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On Broadway
by Marianne Worthington
“Memory and imagination seem to me the same human property, known by different names.”
—Tony Earley, Somehow Form a Family: Stories That Are Mostly True
My father glides his 1949 navy blue Ford down Cedar Lane. His right hand rests loosely on the big white steering wheel. He is holding a Lucky Strike in his left hand. The cigarette smoke escapes in two thin lines from his nostrils and follows the draft out the open triangular window—a window opened only for smoking. From my seat in the back, I can watch him and my mother in her seat and my little sister in the back with me. Looking out the top of my window I see the dark canopy of cedar trees that line this street. We turn right onto Knox Avenue. We pass the Stop and Shop next to the post office where later this evening my father will stop for a pack of cigarettes while my sister and I count the seconds it takes for him to return to the car. Fourteen seconds is the record so far. We stop at the red light at Knox Avenue and Broadway. I do not look to the left at the old run-down, overgrown Williams mansion. It is too scary; I have been told by older cousins that it is haunted. Instead I look to the right where the windows of Klovia’s dress shop are lighted all the time. The odd, twin black mannequins model the latest in sportswear. Headless, handless, footless, they are scary, too, but not as scary as the big house on the hill. My mother never shops at Klovia’s, but I see her look in the window every time we stop at this red light.
When the light changes we turn right onto Broadway and head toward town. We pass Steven’s Drug Store. We pass the Blue Circle at Highland Drive, the street where my mother grew up. We pass the stone gate opening of Lynnhurst Cemetery where all my relatives are or will be buried. We pass Cas Walker’s grocery store, the green neon shears on his storefront snipping the air, and we emerge on the other side of the underpass. By now, I’m sleepy again and begin to drift. The car is warm. My father is humming. His tune matches the whine of the car tires on the road. I wiggle deeper into my blanket and pillow in my flannel pajamas.
It is any weekday morning around 6:30 a.m., early 1960s, Knoxville, Tennessee. It is not yet good daylight. We are making the journey to the Knoxville Utilities Board’s Fifth Avenue Shop where my father works as an appliance repairman. By the time we turn left onto Grainger Avenue from Broadway, I am fooled awake by the industrial smells of the city. The noxious fumes of Rohm and Haas, of Lay’s Packing Company, of JFG Coffee, combine in an aroma that trick me into thinking we are at my grandmother’s house who lives on North Third Avenue. But we pass her street and head on to my father’s work. We are a one-car family, and if my mother needs transportation that day, then we make this early morning journey. We make the return trip in the afternoon to pick up my father from work. When he gets in the car, he will sigh “whew” and hang his head. He will smell like cigarettes and sweat and machine grease. Other than the industrial smells of Knoxville, it is the best odor in the world.
The smells of rural southeastern Kentucky, where I now live, are not the same as the smells of my childhood spent in Knoxville. My home in Kentucky is only one hour north of Knoxville, but the landscape is different, too, as are the culture, the language, and the community where I make my living as a teacher and writer. The sociologists claim that no greater homesickness occurs than for those people who grew up in Kentucky. Kentuckians, particularly eastern Kentuckians, have the most trouble leaving home and staying away. More people return home to Kentucky than any other state in the nation. I would argue that some of this homesickness affects East Tennesseeans, particularly Knoxvillians, just as strongly.
I didn’t have too much trouble leaving Knoxville for graduate school in the mid 1980s, but I’ve had trouble since staying away.
My parents built the house they still live in before I was born. My mother always wanted to live near Cedar Lane. All of my father’s people lived near downtown or in south Knoxville, but my mother was raised in Fountain City and wanted to live there again with my father. One block from Cedar Lane, they bought a lot on Howard Road, a street with just a few houses in 1953. They had the same next-door neighbor for forty-five years. One of my father’s sisters liked his new house so much, she had one built just like it in South Knoxville, behind Berry’s Funeral Home.
