Pubdate: Mon, 01 Dec 2003
Source: Daily Times, The (TN)
Copyright: 2003 Horvitz Newspapers
Contact:  http://www.thedailytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1455
Author: Steve Wildsmith, Of The Daily Times Staff
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

ADDICTION A LIFETIME BATTLE

EDITOR'S NOTE: James S. is a recovering addict and a lifelong member of the 
Hall Community. As is custom in the recovery program to which he belongs, 
he identifies himself by first name and last initial only. This is his story.

"Now the sweet bells of mercy drift through the evening trees / young men 
on the corner like scattered leaves / the boarded-up windows, the empty 
streets / now my brother's down on his knees ?"

- -- Bruce Springsteen, "My City of Ruins"

With his mind's eye, James S. can see the Hall Community of his childhood, 
unmarked by urban decay and the infection of drugs.

A big, burly man who works today for the Knoxville Trolley Co., he smiles 
wistfully at those memories. He closes his eyes, and the sights and sounds 
of 40 years ago come rushing back.

He remembers the sense of community that held sway, with children always 
respectful of their elders and discipline handed down at school, in church 
and at home. He remembers the old Commercial Building, at the corner of 
Hall Road and Howe Street, where a vibrant economic center offered a barber 
shop, a meat market, a grocery store, a beauty salon, a library and more.

He remembers the shouts of encouragement as he and his teammates took part 
in Little League at the old Hall Baseball Park, where the Martin Luther 
King Center stands today. He smiles fondly at the sound of children singing 
on their way back from the Duck Pond, hands clutching stringers of fish.

He sighs contentedly at the memory of Sunday dinners after church, gathered 
around a table at his childhood home on Bell Street with 11 brothers and 
sisters. He remembers school, rattling off the names of his teachers from 
Charles M. Hall High School, where he attended grades one through six, with 
ease.

Later on, those memories grow dark, clouded by the cynicism of age and the 
loss of a boy's innocence. He remembers block parties and fistfights, the 
haunted looks of the veterans back from Vietnam. Later still, those 
memories blur in a haze of cocaine, lost jobs, shady dealings and the sound 
of gunfire.

Today, after almost 12 years of abstinence from alcohol and drugs, James S. 
is again one of the stalwarts of the Hall Community. He's seen it prosper 
and decline, and his life echoes the history of that community. Since 
finding recovery and changing his own life, he's waiting patiently for the 
community to catch up, hoping that, one day, the Hall Community will find 
its way again, as he has.

A simpler time

Throughout James S.'s childhood, the Hall Community was an all-black 
neighborhood. Segregation held sway until 1967, but his father used to tell 
of a time when the neighborhood was predominantly white.

"When my parents moved down in the late '30s or early '40s, it was 
predominantly white, because it was built for the employees of ALCOA," 
James said. "As the people from the aluminum company migrated, the blacks 
came from Alabama and Georgia to work there. My parents came from Murphy, 
N.C., and Bryson City, N.C. At first, my dad worked for TVA as a cook in 
the '30s, and then they moved to Alcoa where daddy got on at the aluminum 
company, and we've lived there ever since."

Home was a house on Bell Street, and James was the youngest of 12 children. 
His mother, Pauline, did domestic work for whites in Knoxville, while his 
father, Clarence, toiled at ALCOA. It wasn't an upbringing marked by riches 
and worldly goods, but it was a happy one.

"We had a large family, but I tell you what, I don't ever remember one day 
being hungry," he said. "My daddy was the greatest provider in the world, 
and that carries over now, because my children are never hungry. I remember 
those sacrifices my dad made. He didn't buy the new shiny car because he 
had to take care of his children.

"My dad, if I could be half the man he was, I would really be something. He 
was strong, he worked all the time at ALCOA, in the hot rooms, at the North 
Plant and the West Plant. He worked a lot of overtime to provide for us. We 
didn't have a lot of stuff, but we had everything we needed down there. 
I'll always love and respect my dad for that."

