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."