As a child, I knew no other place but Fountain City. We shopped for groceries at the White Store, for shoes at Coffin’s, for Easter dresses at the Children’s Shop on Hotel Avenue. We went to Central Baptist Church of Fountain City. We went to Central High School, first at Gresham, then at Essary Road. We sometimes went to Kay’s Ice Cream Store after school for French fries and Cokes. We played in Fountain City Park where the playground was cut in two by a creek. At the Fountain City Library, I learned to use books. We banked at Fountain City Bank and paid the water bill at the Fountain City Utility office. Our dentist and doctors were in Fountain City, our post office, our Esso station. My father bought nails and tools at Fountain City Hardware, and we all got our hair cut next door at Ray’s Barber Shop. We went to Steven’s Drug Store for prescriptions and sundries. We would go there sometimes for cherry ice cream after church on Wednesday evenings. Occasionally, I could talk my father out of 79 cents to buy the latest Motown release. The music of Marvin Gaye and The Supremes and Stevie Wonder were available on 45s at the drug store.
My father used to put his coat on after supper sometimes and say, “I’m going to Fountain City.” Never any more specific than that. Since there was so much to do in Fountain City, I always begged to go with him. He always answered “No.” This occasional solitary trip into the heart of our community was the only mysterious thing about my father.
My maternal grandmother lived with my mother’s sister and her family on Parkdale Road, just four blocks from our house on Howard Road. She had a 1963 white Chevrolet Nova four-door with blood red interior—even the steering wheel was red. It was a snazzy car for a grandmother. My cousins, sister, and I would pile into her car for some errand to Fountain City.
My grandmother backed out of her driveway by cracking open her door and looking down at the steep driveway. At the bottom of the drive, she slammed her door, looked both ways twice, then gunned her Chevy out onto Parkdale Road. Once the car was in gear again, she shifted her weight, bouncing up once on her seat, adjusted her rearview mirror after checking her lipstick and headed for Cedar Lane. She blew her breath out in a slow whistle driving toward Fountain City.
“I wisht I had a nickel for ever time I’ve driven up Cedar Lane and back.”
“Would we be rich?” I asked.
“Lord, yes.” Always her reply.
I tried to calculate it. We went to church twice on Sundays and once on Wednesday; that’s 30 cents a week and didn’t include any other trips we might make to Fountain City . . . times 52 weeks . . . equals . . . but I never could multiply the double digits in my head. By the time I gave up straining to figure our fortune, we would be rounding the curve at Gentry’s Funeral Home, about to arrive at our destination—usually the White Store to pick up something for supper that evening.
My grandmother never allowed me to prowl in the adjacent White Way alone like my mother did. My mother shopped regularly at the White Store on Broadway, and she often left my sister, Jane, and me in the White Way variety store next door. I headed straight for the rack of coloring books, flash cards, and crayons in the back of the store while Jane preferred the toys. She had both Barbies and Hot Wheels, so had important snooping to conduct within the toy aisles. After my mother was finished at the White Store, she would come and fetch us from the White Way.
“Let’s go, girls,” she’d say, stuffing the long trail of S&H Green Stamps into her pocketbook. When we got home, it was our job to paste the stamps into the booklets. Today, when I tell my daughter about playing in the variety store alone, unsupervised, she looks worried and wonders why we weren’t afraid that someone might snatch us.
A dress shop was located in the odd crook of the building between the White Store and White Way called Christine’s, but we always referred to it as Lottie’s because that was the owner’s name. My grandmother bought some of her church dresses there—dark paisley prints of slick rayon with three-quarter length sleeves. They looked just like the dresses Aunt Bee wore on The Andy Griffith Show. At Christmas time my father would give me a twenty-dollar bill and send me into Christine’s to get Mother a Christmas gift. Under the glass counter were leather gloves, purses, and hats. On shelves behind the counter were stacks of slim boxes that held the most delicate stockings, slips, and nylon panties. I never bought my mother these intimate underclothes, usually settling instead on a clutch purse or a pair of cotton gloves. When it came time for me to be fitted for my first bra, Mother trotted me down to Lottie’s where the women who worked there—all my grandmother’s friends—insisted that I strip from the waist up so that I could be properly measured. I approached womanhood in the little hallway of fitting rooms behind the wall of dresses. I stood naked in front of my grandmother’s friends in that little dress shop in Fountain City.
