Tennessee

Patrice Suncircle

I loved Rohn because she was neither a woman nor a man.

She wasn’t black, but she wasn’t white either. She wasn’t crazy, and she was not sane. She was pretty and she liked to fuck. I was fifteen and that was ideal.

I first met Rohn in the summer down south. The weather was hot, and the air was close and heavy with dry grass and small dead rotting animals. Snakes slid out of their skins.

Before I met her I had seen her up at Bell Eagle Esso, the little grocery and filling station that our landlord owned. Sometimes she was with her mother, a thin, pale woman who wore big hats to keep the sun off her face, and who, whenever she spoke, mumbled. I did hear her speak once, and she sounded funny. My grandfather said that she was a foreigner. She usually had Rohn by the arm. Or Rohn was with her older brother, the one most like the mother. People always looked at them funny.

The day I met her, she was astride a big roan mare.

She had a black cowboy hat on, pulled low so that it shadowed her eyes. Her thick red hair fell down onto her shoulders.

We were in the middle of a pasture. Over by a pond some cows stood still as if they’d been painted there. I was walking home from a neighbor’s house, where I’d gone after school.

I kind of stepped backward because the horse was so big.

She grinned, flashing her dark face under the hat’s shadow.

“How you t’day?” Her drawl was soft and gentle. It wasn’t high-pitched and evil like a peckerwood’s, so it didn’t scare me.

I said, “I’m all right.”

She pushed her hat back and I saw that her eyes were green in gray. Her brows arched with the grace of a bow. I think my heart did something.

“You wanna ride home?” She told me later I had a kind of half smile on my lips to make her wonder.

I climbed up and she pulled me the rest of the way onto the horse. From up there I could see the tin roof of my folks’ house. Smoke was coming from the chimney, going straight up. Grandma was starting supper.

I wedged into the saddle between her thighs. Her arms encircled me, and she rested her hand holding the bridle on the horn between my legs. Her breasts were small and firm and pressed against my back. I was too shy to move.

She asked me what grade I was in, and did I like going to school in town, and she bet I didn’t like arithmetic. I thought, at the time, that she was a senior in high school or maybe already in college. We rocked in time to the horse’s movements. I felt her arms tightening about me and the horse walking slower.

“You got a boyfriend?” she asked me, and I said no.

“You want to go for a ride?” she asked, and I said yes.

I knew I would get scolded, but I could no more have refused than turn down strawberries and ice cream. We turned away from the sight of my house. The cows came back into view. A big orange and black butterfly hung in the air. The sky was clear.

“Hold on,” she said. When the horse sailed over the fence, I thought my heart would shoot out of my mouth. My terror evaporated in her laughter, and then her low chuckle brought another feeling altogether. She was holding me so tight still.

Rohn loosened the rein some more. She put her face down next to my cheek. I heard her breathing and felt her long fingers moving on my body, as if they were gently searching for something just under my clothes. I stopped breathing for a minute. She smelled of Ivory soap and the heat of the day. Once, her hat brim brushed my face; it felt soft as cotton.

“Can I touch your breast?” she whispered.

I managed to say yes.

With just two fingers and a thumb she rubbed softly in circles. Around and around through my blouse, from the fullness of my breast to its tip. She did it softly, and once she squeezed the nipple a little. Her hand held the reins on my bare thigh where my skirt had come up.

She put her whole hand over my breast and kneaded it. I noticed the wetness between my legs. I tried to open them wider, and they pressed against her. She kissed my cheek. The dampness her lips left there cooled in the air.

She kept squeezing and playing with my tit, and I think I moaned or gasped or something because she kissed me again. I turned my face toward her. She took off her hat and gave it to me to hold.

She unbuttoned one button of my blouse and slipped her hand inside. It was warm, dry, and smooth. Her hair fell against my face, and it felt like the silk scarf my aunt had sent my grandma from New York.

She held my tit hard and then she pinched the nipple a little. The small pain heated my whole front. Her mouth was on mine, and I thought I would die. It was warm and wet and I thought I would starve before I moved away. I opened my mouth and she pushed her tongue in. She licked the inside of my mouth, inside my jaws, the roof of my mouth. I took her tongue and sucked it.

Her hand, pressing my breast, pinched the nipple more, and each burst of pain filled me enough to almost lift me. And she was kissing me harder and spit was all down on my chin.

