Nonfiction from Harli James

Photo: Insung Yoon

Here Is an Update on This Town

On an early Sunday evening in Asheville, NC, May 2018, a light mist covers the town square. A man in a pale blue racer jacket sits alone on a park bench and smokes a cigarette. His eyes have a palpating look, inspecting the long lawn for something insidious. Before him stands a tall obelisk in the center of the square, mute but obtrusive. Three years from now the obelisk, named after a NC Governor/US Senator who fought against civil rights and was an enslaver, will be removed. Behind it, the former BB&T building is half remodeled. It stands like an open ribcage, the tallest building in town, competing for a view of the mountains. The man leans over and stubs his cigarette out on the sidewalk, but he doesn’t get up. He holds the butt between his fingers and stares across the luminous green grass as if he’s watching a ghost sitting on the city hall steps holding its head in its hands.

It’s strange how, when a person dies, and then everyone who knew them dies, no one is sad about the original death anymore. Bearing witness to demise is the provoking experience, not the fact of the demise itself. After all, we manage to go about our days with a minimal level of despondency despite being cognizant of our mortality. Facing it in real time, such as watching a loved one pass, is another thing entirely. Death in the present is a monsoon. Death in the past is historical.

Thomas Wolfe was born in this town two years after the obelisk was erected. He was buried in the cemetery down the street from my house thirty-eight years later. At his grave site, visitors keep a cup overflowing with pens and pencils—in memoriam, but not in grief—as if he might rise unseen to ink another tome for the heavens to read.

Currently, over ten million people visit Asheville every year. The constant influx of people seeking novel experiences means that for a little town of ninety-four thousand people, it has the entertainment and recreational resources of a multi-million-person city. This has led to palpable change. Over the last twenty years I have watched the old guards shutter their doors and make room for new ventures, which smack more of chic Atlanta chain stores than our town’s signature hippie-turned-bohemian-bourgeois brand that demands something less polished, a little messy.

Watching this textural shift induces low level panic in the old-timers, a turning in the gut of what is coming. But imagine what the town was in Wolfe’s day—less curated, more functional. Witnessing change can be painful, but living among something that has already evolved is hard to even detect. We are the product of myriad past changes, and it’s this iteration we want to keep. We want to step out of the timeline and freeze our current version as the most authentic. Why? Because this is our present, and our present is our home. Not the future and not the past. As we age, we risk our present getting stuck in our past, and so the old folks contemplate some specific time back in their day, an idealized version of their present.

Why do I tell you about the man in the pale blue racer jacket? Because as he sits there, we are in my favorite version of Asheville. Mist coats the darkening town and buildings sit half-remodeled. Blue-gray clouds are backlit with the sun scurrying down the mountain and out of sight. My children, not yet grown, gobble chocolate nearby. The sidewalks are ambulatory, but not yet teeming. There is pressure in the town, but not spoil. And as I watch the man’s face, I see no expression, and do not know him, and I wonder at the mystery of strangers. I feel potential for something great, even as I see the past clinging to the city streets, gossamer characters retracing old footsteps.

Each spring, the Ginkgo trees outside my office sprout lime green fringes on their branches. By May, each leaf will take the shape of a Japanese folding fan. The trees run the length of the Flatiron Building, a homage to the New York City icon for this little town with a big idea about itself. Maidenhair Tree is the Ginkgo’s informal name. A woman with lemon hair.

In You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe depicts a careening train ride up the mountain to Asheville (called Libya Hill) as his main character returns home for his father’s funeral. The folks on the train are bursting with chatter about real estate speculation, each sharing a story of how they’d made gobs of money buying and selling quickly, even as they were bewildered by their ability to dispose of property they hadn’t taken possession of yet. You can practically hear the train wheels clack and creak, feel the smoke-spattered air coat your lungs, and see the passengers’ eyes wild with greed.

Our protagonist is dubious, even though Wolfe’s own mother was a real estate tycoon and had rented out the rooms of her house when he was a child, booting him from bed to bed depending on the needs of her boarders. In Look Homeward Angel, he lacks that stability of home, and a reader gets the sense that if only poor Tom had known where his head lay each night, he wouldn’t have written such a masterpiece. He says, “There was no place sacred unto themselves, no place fixed for their own inhabitation, no place proof against the invasions of the boarders.” Here is the place that had raised him, provided sustenance, the place from which he’d expounded upon lists of the food his mother prepared for him: stacked batter-cakes, rum-colored molasses, a bowl of wet cherries, fat juicy bacon, jam. Yet he didn’t feel at home. Later, through writing, he set his heart down in a place on the verge of change and shifting property lines. He lit up the town square with a ghost.