More than anything, he said, the children of the Hall Community were 
respectful back then. The community was like an extended family, and 
everyone made sure the kids knew the meaning of discipline.

"Discipline was handed down by parents, teachers, the Sunday school 
teachers, the next-door neighbors, everybody in the community," he said. 
"We as kids showed a lot of respect to our elders, unlike today. Kids would 
be out playing and see somebody, and we would be, 'Hello, Mrs. So-and-so,' 
or 'Hello, Mr. So-and-so.' You always spoke to people.

"These kids nowadays, you go by them and they just kind of look at you. And 
that's a lack of discipline and a lack of respect that wasn't taught to 
them like it was taught to me growing up. Kids see me today, and I'm 48 
years old, but they see me today and they look at me as one of the boys 
instead of a grown-up, and that's because they haven't been taught the 
manners we were taught growing up."

School played a big part in life lessons as well as educational ones. James 
remembers each of his teachers through sixth grade at Charles M. Hall High 
School, and today, their lessons still influence him. It was a simpler 
time, and the complications of political correctness and separation of 
church and state have eroded some of that discipline, he believes.

"We were taught the basics -- reading, writing and arithmetic -- but the 
first thing we did every day was pray and said the Pledge of Allegiance," 
he said. "I think that's a big downfall nowadays, not having a prayer, and 
now they're taking the pledge out of schools. And the teachers back then, 
they were just unreal. I thought they were larger than life, because they 
really cared about you.

"They didn't care about the numbers or however many students were in the 
class, they cared about you, and that's what I lost along the way as I got 
older and going to junior high and not personally knowing the teachers as I 
knew them in elementary school."

He smiles fondly as he names them -- Mrs. Dorothy Dean, his second-grade 
teacher ? Mrs. McNeal, who taught third grade and lived several houses down 
the street ? Mrs. Thelma Brown, who still lives in the Hall Community today 
? and Mrs. Mary Reese, his first- and fifth-grade teacher who lived two 
blocks from him and whose husband worked at ALCOA with his father.

"Mrs. Reese was really instrumental in my life, because she was a 
disciplinarian, but she was also the sweetest woman I ever knew in my life 
next to my momma," he said. "She hugged us when we did good and spanked our 
butts when we did bad.

"I can remember getting a spanking in school, and she would pick up the 
phone and call home, so I had another one waiting on me when I got home. So 
early on, we learned a lot of discipline. I think I was a fairly 
disciplined child.

"The first day we went to school, my parents always told us, 'You know who 
you are, and you know what we expect of you, and you know how we raised 
you,"' he added. "You can ask anybody in the community about my family. 
We're very well-respected in the community, and I owe all of that to my 
parents and to my teachers."

Inevitable change

More than anything, perhaps the biggest difference between then and now, 
James said, is that the neighborhood was safe when he was growing up. He 
remembers sleeping outside on the front porch with his brothers and 
sisters, the doors to the house unlocked, the only mischief going on that 
carried out by young boys who stole nothing more than fruit off the 
neighbor's trees.

"You could go out anywhere in the neighborhood, but even then, our parents 
wouldn't let us out too late," he said. "We used to rob apple trees or plum 
trees, but you didn't have to worry about nobody shooting at you, because 
everybody knew everybody.

"Those adults knew who was in their trees. Every now and then a woman would 
come out and throw water at you, but it wasn't scalding hot. Nobody had the 
intention of hurting nobody. It was so safe, and so much like home."

During the day, the old Commercial Building at the corner of Hall Road and 
Howe Street was the center of the community. With the exception of the 
grocery store, all of the businesses there were black-owned. A library 
functioned downstairs, and along the storefronts, boys and girls bought 
pieces of candy. Downstairs was a poolroom, where the men hung out and boys 
were forbidden.

In the evenings, the boys played sandlot football and basketball, and, 
during the summer, Little League baseball at the Hall Baseball Park. It was 
quintessentially American, by any racial standard.