She pulled away suddenly, breathing hard, and I came awake. Her gray-green eyes were soft and heavy, but they started to clear until they had the depth and transparency of a cat’s eyes. I tried to smile, but she had looked away. One of the cows lowed, a long, deep chest sound. I heard birds that had been there all along. She took her hat and put it back on, pushed up this time.

“I’ma take you home. All right?”

I didn’t say anything. It was hot. My blouse was damp from sweat, and there was moisture on the back of my hands. If I tasted them, they would be salty. Rohn read my mind, the first of many times. “It’s all right,” she said, “you didn’t do anything wrong.” She kind of smiled as if there were something on her mind. I smiled back.

Southern nights are full of stars and crickets and mosquitos.

The stars hang down beside your head. The crickets are inside head. The mosquitos bite. They are there for the purpose of reality, I imagine. If they don’t often find their way into romantic stories, it is not their fault.

I used to sit out in the front in my rocking chair after watching Amos and Andy or Ozzie and Harriet, until it was well after dark. I used to look up at the stars and try to fathom how far away they were. It was hard to comprehend that the light I was seeing from a certain star had started from there eight years ago. I thought of furnaces bigger than the Earth. I thought of people who’d been alive eight years ago and weren’t anymore. I heard somebody quietly call my name, or thought I did.

I listened and I heard it again. “Pa-tri-ciaaa.” I walked around to the side of the house.

She was standing not more than six feet away, as quiet as a haunt. I grinned in the dark, and I think she smiled. She didn’t have her hat on, and her hair was all tousled. She had on jeans and a man’s big plaid shirt.

I stood close to her, and we whispered, because the house was right there.

“Can you go for a ride? In my car? It’s right down the road.”

“Naw, I don’t think so.”

“How about a walk?”

I shrugged. “It’s late. Grandma won’t let me.”

“Just inside the pasture. Over that fence. Just over there.”

I waited a minute. I wanted to so badly.

“Okay,” I whispered.

Then she was touching me, lightly, her arm around my shoulder. We were about the same height because I was tall for my age. She smelled of some odd perfume; I learned that it was her mother’s.

We walked through the garden, stepping across the rows of turnip greens and the tomato vines. It was a new moon, and everything was dark blue. She held the barbed wire apart while I climbed through, and I did the same for her. She slipped through without touching it anywhere, like she’d done it a lot.

We sat on the ground, close enough to feel the warmth of each other. I pulled out blades of grass and waited. There was nothing to hear but the crickets. She lay back, her hands folded behind her head.

“I bet I know what you were doing. Looking at the stars, huh?”

I nodded. I felt her smile.

“Bet you were sitting out there, trying to think how they could be so far away?”

I giggled.

She reached down and gently tugged me down beside her. She could read my mind. It felt good, like somebody else in there with me. I have never waited for anything as hard as I waited for that first kiss.

She pulled me onto her so that my breasts touched hers for the first time. Then she pulled my chin down with two fingers and gave me a lingering taste-kiss right on the lips. It was better than the kisses two days before on the horse, and I might not have had one like it since.

She ran her tongue across my lips. I opened my mouth and she started kissing me harder. Soon it was like the other day with her tongue halfway down my throat. We rolled over slowly until she was above me. She was on me with her legs straddled, when I felt something I shouldn’t have. It woke me.

“Rohn…?”

She laughed low and deep in her chest. “I told you I wasn’t like other women. Didn’t I tell you that?”

But she was soft. And her voice was a woman’s. And her breath was a woman’s. And her breasts. She kept kissing me and pushing down on my body and grinding her hips into me until I responded.

I had on jeans that night. My blouse was already open and now she started to undo my pants. I helped her and we got them off.

Then she was up on her knees, still straddling me and doing something with the zipper on her pants. She took her penis out. It was warm and hard and at first she rubbed it back and forth against my clitoris. It made me lose my breath. I pulled her toward me and she told me to open my legs wider and I did.

At this time I was still a virgin. She was big for me and it hurt going in. I squirmed and she covered my mouth with her own.

It hurt but I kept pushing up to her and trying to open my legs wider. So we lay there, twisting and rutting on the ground. I came. I’d never come before with something inside me. And my bud between my legs filled up until I felt ready to burst. I was panting, and she seemed to suck the air right from the center of my body. Taking my breath.