One spring a year or so before she died, at age 92, I helped my grandmother clean out her dresser drawers. She lifted a white slip from an old box and held it up by the straps.
“I bought this slip at Lottie’s and it never did fit me right. Do you think you could wear it?” she asked.
“Maybe,” I said, “but it looks too big in the bust.” I didn’t want to take it, remembering the awful bra-fitting episode forty years earlier.
“Well, I’ve hardly ever worn it and it’s laid in this box for years. Do you want it?” It was more a command than a question. She tossed it over to me and then the box, its tissue paper yellowed and crisped.
My paternal grandmother’s neighborhood on North Third is different from mine on Howard Road. The houses and trees are older and closer together. Mailboxes are attached to the houses beside front doors, not standing at the ends of driveways like in my neighborhood. There are sidewalks and stone walls and alleys and long, deep porches on the houses. Venerable forsythia and hydrangea bushes burst yellow and blue around the edges of houses in spring. Inside my grandmother’s house the ceilings are high, the rooms are drafty, and the windows are taller than a man. A Hamilton upright piano sits in the foyer, hauled down to Knoxville from my father’s homeplace in Russellville. My grandmother only lives in the front bedroom, living room and kitchen. The other rooms and the entire upstairs are rented out to boarders—mysterious people I never see but sometimes hear when we visit. The one thing I want to do more than anything else is climb the stairs and prowl around in the upstairs rooms. But I am never allowed to do that. Instead, we play outside in the small back yards and on the sidewalks of North Third Avenue.
There is a cobblestone driveway two or three houses down from Grandmother’s house. The driveway inclines straight up from the street then plateaus to reveal an old two-story clapboard house like my grandmother’s, tucked behind boxwoods and maples. The driveway, too, is covered by oaks and maples and willowy vines that make an arbor over the long, steep driveway. Either side of the drive is encased by a concrete wall. When you run up the cobblestones from the street, your feet make a musical sound that echoes off the walls and bounces back from the canopy above. If you make it all the way up the drive without stopping, your footfalls play a scale as you reach the top, do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do. The old couple sitting on their porch look up when you arrive at top of the driveway. He is reading the newspaper and she is breaking beans. They smile, wave to you. They seem happy to hear the welcome played out by little feet on their cobblestones, but they do not invite you onto their porch. This is how you learn the rules of neighborhoods.
The Broadway Exchange of Interstate 40 takes my grandmother’s house and her entire neighborhood in the early 1960s, and she moves into the other house she owns on Edgewood Avenue. Every time I exit I-40 onto Broadway, I think about the constant roar of cars and trucks weighing down the remains of those old houses, her house, her coal bin, her foundation, and the roots of those magnificent trees sacrificed for transportation and commerce. All that is left now is a grainy image in a home movie of my grandmother exiting the front door of her white-planked house on North Third and descending her front steps toward the street.
Knowing there is a wreck on I-75 north of Powell, my father advises me to return home to Kentucky via Norris.
“Just go out Black Oak Ridge,” he says impatiently, “through Halls, turn left like you’re heading for Emory Road and just follow the freeway out to Norris. I can’t believe you’ve forgotten how to get out of Halls.”
Growing up, I probably spent as much time at my cousin’s house in Halls as I did at my own, but it has been ten, fifteen (could it be twenty?) years since I’ve driven Broadway into Halls and beyond to the Norris Freeway. What’s the big deal, I think? Surely I can’t get lost. I’ve been out this road, literally, hundreds of time.