"It was booming, man!" James said. "We could go down and get candy, and a 
lady down the street would sell candy and cookies and soda. There were 
restaurants, a beauty salon, a barber shop, a meat market, and of course, 
the poolroom, where the older men would hang out and shoot pool, and I 
guess they drank and gambled.

"I didn't know anything about it until I turned 18, because I couldn't go 
down there. I know my dad never set foot in there. He was just that kind of 
man. He never thought he was better than or less than anybody; it just 
wasn't his cup of tea."

Despite the insular comfort of the neighborhood at the time, the outside 
world had a way of rearing its ugly head. Whites and blacks mostly kept to 
themselves, but every so often, when a black man chose to date a white 
woman, tensions ran high.

James can remember the Ku Klux Klan driving through the neighborhood, guns 
and rifles hanging out of the windows, shouting obscenities. Occasionally, 
a cross would be burned in someone's yard. Outside of the Hall Community, 
blacks had to use water fountains and rest rooms marked "colored." And he 
still remembers, with vivid pain, the first time he heard the word "nigger."

"One day myself and about three, four or five of my friends were coming 
back from the Duck Pond fishing," he said. "It was right about dusk, but it 
wasn't dark yet. I must've been 10 or 11, maybe 12, and we were all walking 
with these stringers of fish. We were coming back and singing, and this guy 
and his wife rode down past us, and we were just singing a song.

"And this guy thought we were saying something to his wife. He was white, 
of course, and he slammed on the brakes and threw it in reverse and backed 
up and pointed a gun at us and said, 'Now you laugh, you little niggers.' 
I'll never forget that. He pointed a gun at us, and we were just singing! 
We were just minding our own business coming back from the Duck Pond, fishing."

In 1967, James's life took another confusing turn. Integration took place, 
and his days at Charles M. Hall High School came to an end. With his 
brothers and sisters, he was bused to Alcoa High. Adulthood was just around 
the corner, and while the rumblings of the Civil Rights Movement and the 
Vietnam War had yet to trickle down to the sleepy Hall Community, they were 
on the horizon.

Prodigal son

James graduated from Alcoa in 1973, and that fall, he went away to East 
Tennessee State University. He didn't enjoy it, however, and a year later 
he returned to the Hall Community.

"I think my parents wanted me to go so I wouldn't get drafted, but I didn't 
like it," he said. "I wanted to work, so I quit school and started working, 
and my first real job was at Shoney's on Alcoa Highway."

Finding his way in the world, James began to experience the frustration of 
being a young black man in the early 1970s. He saw the veterans returning 
from Vietnam, haunted by the war and wanting only to forget it. The 
community had slowly begun to change, and while the signs weren't obvious, 
they were palpable to a young man who had spent his life there.

"Being a black male in Blount County, in East Tennessee, it was rough, 
simply because I felt like we were treated as less than," he said. "Sure, 
we got jobs, but we didn't get the best jobs. That didn't have anything to 
do with the way I treated people, because never once did I do anything to 
retaliate against the way somebody was treating me, because I just wasn't 
taught like that. It was more or less turn the other cheek.

"During that time, things started changing and people started changing. 
Society started changing. It was like a poison came over everything and 
everybody. I really feel like the Vietnam War added a lot to that. We had a 
lot of guys leave our neighborhood, go to Vietnam and come back messed up. 
A lot of guys came out of Vietnam and brought a lot of chaos back in, 
because that war really screwed a lot of people up."

As a young adult, the temptations he never saw as a child were suddenly 
readily available. He remembers seeing veterans from the war smoking 
marijuana in 1968, and the whispers of liquor houses and bootleggers as a 
child, but it wasn't until early adulthood that he explored it personally.

"I was in my 20s, but I was part of the in crowd then, and we were still 
safe," he said. "You could have house parties, and there were no shootings. 
Every now and then a fistfight would break out, because not everybody is 
going to get along. But by the mid-1970s, I saw things changing. People 
were getting a little more violent, and I could see it more because I was 
right there with them."