I came again and then she did. We were wet and sticky and a mess. My grandmother could call any time. Rohn held me.

I wanted to ask her, “How can you be?”

I could not comprehend.

Later that night in bed, I kept waking just at the edge of sleep, warmed by the soreness between my legs.

Carson McCullers wrote about “freaks” and “misfits.” Faulkner wrote about freakish habits, and then there was Huck and Jim. There is a strange kind of tolerance down south when it comes to personal habits. Just don’t involve politics. Just keep it behind closed doors so that it can be gossiped about. Fantasized about. Keep it under cover of night so that tales can grow.

I was your basic black adolescent tomboy with pigtails everywhere and a pointed chin. I looked from beneath long-lashed eyes without raising my head and gave tight-lipped secret smiles and rakish grins. I shrugged off the impossible.

What was nasty was funny to me, and I smelled of sweat and my jeans had grass stains. I masturbated to movie magazines and let boys feel me up because it felt good. My experiences had, in some twisted way, prepared me for Rohn.

I was told that I would burn in Hell if I did practically anything. I was inevitably going to Hell, but I was too terrified of that fact to give it much thought. So I ran wild like the heathen I was, amid flowers with odors sweet and heavy enough to drug you; ran with dogs and other beasts that copulated when the spirit struck through the tall grass on hot summer nights. This was as real to me as Bible verses. So Rohn was real to me.

Rohn was the bill for some long-ago charge that her mother—or her ancestors—had run up. Her mother accepted her as such.

She had not been made to go to school. Legally they got her declared an idiot or something. She was taught at home, better than the schools around here could teach her, most likely, because her mother was educated.

Her mother and her elder brother were the only ones who had anything to do with her. The others despised her. She told me that her younger sister had twice tried to kill her with rat poison. Her father beat her whenever he came home and found her there without the mother or the brother.

She told me later, after I was allowed to go riding in her car, that she was always afraid somebody would tell my grandparents some wild tale about her.

But she also told me that when she was in her teens, her mother took a turn to her. The same bed that she had nursed her in. Her mother, convinced that Rohn would never find a lover, took her in. This time, instead of opening her blouse to nurse Rohn, she opened her legs to her. Anytime she wanted it, she said.

I was in love with Rohn by then. I figured that she had to like me more than most, else she would never have told me those things. On the other hand, they could all have been lies.

One Sunday she came by in her ’56 Chevy; it was green and white and shiny.

I ran out to the car and leaned on the window. “Hi.”

She smiled. “I just came by to tell you how pretty you are.” Which she knew would make me grin.

“Can you go for a ride?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“Ask.”

So I ran back in and asked, and was told no, I couldn’t go for a ride in anybody’s car, and what was I wanting to go for a ride with Miss Rohn for anyhow?

I ran back out and told her. Her smile changed to somewhere between sad and disgusted, and she nodded. “Oh, well.” Then she looked at me and winked. “Maybe some other time, okay?”

“Yeah maybe.”

“You take care, y’hear?”

“All right.”

Never occurred to me to say ma’am to her, ever.

I was up at the store to get some things for Grandma. It was getting near to evening. Rohn’s car was there.

I’d never felt this way about a real person before. I felt about her like I only felt about fantasy movie stars.

She watched me approach the car. She was sitting with her back to the door, one leg up and her arm stretched across the back of the seat. She half smiled.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

I explained about my errand; I’m not sure what there was to explain. She looked at me quietly. I think that she knew what she was doing. Driving me insane. So I took my leave and went inside.

When I came out, she offered me a ride home. Her eyes darted toward the store and then she opened the car door. She set my groceries in the back.

We pulled out of the station. Dark was falling and the bright Esso sign came on. We sped past my turn-off road. I sighed in relief.

She cut the radio to the black station from Memphis, WDIA. It had already been set on the signal dial. At home I could listen to WDIA only three times a day, when the gospel programs came on. Now some sister was singing about not having enough meat in her kitchen.

We drove across the railroad tracks and pulled off a dirt road near a stand of trees. We didn’t have much time. Already I was wet.

We walked into the woods, and she pulled me to her and kissed me. We kissed a long time. I began moving a little bit, and I felt her growing big. I wanted her inside me and I kissed her harder.

But she had other plans.

She undid her zipper and told me to get on my knees. Halfway down I realized what she wanted.

