Tennessee Homesick Blues

Kate Barber

            I grew up inside these Smoky Mountains, inside branches tangoing with fog, inside clouds bowing to these hillsides. Grew up straddling creeks in the hush of these trees, listening to frogs and crickets sing, letting campfire smoke stain my hair and lick yellow and pink skies. I grew up only watching sunsets over mountain skylines, grew up sitting on that barstool eating hamburgers with my daddy in the back of Broadwater’s drugstore, grew up with itchy feet, waiting. And soon as we crossed that high school football field under that June sun ten years ago, I went running across those county lines, fled to that private Baptist college I stitched myself into the seams of. Feels like everything was anything happened up here in these Smoky Mountains—

            Grew up just outside them, went to college right in them. I didn’t know Dolly Parton was a singer until I was thirteen, just knew she owned Dollywood and at the end of Thunder Road she said Y’all come back now, ya hear? We always did. Now I’m twenty-eight and feels like I can’t hardly remember a time I didn’t climb inside her records on my daddy’s turntable when I couldn’t climb nowhere else.

            Inside this Smoky Mountain cabin, at the Thanksgiving table: my daddy, his wife, two sisters, a brother-in-law, two stepbrothers, two stepsisters-in-law, one stepsister, one stepbrother-in-law, four step-nieces, two step-nephews, one step-nephew just started growing inside one stepsister-in-law. On the counter in the kitchen—a pie that isn’t Memomma’s, turkey my Uncle George didn’t slice, potato salad that doesn’t taste nothing like my mama’s, sweet tea that hasn’t got enough sugar settling down to the bottom. 

            In another Tennessee town, in a different mountain range, my mama’s sitting down with her friends at a different Thanksgiving table, one that used to be full of her sisters, her brothers, of the family that felt like home. Over the years, we’ve buried them all. When Mama and Daddy first split up, they lived just a few miles apart, still all together for Christmas mornings and graduations and birthdays. Up until now. Now, all the versions of our family there’s ever been are gone. 

            My stepmama asks us to go round the table, say things we’re thankful for, and listen: everybody is thankful for a husband, a wife, a child—a family. Our new family. And me, I say I’m thankful for a desk inside an office on a faculty hallway back in North Carolina. I haven’t got a husband, a child, a family. After I left that sleepy college town, I swore I’d get me a teaching job at that college on the coast in that town I loved so much. Took me years. Cost me more than one man I loved who wanted to marry me, who wanted to keep me here, in Tennessee. Truth is, I’d rather sit alone on the Atlantic Ocean than stuffed inside one of them neighborhoods with brick signs outside the iron gates.

            This new family all smile politely. They nod at me. But when I slip outside after lunch, I imagine what they whisper: Poor thing. She’s almost thirty. A desk in a hallway isn’t nothing compared to a child in the crib.  

            I shut the door separating the kitchen and the back porch. I sink into the porch swing, hit play, listen to Dolly’s voice drape across the mountains—and can you be homesick for a place that’s right in front of you? 

            My daddy comes out, sits down quiet, nobody but us and Dolly out here, the noise and bustle of all of them in there.

            “It’s okay to be alone right now, you know,” he says, and I tell him I know this already. “There’s a man out there for you. God will bring him to you in His own time.” I say nothing. “We’ve been praying,” he tells me.

            But he doesn’t know the stories these mountains know, doesn’t know how these mountains grew me up. All those nights back in college we drove out here, wished on stars, stood in rivers, camped in tents. We wore black and white dresses and three Greek letters inside these same cabins. Still learning what friendship meant, eighteen and drunk on wine coolers in downtown Gatlinburg, henna tattoos on our feet, no rings on our left hands. These mountains taught me things like: I don’t need a church to find God. Things like: God didn’t write that Bible no more than I did, and Paul was just a preacher same as my daddy. Things like: I don’t need a gold wedding band or a womb full of anybody to know who I am. 

            But inside that cabin, they’re bowing heads, reciting prayers learned in Sunday school classrooms; they’re praising a vice president who thinks those whisperings and chants can change somebody’s heart into loving somebody it don’t; and they’re thinking how I’m nothing like them. And I’m thinking about that boy who used to live right here, the one I left in his mama’s driveway, the one I heard had a diamond hidden in his sock drawer. And I’m thinking how if I hadn’t left these mountains, if I stayed right here, all that time, left all those dreams behind, maybe he’d be what I said I was thankful for this Thanksgiving lunch. Maybe that cornbread would taste like his mama’s on weekends we came up from college to Knoxville. Maybe we wouldn’t be here at all; maybe we’d be at that kitchen table on his grandparents’ farm out in Saint Paul. I’m thinking how if I hadn’t left him, maybe I could be part of this new family, this two-by-two family, this something else, this Thanksgiving table my daddy wants me to slide up to. Measure up to. 

            I’m thinking how those Atlantic waves can almost kiss that Cape Fear River back in North Carolina, and I’m remembering all the days my bones ached for these bare trees against this sky instead. I’m thinking how maybe if I’d never left these mountains in the first place, maybe I’d fit inside them now, and I know no matter how many times I had to make those choices, I’d leave over and over and over again.

            — and can you be homesick for a life you never had?