their tan and brown jerseys but far and away the class of the league. When the games were over, we drank our free suicides and kept our hands to the glove leather, playing hotbox and 500, occasionally taking batting practice on one of the farther fields. I never did make the majors.

Jesse Barfield did, though. Hailing from Joliet, Ill., he played neither for A-House or Copper Cellar, but he did make a celebrated pit-stop with the Knoxville Blue Jays, the Double-A precursor of the local Smokies. As a kid, I watched him send more than one fastball flying out of Bill Meyer Stadium, and it never ceased to thrill. My brother and I were not season ticket holders, but had been semi-regulars since the days of the old KnoxSox, when Dad would bring us down regularly for Quarter Beer Night. We would sit in the first base bleachers and watch the raucous goings-on between the drunken fraternity boys at field level and the slightly more erudite, but no less drunk, university professors that favored the upper rows. We watched some baseball too, as I recall, and in our years we saw a parade of future major-leaguers come through, from Harold Baines to Lamarr Hoyt, Cecil Fielder to Glenallen Hill, but it was Barfield who my brother and I immortalized in song, a sweet baseball ditty sung to the tune of "Davy Crockett":

Jesse, Jesse Barfield, hits them home runs far
Jesse, Jesse Barfield, he's our home run star.

When all is said and done about Bill Meyer Stadium (as I hear it will be, and soon, which makes me sad), there will be much I remember of the place. I will remember the barons of the bullpen, the whistle of passing freight trains, the mad scrambles after foul-balls in the parking lot. I will remember the smells from the Magnolia Avenue barbecue shacks that dot the area, and I will remember the old men who sat stoically in their box seats, silently chewing tobacco, erupting only occasionally to spew great streams of oily brown juice into the cups at their feet.

But mostly I will remember the left-field line, with its high fence guarding the weedy lots beyond. Beyond those lots stood—and still stands, I am sure—the old Standard Knitting Mills plant. High upon the brick face of that plant is a bank of windows, and when I die, one of my chief regrets will be that I never saw a home-run ball go crashing through those panes. It would take a mighty shot, no doubt, almost straight down the left-field line, and I would have thought it couldn't be done except for the panes already broken, about a dozen as I recall, that stood in mute testament to storied longballs from earlier times. The owners of the building did not replace the shattered windows, not in my youth anyway. Whether this act of seeming good grace came from a sportsman's appreciation of a ball well hit or was simply a product of disinterested economics I never knew, but it scarcely mattered. Those broken panes gave me something to dream on; I still think of them from time to time.

Of the 1982 World's Fair—the Sunsphere sprouted in my twelfth year—I remember primarily Belgian waffles, steel drums, and the giant Rubik's cube inside the Hungarian Pavilion. Stored deeper in the chest are memories of a messy romantic mishap—one of my first—played out in high drama in the IMAX theater, wherein a swapped-spit 6th-grade friendship was forever stained by a small act of treason. (I forgive you, Dave.)

There are still other memories: summer arts programs at Laurel High School, where a succession of great teachers instructed me in the ways of silkscreen, stained glass, and counterculture; tennis lessons from Louis Royal on the beleaguered Tyson Park turf; swimming in a swollen Third Creek, an act of toxic ignorance for which my future offspring may still pay; standing in the sun at Crescent Bend Gardens, where I held a hose for money, and occasionally paused to pick bagworms off of the evergreens.

Romance, picnics, baseball sluggers, et cetera et cetera ad nauseam—all the tropes of a Southern boyhood well spent. I may as well add snowcones and honeysuckle, while I'm at it.

And cold beer, of course. Not as a kid, mind you, but as I graduated from my youth a new pastime emerged, centered primarily around the porches of Fort Sanders and the seductive allure of cheap American beer in quantity. Those were lovely, languid, languorous evenings, built from no more than a twelve-pack, a couple of friends, and a sturdy couch, and when horseflies and honeysuckle pass from my mind I will still recall those nights. I will recall the streetlights, the thin breeze, the Muddy Waters on the stereo; the aluminum soldiers standing sweating on the railing, waiting to be drunk, crunched, creased, and tossed in the corner among the other empties; the idle, aimless conversation as we whiled away the night with no great plans in our heads, nor any thought that there should be such plans. A rite of passage, I know, repeated all over the land, and with scant variation. Yet there was something sweet in that time, and elemental, and it seems to me now that it could have happened no other way but in summer, in Knoxville, on a porch in Fort Sanders, among those I loved and those I didn't, with beer and blues and boisterous talk, June bugs and stray cats attending, and night falling softly in the sky.

Sigh.

Years later, I wrote a novel set in Knoxville, a novel distinguished chiefly by bald sentimentalism and the lack of a discernible plot, a beginner's book that languishes unread in the deepest drawers of my bookcase, as it should. The first line reads as follows:

It is summer in Knoxville, and it is raining.

My mom laughed out loud when she heard that line, comparing my literary aesthetic to that of Snoopy. I was hoping for Agee, but she had a point. Still, that inaugural passage has the power to bring me back, instantly, to the long lazy days of summer in Knoxville, to jelly jars and ballparks and conquered twelve-packs on a hundred and one Fort Sanders porches.

The cool drizzle makes the city streets steam, I continued, filling the air with the familiar scent of rain on hot pavement, delicious and unmistakable. On the corner of Highland and Twenty-first a man pulls his hat against the persistent rain and continues down the road, unhurried. Dusk is approaching and the air cools around him. The trees sigh with relief and settle in for a long summer rain. The sidewalk cracked by grass and littered with old beer cans, weeds high on the sides. The wet roads gathering a dull shine. A tabby cat crouching beneath an old orange Chevy. He walks on and out of sight.

Bent old houses of weathered wood and interrupted angles frame the scene, tall and solemn in the fading light. Thick trees in full summer leafage line the streets. An extravagant magnolia reaches out of one front yard; a dripping dogwood stands alert in another. Unmown yards sporting clusters of whited dandelions spread out beneath the trees and around the houses whose forms are softened by the light rain and the effects of dusk. A few pedestrians and an occasional car move through the streets, but fail to disturb the quiet reverie among houses, trees, and rain that has emerged on this summer evening.

Schmaltzy? Perhaps, but I meant it. A hundred pages later in that same sad novel a second summer had rolled around, and rather than worry my head trying to evoke a Southern summer through poetry or insight—both in short supply in those days—I settled for a simple list, a catalog of images that I knew would be familiar to all. That list read as follows: watermelon rinds, sandlot baseball, bottle rockets, high weeds, recalcitrant pushmowers, shade tree car repair, chigger bites, catfish dinners with sweetened ice tea, banjo music, fishing trips, rope hammocks, race riots, warm rain, July Fourth, and homegrown tomatoes.

I forgot blackberry pie. How could I?

I have called Phil Hamlin.

He says it was vanilla.