By ADD SEYMOUR JR.
I think it was a dark Camaro.
All I remember is it probably was the perfect single guy’s
car in the early 1970s. Small, with not
much of a backseat, even for a car during that era of small cars that were
actually massive. I often sat in that
hard middle area that wasn’t really a seat in back. But I do remember the “Let’s Do More in ‘74”
sticker that was on the back of the car.
Horton drove it. He
lived in the upstairs apartment of my grandparents’ home at 1615 Fifth Avenue
North in north Nashville back then. I couldn’t tell you too much about him,
only that he was dark skinned, had a beard, kinda thickly built, but also a
really friendly guy.
My mom, my two brothers and me lived just a few miles away
on the other side of the river in James A. Cayce Homes, a large housing project
in East Nashville that still stands today.
When mama didn’t own a car, but we were planning on spending our usual
Sunday afternoons at Granny and Granddady’s house, she’d hail a cab – or we’d
jump on the city bus and have a pleasant walk through the neighborhood – to their
house.
We’d spend the day playing in the school yard across the
street, meeting up with some friends in the neighborhood, or just sitting on that
swing that gave us hours of quiet contentment on that peaceful porch.
And then around five or six, Horton’s car would magically
appear on the street, just beyond the tall, manicured hedges that surrounded
the house. And he’d happily give all four of us a ride home in that little car
back to the projects.
All of those simple memories flooded my mind when I drove
over to 1615 Fifth Avenue North on a May day in 2018, more than 45 years later.
Can’t tell you what ever happened to Horton. He eventually moved out. At one point, we
moved into his old apartment upstairs and then to small house in the lower-middle
class suburbs.
But that house in north Nashville always was special.
It was where my cousins, aunts and uncles from Indianapolis flocked
to a couple a times a year during the summer months, flooding that house with
young energy, loud laughing, lots of stories and plenty of playing pretty much
one song on our grandparents’ piano in what were like mini family reunions.
Yet as life does, things evolve and they change.
That house, with those thick manicured hedges eventually was
sold after my grandmother passed and my grandfather moved to a house closer to other
family members.
Over the years when I’ve visited to Nashville, I’ve gone
over to 1615 Fifth Avenue North. I went
by there today.
The hedges are gone. The
porch swing is only a memory to us who rested in it. The house has been remodeled. The occupants, well, they don’t look anything
like Horton or the rest of us.
In fact, the Salemtown neighborhood, which had been full of
older, hard-working, blue-collar black families, has been remodeled. It’s now full of young, upwardly mobile,
white people who didn’t know the area existed during the time I was growing
up. Maybe they did and since it was a
mostly black neighborhood in north Nashville, probably thought it was someplace
they shouldn’t be day or night just because it was in north Nashville and off
the city’s most historic and beloved black artery, Jefferson Street. But the only unlawful stuff you’d see in that
area were a few prostitutes like Big Mama, who everyone knew and waved at. She’d wave back as she quietly stood near the
old car battery shop, drinking a beer out of a brown paper bag.
But now the neighborhood is full of new condos, new
apartment buildings, latte-walking yuppies who look like they’ve discovered the
holy grail of living. I wonder if they
even think about what the neighborhood’s history is.
Do they even care?
Or maybe they think they’ve come and saved what they were
told was a decaying, crime-filled haven of old houses and limited dreams.
Standing outside of 1615 Fifth Avenue North in front of the old
Fehr School, down the street from old Morgan Park Community Center, I doubt if
any of them care.
That hurts. Your
roots are trampled and turned into history the current storytellers could care
less about telling or even knowing about.
As if it didn’t matter.
For us who came before them, it hurts. And its a damn shame.
