Metro Pulse/Midpoint

Comment
on this story

The geography of the heart

by Stephanie Piper

Two years before I moved to Knoxville, I played Mary Follett in a Chicago production of All the Way Home. It’s sometimes called the Knoxville play, because it takes place here and is based on James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family.

Our dialogue coach was a transplant from East Tennessee. She taught us how to pronounce LaFollette and how to raise the inflection at the end of a sentence, turning a statement into a sort of question. And then, putting accents aside, she told us to stop acting like this family lived in the Midwest, or the northeast, or some unspecified location. It may be a play about universal truths, she said. But these people lived in Knoxville, and that means something.

Growing up in New York, my knowledge of Tennessee was limited to Davy Crockett. My brother had the cap and sang the song. “Greatest state in the land of the free,” he would croon softly as we drove along the Saw Mill River Parkway in Westchester County. Images of cabins and misty mountains flickered in my mind’s eye. I had never been South. I never planned to go.

Then I went to college in Virginia, and I met a boy from Memphis, and my journey towards Knoxville began. It took a long time, with intermediate stops in Connecticut and Manhattan and Chicago. I made homes in the other places, dug gardens, put down tentative roots. But a United Van Lines truck seemed always to hover on the horizon. We were on our way somewhere, birds of passage.

I have lived in Knoxville now for 20 years, the longest I have lived anywhere. I have owned two houses and raised three sons and had the best job and the worst job of my life in this town. I have been wealthy. I have been broke. I have been a suburban tennis-playing matron, and I have been unemployed, invisible and desperate.

I have made a handful of good friends and a few enemies. I have learned to fish, to shoot a rifle, and to stay afloat in level four rapids. I have learned to say “torn up” instead of “broken.” And I have learned what it means to be the stranger.

I came here unwillingly, suffered, made peace, made progress. I hated it. I liked it. I was neutral about it. Offered a chance to leave, I stayed.

It’s easy here. The winters are mild, the autumn lingers, the spring is extravagant. The mountains loom comfortably near. It’s easy to drive to the white-water rivers, easy to find a forest path. People wave. People smile. People say come-back-and-see-us.

It’s easy to dance on the top layer here, to skim lightly over the surface of things. No native would call me an outsider to my face, or tell me the truth, which is that 20 years is about the same as 20 minutes. No native here knew my mother or father; no grandparent of mine farmed land around Dandridge or Whittle Springs. My people took boats from Cork and Cherbourg and landed in New York and stayed. Their descendants are still there. When they think about me, they wonder if I’m gone for good.

I live in Knoxville now, and it means something. I have learned to survive and sometimes to flourish in a place I never planned to be. In the longest chapter of my life, I have learned to live as a stranger, a bird of passage. It is a flight I can neither forget nor regret.

Once, leaving for summer camp, I wept as I said goodbye to my grandmother. She handed me a lace handkerchief and fixed me with her steady, blue-eyed gaze. “If you never leave,” she said, “you never come back home.”