I’d never done it before, I’d never even read about it, but it seemed a natural thing to do.

She took my face between her hands; her hands were smooth and they felt hot. The sky was still light though the wood was dark. One dead tree without any leaves stood in front of the others. There was an old sack or something caught in its high branches. “Don’t use your teeth none, hear?”

I opened my mouth. It was like a fat sausage, tasteless except for a little salt. I slid my mouth over it, like she told me, against the plump vein underneath. And I let her shove it against the back of my mouth. I squeezed her hips firm in my hands, and she massaged my cheeks and my throat with her thumbs, and ran her fingers all in my hair and on the back of my neck. She rotated her hips slowly. And then faster and harder I sucked until my tongue felt like lead, but it had begun to taste so good. She twisted real slow, and I grabbed and sucked. Time was passing. Grandma was waiting. Time was, I think, standing still. For us. A sheriff on a horse with a posse could have come out of the trees and we wouldn’t have known. Or two boys could have been watching us.

She came. I jerked my mouth away and spat, but some of it got on my shirt. Rather, my grandfather’s shirt.

I was hot, too, and between my legs was very sticky, so we lay on the ground and dry fucked with our pants up until I came. She was hard again, I think. But she said that she would go home to her mother.

We sped away in the car. The wind felt good. The slide guitar from the radio drowned out the crickets.

I had a playroom. It was just a curtained-off place between the kitchen stove and the wall where I kept all of my magazines, and where I went to read them and to fantasize.

One day I was sitting in there when I heard Rohn’s voice. My grandfather said something back to her and then called my name. I went to the door. She was wearing a white shirt and old jeans and loafers. Rohn didn’t look like a boy and she didn’t look like a girl. I was afraid that my grandparents would see what I saw. If they did, they’d take it away from me. But Grandma kept on working in the tomatoes and Grandpa went back to help her. Only the dog followed Rohn over, sniffing her.

“Hi.”

I asked her into my playhouse. The curtains could be pinned closed, and I could hear footsteps on the wooden steps if need be.

Her shirt smelled of starch; it was a white so new and clean that it had a bluish tinge. I kissed it. I kissed her. Her teeth touched my tongue. She sucked it. She had such a fine mouth. We hardly ever talked. I knew what she wanted from me, and she could have all she wanted. That particular day she was going to take much more than I’d ever imagined she could.

We pressed against each other, all our clothes on, and I felt her soft breasts pressing mine. I breathed in, and pressed against them more. It’s the feeling I still like best when I’m with a woman. Those round soft tits pushing.

We lay on the floor tight and moving just a little. She kissed, with her lips parted slightly and soft and moist, first my mouth, then my cheeks and my nose and my throat.

I started to pull down my shorts. She grinned; sometimes she just did that, out of the blue, like a Cheshire cat. I wonder what went on in her mind.

I kneeled in front of her, and she cupped my buttocks in her hands and squeezed them. She put her mouth on my shoulder, right at the stem of my neck and sucked a bit until I had more of a welt than a hickey. She bit me, and I drew in the pain like a scorching breath.

I had my hands all in her hair. In the silk and the curls. I loved that hair. I felt it on my hands when I awoke in the night. Outside the kitchen door I heard the dog give a loud yawn, and then, I think, he turned around and lay down.

We kissed. She worked her hand around in front and slid it right between my vulva lips. She wriggled her finger a little, and I groaned and squeezed her to me. Her other hand was still squeezing and rubbing my behind. She kissed my neck, rubbed her mouth up to my ear, and stuck her tongue in. I laughed and pulled my head away.

Then she moved her finger from around the front and stuck it up my asshole. It was hard and sticky, and I jumped. She pushed it and it hurt just a little, so I sucked my breath in. I’d never tell her to stop when she was hurting me because I liked the deep kisses that she gave me when she did. She always kissed me like that when she was hurting me somewhere.

We kissed deep and slow, and she kept working her finger deeper up my asshole. Every once in a while I would whimper. We stopped kissing and she buried her face in my neck and pressed me to her, moving herself into my pussy and rotating her hips. I creamed. She was hard. We twisted and rubbed; I got the lips of my cunt over her dick and stroked up and down, and rubbed up and down, streaming across my bud and covering her joint with cream. Her finger was still there, I don’t know how far in it was. She groaned.