Ginkgo trees have a hardiness zone of three to eight, making them viable from Georgia to Maine. Suitable for urban places, they tolerate pollution well. Fossils suggest the species is 270 million years old. Every day from my office window, I study the line of them down the street. Their architectural backdrop is the thin-speckled, granite-wrapped base of the Flatiron Building, buttressing the structure’s creamy limestone slab facade, and rows of windows spaced three feet apart at each level, all the way to the eighth floor. That’s the right height for a building in this town.

And give it an operator-powered elevator. And give it green awnings that tatter in the wind. And give it marble-tiled floors that were also used in this building and that building because there were extra. Six years after the man in the pale blue racer jacket stubs out his cigarette, the Flatiron building is sold to a real estate investment firm who mechanizes the elevator and turns the building into a luxury hotel.

In You Can’t Go Home Again, Wolfe’s character is unsettled by returning home because of the things he’s written about the people who live there. They’ll kill him! Stone him. Run him away. Also, he can’t go home again because he needs to first prove himself worthy with a second book, and so he spends over four years writing it.

Wolfe left home because it was never a good fit for him, too small for his soaring spirit. When he returns, he hardly recognizes it. He describes a place surging with that same youthful angst he embodied when he left—new hotels, speculation, a slipping away of childhood nights sitting on the front porch, inky summer air languishing around him. But like the energy in his first book, which was written as an “act of utterance” and put down in “white hot heat,” he returns to a place boiling with change.

Before college, I moved ten times, from Macon, Georgia, where I was born, all throughout that pot-belly-stove-shaped state, to the Carolinas, back down to Macon for high school and even up to West Virginia, finally settling in Asheville, where I have lived for over twenty years. Yet I admit I don’t quite feel that this is home. Only having left a place, have I looked back and called it such. But when I see that place, it is unchanged in my memory, a particular slice of space and time that I inhabited. That specifically is home. And so, for me, home can only be identified in the past, but paradoxically can only be experienced in the present.

Home is a slippery noodle, a spinal cord of loose string. A name, a briny smell, a sticky air, a collective pain. For me it is embodied in the words of Macon’s poet son, Sidney Lanier: sweet burly-barked, man-bodied tree. Home is architecture and streets and new stores with historical names printed over their transoms. I know that what makes a place are the people who walk the streets—past and present—etching some fissure into the town, whether building or removing an obelisk, the crack of a cornerstone, delicate cups of lettuce leaves reaped from the soil and leaving a nutritive legacy, the crush of a tender yellow leaf on the sole of your boot. So why can’t I accept that I belong here?

Wolfe can’t go home again because when you are expelled from a place, fully formed, there is nothing left to take from it. The pages of his books smell like leather, a library, earth tang, fresh air.

Tom, here’s an update on this town: Rain torrents down and everything is gray. The old BB&T building is wrapped in concrete and glass and is an art-deco inspired hotel and wine cellar. The sidewalks are made of concrete, except in the block by your old home, which is maintained with reverence. Trolleys of bridesmaids whoop and holler, screaming Britney Spears lyrics as I eat my sandwich on a park bench at lunch. The grave of your brother is three down from yours. But you know that.

By October, the Ginkgo leaves are a deep-butter yellow, and when I track them into my office on the bottoms of my shoes, I track in the DNA of last year’s leaves. And of the leaves from all the prior years that are broken down into the silt stuck between the stones in the street, the decision to build up a road here, where once there was a hill, shaped from the age-old movement of the earth that formed the Appalachians, the toil of the men who constructed the road and the buildings, and the words they spoke to each other as they worked. I turn to my co-worker and say, Aren’t the Ginkgos beautiful this time of year?

In Look Homeward Angel, Wolfe leaves his brother as an apparition on the city hall steps, beating his chest for the loss. We close the book, bereft.

Today, I place a pen in the cup at Wolfe’s grave. Tomorrow, I will transport yellow leaves into the office on the soles of my shoes. I will pluck a little fan-shaped leaf from the branch, put it in my mouth, and write my own list of food: little gems, butter leaf, mother tongue, granite slab, home.

Asheville, NC
April 2023
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Harli James is a writer living in Asheville, NC. Her work has appeared in several literary journals, including Jabberwock Review, descant, Permafrost, and The Gateway Review. Her work can also be found on her web site, harlijames.com.