Marijuana was available, if you knew who sold it back then, James said. 
Most of the dealers who sold it were from Knoxville, or lived in the Hall 
Community and bought in bulk to deal to friends and neighbors. The drug 
scene was discreet, he added, and everyone involved was more concerned with 
keeping it clandestine than in flashing money or gold.

In 1977, his father, Clarence, died from a brain tumor. Devastated, James 
searched for his calling in life before joining the Air Force two years 
later. Shipped to San Antonio to Biloxi, Miss., to his first duty 
assignment in Japan, it would be six years before he returned home.

When he did, in 1985, the neighborhood had grown stagnant. If any change 
had come, it hadn't been beneficial.

"Basically, not much had changed, because when I came back, the same people 
were standing in the same spots they were in when I left," he said.

Down in the lowlands

James had seen the world, but his friends had seen little of it. By that 
time, he said, cocaine had come to the Hall Community, and it wasn't long 
after getting out that he first tried the drug.

"I had friends who would come to Knoxville, buy the powder form of cocaine, 
take it and cook it up and smoke it," he said. "At that time I was a big 
pot user, so I would snort it. I was afraid to smoke it. When I got back 
was when the cocaine epidemic really hit the neighborhood, I think. You 
could usually find powder cocaine real easy back then. You knew who was 
dealing it, but everything was still kind of undercover.

"The places where you used, there weren't any crack houses. You'd be at 
somebody's house who worked every day, and at first it was all 
recreational. You've got somebody who might live in an $80,000 or $90,000 
home, and you'd be sitting at the kitchen table, smoking cocaine."

At the time, he found work with a natural gas company in Maryville, and in 
1987, he got married. With a 6-year-old stepson and a newborn baby, his 
wife caught on to his new habit.

"She noticed all the money started missing, and I'd stay out two or three 
days at a time, gone, just missing," he said. "My family eventually found 
out, but even when they would ask, of course I would deny it. As for the 
rest of the community ? I never was out in the open, but the minute you 
think nobody sees you, everybody sees you. I can't account for who all saw 
me when I was in my shady dealings.

"I can remember, because my family was so well known in the neighborhood, 
that I could go to houses and borrow money. Of course, I would concoct 
these big stories about this happening or that happening, and people would 
loan me $40 or $50 -- never more than $100 -- and for whatever reason I 
would pay them back, but I would always go buy drugs with it. Then it got 
to a point where I started knocking on people's doors at 2 or 3 a.m., and 
that's when my disease was progressing. And people knew."

His mother died in 1991, and the loss pushed him deeper into his addiction. 
It cost him his job, and eventually he moved with his family to Parkside, 
the low-income apartments behind Midland Shopping Center. But he never 
really left the Hall Community. His using buddies and dealers still lived 
there, and he still bought and used drugs there.

It was in the Hall Community, in fact, where he got high for the last time 
in 1992. It's a day he still remembers well.

"I'd been out about three days, I guess," he said. "It was a Sunday 
morning, and I still remember the house I left out of in the neighborhood. 
I left out about 7 or 8 a.m., and I was low, boy. I was contemplating 
suicide, and this old man pulled up. He knew me and my family, and he said, 
'Son, where you going this morning?'

"The only thing I could tell him was I had a friend who was sick in the 
hospital, and I needed to go see my friend. He took me straight up there, 
and I went in to the ER and said, 'Ma'am, I'm on drugs, I've been 
free-basing cocaine, and if you don't get me into treatment, I'm going to 
kill myself."

He'd already gone to treatment once before, sent by his employers. Even 
then, he said, he wasn't ready to stop getting high. This time, he pleaded 
to be allowed back in, even though he had no job, no insurance and no money.

"It was just a miracle that they let me in, but that's how God works in my 
life," he said. "I had nothing to do with it except having the willingness 
to surrender. They remembered me from before, when I was first in there and 
how I was shucking and jiving, but this time they saw someone who was beat 
down.

"I got in there, and I finally got real. I quit shucking and jiving and got 
down on my knees and got in touch with the spiritual part of my life. I got 
out, went to a halfway house and started working, and I'm still here now -- 
but it didn't come easy."

