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The changing faces of born Knoxvillians

by Matt Edens

It's odd, but after something like 17 years I still don't think of myself as a Knoxvillian. Seventeen years: half my life, really. I came to this town a 17-year old UT freshman, and since then have I've earned a degree, met a girl and got married (she came to town the same year and the same way I did. And no, she doesn't think of herself as a Knoxvillian either), stumbled into a career, and inexplicably wound up something of a civic activist, the sort of guy who shows up at meetings and bothers people with my opinions (oh, and I've sunk way too much time and money into a cantankerous old house too). In other words, I've built a life here. Yet, in all the time that I've lived here, so successfully disguised to myself as an adult (to paraphrase James Agee), when it comes to considering myself a Knoxvillian, I've kept my distance.

I'm hardly alone. Look around my circle of friends and acquaintances and you'll find mostly people like me—folks who live in Knoxville, but wouldn't begin to call themselves Knoxvillians. You know who you are, folks who fell into this town almost by accident (R.B. Morris likes to call this the Bermuda Triangle of the Appalachia, and he's got a point) many drawn by institutions like UT, TVA, HGTV or, while it lasted, Whittle Communications—places that tend to think of themselves as in Knoxville but not of it (an attitude that apparently rubs off). Among the folks I'll have a beer with at the Preservation Pub or Downtown Brewery, honest-to-God Knoxville natives are rare. Sometimes it seems I've gotten to know as many New Yorkers over my years in Knoxville as actual Knoxvillians

One reason may be the fact that I live in the center-city and mostly hang out downtown—both are magnets for us "accidental Knoxvillians," perhaps because they're places a lot of native Knoxvillians seem to have given up on.

And I suspect a lot of us Knoxvillians of the accidental sort don't really mind that. The notion crystallized just this past week in a brainstorming session the Haslam administration set up for folks from assorted neighborhood organizations. One person kept going back again and again to the same theme: re-education to, as she put it, "change the culture," because that's the only way we'll attract "all these expatriates from California or Oregon and places like that." (She is, of course, an expatriate herself—another accidental Knoxvillian.)

It's not that those of us who've come from elsewhere don't appreciate Knoxville. On the contrary, most transplants I know feel they appreciate it more than the natives: Knoxville's history, its natural beauty and its potential. We feel Knoxville's a pretty good place that's on the cusp of being great. Although, if pressed, we'll have a hard time explaining why.

We won't, however, have any problem telling you what, in our opinion, is holding Knoxville back. You've no doubt heard it all before, perhaps in these pages: Knoxville's apathy, its "powers that be" and its hillbilly hard-headedness. As the lady said, we need to "change the culture." We like Knoxville just fine. It's Knoxvillians we have a problem with: conservative in their religion, their politics and their taste in everything from restaurants to the music on the radio. And wearing orange to the office every Friday in the fall, what's up with that? (Knoxvillians go to parties and go on and on about UT football. Accidental Knoxvillians go to parties and go on and on about how Knoxvillians go on and on about UT football.) I'm as guilty as the next fellow. I've done it all: the eye rolling, the snide remarks, the same shopworn comments about the ubiquitous orange.

But I've got to rethink my whole approach. You see, while my wife and I aren't Knoxville natives, our two sons are—born the day after Christmas just a few blocks from where Agee lived and a block or two closer to where Longstreet's Gettysburg veterans stormed a long-vanished dirt fort that lent its name to a hospital and a neighborhood. (Which, sadly, is itself vanishing—yet another house burned the day my sons were born, we saw the smoke on the way to the hospital.)

Maybe that smoke got me to thinking. A few days later, sitting in my study with one of the boys in my lap, I turned to the bookshelf for something to read to him and pulled down the first volume of Jack Neely's Secret History. I read a short passage (by the way, Jack, the stuff holds up well out loud). It was a piece about Frances Hodgson Burnett's years in Knoxville. That definitely got me to thinking, looking forward to one day reading the boys The Secret Garden and explaining that the woman who wrote it lived right here in Knoxville.

The garden may have been here too—maybe someday we'll hunt it out for a field trip. Or walk across the Gay Street Bridge while I tell them about Kid Curry's jailbreak. Or past the Cal Johnson Building on State Street, so I can explain how the man who built it was born a slave but died a millionaire, then maybe a side trip to the Presbyterian Churchyard and the tale of how Adolph Ochs came through here on the way to making the New York Times America's newspaper of record.

Anyway, I made a deal with the boys right then and there. I'll teach them to appreciate Knoxville, if they teach me to appreciate Knoxvillians.