She eased her finger out and chuckled; I felt the laugh in her throat. “Do you have any Vas’line?” she asked.

We had just a little, so I brought back the jar of bacon grease that was sitting on the stove to go with it.

She eased me around so that my back was to her. I felt her lips and tongue on the back of my neck. For a moment her hands cupped my breasts.

She told me to bend over and spread my legs as far apart as I could. I said she couldn’t, that it was too small. She said we’d manage. She wiped the grease on me.

So I did what I was told, and I told her to be careful. She dipped her finger a few times in my cunt and I shuddered.

I was spread so wide I could already feel the pain. I held my breath. She told me to relax.

I did, except for biting my lip when I felt the tip of her joint probing around where it shouldn’t. I told her again to be careful. I was scared, but the fear was part of what was making me sweat and tremble. She pushed and immediately I felt the impossibility of the whole thing. But it didn’t change anything.

She rubbed my clitoris again with her finger, just barely skimming it. I was already on the brink of coming. I opened wider and she pressed in more. It hurt.

A fraction of an inch by a fraction of an inch. She pushed and I gasped. “Relax. Relax, baby.” I felt her voice.

“Come on,” she whispered right in my ear, her voice more like wind or dry leaves.

“I love you. I love you. I love you.” I said it every time I gasped.

She gathered me in her arms, crisscrossed like a straitjacket, and buried her face in my hair. I could hear her carefully placed breaths, like somebody measuring something just so. My ass began to burn.

She pushed, she held me so tight I could hardly breathe. Something started to fill up my ass; it felt good, and at the same time I felt I was going to rip. My clit was swollen; my clit wanted to swell up big and long as my tongue. She started a regular pump now, and I think I whined. The burning was a red-hot rod sliding into moist pink flesh. Mixed in with her gasps loud in my ear were groans as if she were in a little bit of agony. She touched my clit and I jumped. She pushed a finger up my vagina. Two fingers. I covered her hand with mine to make her take it out, but she didn’t. My hand lay on hers, softly, as if it were helpless.

The pain was so intense I was almost dizzy; I moaned a little, like I was getting the shit fucked out of me. I’m sure that the dog, psychic as he was, raised his head. With one finger she stroked my bud and the pleasure made me call her name.

I started to squirm, we moved like wrestlers; she was inside me and all over me. I loved it and I couldn’t bear it. She might have had it all the way inside my body. We wrestled and knocked over a stack of movie magazines. We tore and twisted their pages, and they carpeted the hard linoleum beneath us.

I felt saliva covering all of my chin and strings of it wet my nose when I lowered my head. There was something wet and warm moving on the back of my neck. She came.

I felt as if I was going to explode, as if steam was building up in my bowels. She held me tight, still and silent for a minute as we both trembled. We relaxed and she pulled it out through my raw flesh. Right after, a brownish egg-white liquid streamed out of my asshole like the runs, and covered the movie stars’ eyes and mouths. I expected it to smell but it didn’t.

Her face was covered with sweat and around her temple a few curls lay flat and darkened with moisture. My shirt, which I’d left on and open, was wet and my breasts glistened. The playhouse seemed close, steamed. Then sounds came back. A truck passing on the road; from far away, my grandfather’s voice. That was all.

She took me in her arms and kissed me gently on the mouth and face. There was blood on my bottom lip; she licked some off. I held her weakly. I kissed her back softly. We kissed for a long, long while.

We laughed a little and I noticed something warm still running down my neck and I patted it with my fingers. It was blood. I twisted around and it was all over the collar of my shirt. Then I realized that my breasts hurt; I touched them and they were tender and bruised. I felt like I had been in an accident. I felt like…

“I love you,” she said.

She knew just what to say after putting me through a meat grinder. I was so thankful.

The next night at church was the Lord’s Supper.

It was a night full of stars that I didn’t want to leave to go inside. But I filed back into the building with the other girls. A sweetish yellow light filled the church.

The preacher got up and, in a conversational tone as if he were down among us, said what he always did about eating the flesh of the Lord with sins on our conscience. We would burn in hell if we did. I broke out in a sweat. If I had died since the last Lord’s Supper, I knew that I would be in hell.

But then something happened worse than hell. Rohn left me.

She was just gone.

I didn’t see her at all the week following the Lord’s Supper. I thought that maybe she had gone somewhere with her mother. But she didn’t come back the next week either.

