Revelations in an old warehouse
by Jack Neely
On State Street there's a building with a hole in its front, apparently where some truck backed a little too far over the sidewalk. Deep within the hole you can hear water dribbling, as if from a busted pipe. Somebody's losing money, but nobody's bothering to fix it.
The building is still labeled THE UNIV. OF TENN. WAREHOUSE. It's one of several interesting buildings about to be demolished for our Justice Palace.
Twenty-two years ago this month, I got a summer job working in the mailroom at UT. We'd spend the mornings sorting the mail into little wooden pigeonholes at the UT Mail Service headquarters, which was a windowless office in the basement of Andy Holt Tower. Then we'd roll the mail out onto the loading dock and load it into trucks and spend the afternoons delivering the mail. That was the best part, padding around UT in tennis shoes, in the sunshine. Except for my striped mail-service uniform shirt with the Mail Service patch on the shoulder, I could have passed for a student, as, a year later, I was.
About once every three weeks or so, somebody would say, "We've got to go to State Street." I don't remember why we had to go to State Street, but UT owned a warehouse on State Street, and going there was a grave necessity that broke up the routine.
Most of the guys I worked with were career mailmen. Most had been there for years, but every once in a while one of them would get disgusted with UT and say, "I'm going downtown to take the civil service exam." One did, and he became a U.S. mailman. He was sort of a legend.
Anyway, there was this big guy I worked with, named Richard. He'd been working there a good long while; sometimes he admitted he resented having to train this skinny little white guy for a job I'd have only for the summer. I couldn't argue, and didn't.
He did like stories. If you had a good one, you'd have his full respect. But sometimes he'd seem protective, in a condescending sort of way.
"It's time to go to State Street," he said one day. "Things can get pretty funky there. I hope it's not a bad experience for you."
That's all he said. I asked him to elaborate, but he didn't. We drove downtown.
Downtown had a certain sullen gravity to it in 1977, but nothing to attract a suburban teenager. There were still plenty of stores, but no sidewalk cafes, no public parks, no discos, no brewpubs, no espresso bars, no live-music clubs. The Tennessee Theater had closed; the S&W was still open for business, but I already thought of it as outworn, a place we used to go. Much of downtown's Victorian architecture was still covered over with that aluminum or glass or concrete siding that never quite make them look modern. Even the modernizations were already cracked, warped, gray with soot. To me, downtown in 1977 was more or less a thicker version of any run-down strip mall on Chapman Highway. Downtown didn't need saving, and didn't much deserve it.
I didn't know the darker parts. The whole grimy quadrant north and east of Union and Gay were a mystery to me. But that's where we drove in the big green truck, on a warm, rainy afternoon.
We wheeled down an alley I'd never noticed and backed into a loading dock. The State Street warehouse was a dusty place of unknown age with creaky wooden floors that were so deeply pitted and scarred they could stop your hand truck as you rolled it along and you'd have to rock it out.
We rode in an old cage elevator that didn't have buttons, just a steel cable that you'd pull, and as we arrived at a floor we could stop the car only approximately. The first time I rode it, the other guys thought it was funny to let me try to control the elevator. After I missed the floor a couple of times, we got out and moved heavy things around.
I learned that the State Street experience entailed a lot of waiting. Some guy I'd never heard of wasn't there yet, and only he knew what to do. Sometimes we'd wait in old chairs, four or five of us, in a dismal office where some supervisor used to fire people.
The men were white and black, all with more facial hair than I had. One of the guys pulled out a clay pipe and a bag of dry leaves. It surprised me but no one else. The others reacted exactly as they would have if he'd brought out a folding ruler. Still, if that was all Richard meant when he talked about things getting pretty funky, I figured I could handle it. He tamped it down, lit it, and passed it around, and they all seemed to recede from view. They became like ghosts, and I was the only mortal in the room.
Lonesome, I looked around for something to do. On the metal table was one book, a hardback so battered it looked like a high school textbook, its cloth glazed from wear.
I picked it up. "Some stories in there," someone coughed. It was Betsey Creekmore's Knoxville, the original edition, with the chapter called "The Distaff Side." I remember that, because I'd never seen the word distaff before that afternoon. I read it eagerly, assuming distaff was something weird and disreputable.
"Read the part about the Civil War," came a murmur from the chair in the corner. I'd never read anything about local history before. I didn't consider it a subject worth my attention.
I found the Civil War chapter, dog-eared pages with fingerprints all over them. "Read it loud," came a voice. I read about the shelling of Knoxville, and all my colleagues turned their reddish eyes toward me and listened.
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