Back home

After getting out of the halfway house, he returned to his home at 
Parkside. Shortly thereafter, he and his wife moved -- but not back to the 
Hall Community. Instead, they rented a house in Maryville, where they lived 
for seven years. But with brothers and sisters scattered throughout the 13 
Streets where he grew up, he saw its regression from afar.

Before he got clean, the old Commercial Building was torn down, a blow to 
the community even though, in its final years, James admits it had become a 
gathering place for shady characters and dealings. Shortly after he got 
clean, cocaine arrived in a viscous new form: Crack, which swept the small 
community just as it had bigger cities.

"Probably six or eight, maybe even 10, years ago, that's when people 
started just gathering out and selling drugs openly, like they didn't care. 
That's when it really got ugly," he said. "The more people that went to 
jail, the more dope was sold, and you had people telling on each other and 
turning each other in.

"I'd never dream of standing out in the middle of the blamed street 
drinking a beer. I thought that was the worst thing you could ever do, and 
now you see these kids standing around drinking a beer, and if the police 
come, they just put it down the front of their pants or whatever.

"Gosh, the respect is just gone. The new fads today -- the gold teeth, the 
hairdos, the pants hanging down, that is so ? ugly. So unethical. It's just 
a different generation, a generation of kids that weren't raised like my 
generation," he added. "I guess I first saw it about eight or 10 years ago 
- -- I'd see the kids, and they were disrespectful. They'd be standing right 
out in the middle of the street and toke on a joint. We wouldn't dream of 
doing that! Everything we did was undercover, and that's what I thought the 
drug scene was supposed to be, under wraps."

Those children, he said, were the sons of classmates and friends he'd grown 
up with in the Hall Community. He doesn't fault their parents -- he knows 
from painful personal experience that all the parenting in the world 
sometimes can't stand up to the pressures of society and the lure of easy 
money. He knows because the stepson he helped raise was killed over drugs, 
shot in a Kroger parking lot off Northshore Drive earlier this year.

"I know my stepson, before he got killed, was caught right up in it," he 
said. "That hurt us so bad, because my wife and I loved him so much. I 
loved him just like he was mine. He was 6 years old when I came into his 
life. I raised that boy, and I know I raised him better than that. But he 
just got caught up.

"These dealers, they don't care. It's all about the dollar. Money is power, 
and I've seen guys run at these cars like dogs, chasing these cars down 
because want they want to sell the dope."

In 1999, James and his wife agonized over a decision that would separate 
them for a month at the time: Moving back to the Hall Community. His wife 
wanted to move into her mother's home; James wanted to avoid the chaos that 
ran the streets there unchecked. With seven years clean and hard work spent 
in a 12-step recovery program, it was difficult deciding to go back to the 
very place where his addiction was born.

Eventually, the two reconciled and moved. What he found was that the Hall 
Community's deterioration had slowed, but it hadn't stopped.

Troubled Times

The first time James realized that the Hall Community of his childhood was 
completely gone, he was awakened in the middle of the night by gunfire.

"You don't hear it so much now like you did, but there two or three years 
ago, we'd hear gunshots every night," he said. "Most of the time, it was 
just somebody playing with a gun, over in the Howe Street Park. The Blount 
County Sheriff's Office, those guys are great. They clean that mess out 
from that park at a certain time.

"But the first time I remember it, we were in the house asleep. I don't 
know who the guy was living next door to me -- there's been two or three 
people there since then -- but evidently he double-crossed somebody, and he 
was in the house, when all of the sudden early one morning or late one 
night, you heard Blam! Blam! Blam!

"They stood right point-blank at his picture window and shot into his 
house, and it was right next door to me," he added. "I don't know if they 
were shooting to kill or shooting to scare, but you could tell it was a 
9mm. They must've ripped off five, six or eight shots, I don't know. I 
didn't see anything, because the first thing I did was check on my wife and 
kids, then the next thing I did was call 911."