The Saturday night following the second week I knew that something was wrong. I cried a whole night so silently that my grandmother, sleeping in the same bed, didn’t hear me.

I learned, mostly by listening, that she had indeed disappeared. Rohn had disappeared and so had Fauna Dipman.

Fauna Dipman was a light-skinned girl with freckles. She went to the Baptist church. She had just gotten married that past spring. I’d never paid her much attention, and Rohn had never mentioned her. I heard somebody saying that Rohn was crazy and Fauna was probably dead. Fauna’s young husband walked around like somebody had hit him on the head.

One day I went to a small hollow down past our garden at the edge of the woods. It was another of my secret places, and I had taken Rohn there. While I was there, something made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It was just a feeling.

She had already started haunting me. I ran out of that hollow so fast I had a stitch in my side. I still run from that place in my dreams. I wake up sweating and feeling the hollow, not as empty as it should be, at my back.

I didn’t see Rohn again for twenty-eight years.

I lived up North then, and one spring I went to visit a long-distance lover who lived in New Orleans. On the morning of the day I was to leave, we drove to a shopping area where there were a lot of small craft shops just opening. It was early and there weren’t many people about. My friend, Emily, had run back to the post office for something, and I waited near the car, under a huge oak tree. I hardly paid attention to a car that drove up and parked just a few yards away.

Rohn got out of that car.

I had no doubt it was her. Her dark red hair was shorter and slicked back. She’d put on a little weight. She wore men’s trousers. Her face was quiet and mature.

She walked into a little candle shop. I could not move. Burst after burst of light was going off inside me. Rohn.

I looked at her car. It was a long, blue, shiny Oldsmobile. A car for adults. And I looked at the woman in the passenger seat. It was Fauna. Fauna, as the young wife would look almost thirty years later. With her lipstick and her powdered cheeks and her hair pulled back. Her contented smile as if she were happy. Or at least was that morning.

I tried to think of all the things that I would say to them. I imagined the scene. I thought of dinner that night. When Rohn appeared at the door of the candle shop I didn’t move.

I stood there concealed by the large tree and I did not move. I stared at Rohn. I stared as hard as I could.

She was handsome. She had long, dark curving eyebrows. A one-sided trace of a smile on her face. Sideburns. And she seemed to walk with just a bit of a limp. What happened, baby?

I let her get back into the big Oldsmobile. It tilted slightly at her weight on the seat. Closed the door. Backed out of the little drive. I saw Fauna laugh at something Rohn had said. And drive away.

I watched the car go farther and farther until it disappeared.

When Emily came back we got into the car. Emily is beautiful. She is a dark, honey-skinned New Orleans woman with amber eyes. She is all woman.

I was still seeing Rohn and Fauna. I still saw the point at which their car had disappeared. Emily threw her arm across the back of the seat and playfully tugged at my hair. She was just turning back to start the car when I said, “I love you.”

She raised her eyebrows and smiled. She thought it was meant for her.

I leaned closer to her, and she reached toward me and took my hand in both of hers. We kissed. She brushed my upper lip with her tongue and then she brushed my lower lip. She kissed both sides of my mouth just a taste and my mouth opened just slightly and she licked the insides. I took her tongue and sucked and sucked and we kissed and kissed…but my mind was on Rohn. God, she must have done something powerful to me. If Emily had been like Rohn, there is no way I would live nine hundred miles from her.

There’s a certain kind of woman I can never resist, no matter what she does. A certain hair color that makes me want to touch it, a certain slow swagger that I’ll turn around on the street to look at, a certain accent; that, combined with a tone of voice I remember, can make the hairs stand up on my neck.

Rohn was on my mind and I let Emily touch me where she wanted to. But it was Rohn making me feel so weak, nearly thirty years later, sucking all my breath away.

PATRICE SUNCIRCLE

on “Tennessee,” first published in 1994

I was born in west Tennessee—Tennessee Delta country. I grew up on my grandparents’ farm. I still am pretty much a country girl. One of the few things that can entice me away from a good book is a walk in the woods.

I’m a pagan, which is how I see the two characters in “Tennessee.”

Pagan—meaning love of wild nature and all that that entails. I didn’t know I was a pagan when I was growing up down south—lucky for me—nor when I first wrote “Tennessee.”

Now I do.