I cut through the back roads of my old neighborhood to get to Hotel Avenue, the same streets my sister and I took every Saturday enroute to a little store on Holbrook. I pass the library and the park and the old store fronts on Hotel. I try to see if the beautiful wooden doors with the long oval glass still grace the shop that used to be Mr. Tallent’s drug store. I turn left onto Broadway, pass Garden Drive and head up the hill toward Halls.
The sign for the Fountain City Ball Park is still there, but the Fountain City Swimming Pool is gone. Gone too is the Black Oak Motel where I swam with friends in the motel pool as a child. Gone: the Ridge Top, the little bar and package store where one of my friends would meet a trashy boyfriend on the sly until her father followed her one night and pulled her out before she got into more trouble. Gone: the Freezo at the bottom of the rise, the only place in Halls where you could get soft-serve ice cream and greasy onion rings and watch fast boys drive around and around in their faster, souped-up Cameros.
Not seeing any landmarks, I’m overwhelmed. Certainly, I’m not on the wrong road, but I begin to doubt myself the way you do when it’s dusk and the twilight starts to blur your edge of vision, but still, you take the road for granted because you’ve driven it all your life, and then suddenly, there’s a stop light you could swear was not there ever before. And there’s so much traffic and so many fast food places. This could be Kingston Pike! And then I see it, and I know that Halls has changed forever: A Wal-Mart Store at the turn-off from the Halls Highway onto the Norris Freeway. I nearly cry, but I don’t dare for fear of the bumper-to-bumper traffic that is snaking out of Fountain City into what used to be the farms and fields of Halls.
Returning to Knoxville for a visit, I am traveling down Broadway toward Fountain City after some errand downtown. I think about turning down Grainger Avenue to see what’s left of the route to my grandmother’s house but keep going, trying to catch as many green lights as I can. Somewhere between Fulton High School and Steven’s Mortuary, a song called “Roy” comes on the radio. It’s a song about a man who claimed to know Don Gibson “before he was a star.” The singer uses my uncle’s whole name in this song; upon hearing this, I nearly run the red light at Home Federal.
How could this songwriter know my uncle—several years dead—who lived in south Knoxville, and this man, Roy, who worked for my uncle?
I am very curious and distracted. In Fountain City I stop and buy the CD, take it to my mother’s house and play the song for her.
“I’ll swear,” she says. “Do you know this fellow that wrote that song?”
I do not.
“Well, Roy did work for your uncle,” she says. “And, you know, once, years ago, I saw Don Gibson at the K-Mart over on Clinton Highway.”
About three years later, I happen to be back in Knoxville to attend a poetry reading at the UT Library. The poet acknowledges several people in the audience, including Knoxville poet/songwriter R. B. Morris. I nearly make a fool of myself straining to see who he is, this man who used my uncle’s name in a song. When the reading is over, I make a straight shot over to him so I can tell him I’m related to one of his songs. People are forming little bunches and lining
up for their turn with him, and I realize that he is well-known and popular in his hometown. But he is gracious and sweet and asks me lots of questions about my family.
Even later, I meet R. B. Morris several times to talk about writing. We discover we grew up on opposite sides of Broadway. We went to rival high schools. We were raised in homes that listened to WIVK radio and watched Cas Walker and J. Basil Mull on the television. His neighbor was Red Rector, consummate mandolinist and straight man in the famed local duo, Red and Fred, seen regularly on the Cas Walker Farm & Home Hour. He tells me he once bought a blue station wagon from somebody who lived on Edgewood Avenue, near my grandmother’s house. I tell him one of my piano teachers lived at the end of Fairmont Boulevard, close to his childhood neighborhood. We have daughters the same age who are not growing up in Knoxville.
We talk about driving our hometown streets as adults. What possesses us? What ghosts are we looking for? What will our memories reveal?
“Song lyrics,” he says.
“Poetry,” I say.
“Same thing,” he says.
Right here it is in front of us, I think. Right here in our hometown. Right here where we’ve lived most of our lives, we find what we need.
November 24, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 48
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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