The random gunshots have dwindled in number, but the open dealing is still 
prevalent, he said. Traffic throughout the neighborhood keeps him up at 
night sometimes, and even though he and his family are recognized in the 
community, he worries for the safety of his 15-year-old daughter and 
10-year-old son -- because not everyone riding the 13 Streets looking for 
drugs lives there.

"I feel safe because I'm in my home, but I wouldn't feel safe outside my 
home, if I wasn't who I am," he said. "They know me, but you don't know 
who's going to try and rip who off, or who's going to get really high or 
drunk and just start shooting. You don't know who's going to be riding 
through and doesn't know my family."

The police do what they can, he said, and occasionally go overboard.

"Anybody that's basically not black is stopped by the law, and I guess 
that's good in a way, but one day they stopped one of my wife's friends, 
and that wasn't OK. I wasn't OK with that," he said. "I know they have 
surveillance equipment, and I know there's probably equipment set up in the 
neighborhood -- if there isn't, there should be. They ought to know who's 
dealing.

"I've got white friends, and I wouldn't want any of you all to come to my 
house, because I wouldn't want you to get stopped. Because if you do come 
over, after dark, especially on a Friday or Saturday night, you're going to 
get stopped. There's a 99.9 percent chance you're going to get stopped."

Living by Example

Fixing a drug addict isn't easy, but there are simple, clearly defined 
steps an addict can take to get better. Fixing an entire community is much 
more complicated. James doesn't have clear-cut answers as to what must be 
done, but he has his opinions.

"No. 1, folks need someplace to identify with," he said. "When they tore 
down the Commercial Building, that took a lot away from that community. Any 
city you go to where there are a lot of black people, we have to have some 
place to identify, a hangout. We have to have something to do, and that's 
what's going on right now in the community.

"All that's been taken away, so all the kids hang out on these corners and 
do their thing, or hang out in the Howe Street Park, or at the corner of 
Howe Street and Kevin Road. The young adults and older adults don't have 
anyplace to identify with in the community, and I think that's where a lot 
of your drugs are coming in. If you don't have anything to do, what is 
there left to do?"

More community businesses are needed, he said.

"Put in a grocery store, or a drug store," he said. "I don't care if you 
put another pool room in up there. Put a little tavern up there, and if 
they want to drink beer, let them do it! Not many black people from the 
Hall Community are gonna go over to Par-T-Pub or Lowell's Place.

"At that rate, people may have a chip on their shoulder because they don't 
have anyplace to identify with. We don't have anyplace to go and relax, and 
I think that's where a lot of drug activity comes from, because folks don't 
have anything to do."

The churches have been active in the neighborhood, but for the residents 
who don't embrace religion, there's little other social outlet in the Hall 
Community. Over the years, he's seen congregations march the streets, 
proclaiming to take back the community, but in the end, the drug dealers 
simply wait until the coast is clear.

"They don't care," he said. "They won't deal no drugs right there and then, 
but as soon as they leave, they will. Because the supply will always be 
there, and until we get better education and rehabilitation of drug 
addicts, the demand is always going to be there.

"You take the demand away, the supply will dwindle. But as long as there's 
demand, the epidemic is going to always be there. You could bust everybody 
in the world over there, and there would still be one person who would come 
up selling dope."

Ultimately, he said, the Hall Community isn't a bad place to live, and he 
has hope for the future. He's not a crusader, nor does he want to be, but 
he hopes that, like his father, he might can make a difference by the way 
he lives his own life.

"I can't go out on no streets crusading, telling these guys don't do this 
or don't do that," he said. "They're not going to listen, because I didn't 
want to hear it when I was their age. The way I live today, the way I 
present myself today, is the difference I can make in that situation.

"They see me every day going to work. They see me every day coming home to 
my wife and children, going to church, out with my son out throwing a 
football or coaching basketball or umpiring baseball. I pray and try to 
practice acceptance, and in the end, I just try to be an upstanding member 
of society today. Everywhere I go, I try to live by example."
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager