Starting over

I left Philly and this newsletter is about that.

Last week I moved from Philadelphia to Chattanooga, Tennessee. This is my hometown, but I’ve been away for a long time.

I first moved up to the Northeast when I was 11. My mom got married to someone she had met online; an assistant pastor who lived in Bucks County. We left everything we’d ever known to start over in the Philly suburbs.

The marriage didn’t last the year, but my younger sibling and I tried our best to make friends in the rural Mennonite community where we had landed. We had been homeschooled up until the move, so honestly, we were both very weird. To make things worse, everyone at our new school seemed to be second cousins. That, or they’d been in youth group together since they were born. I wished my last name was Landis or Bergey; or that my clothes didn’t smell like tobacco; anything to blend in with the anabaptists.

My mom remarried again when I was 15. We moved to Allentown this time, a city that felt like a suburb of itself. There wasn’t much going on there for teenagers. On weekends I begged to be dropped off at the outlet malls. If I got really desperate, I walked along the shoulder of the road to a fast food place with my friends, getting catcalled the whole way. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

When I turned 18, I finally moved out and headed to art school in Philly: possibly the greatest city in the world. I quickly noticed that no matter how strange I might look or behave, I would never be the oddest person on the street. This realization, among many others, set me free.

I walked and biked as far as I could in every direction, free from the chokehold of cars as the sole method of transportation. I went to every kind of event I could conceive of; art shows, churches, midnight raves, book clubs. Strangers were kind to me everywhere I went. I remember trudging to class in the pouring rain one day when I heard a woman click her tongue behind me. When I turned around, she extended her umbrella and walked with me the rest of the block. This was one drop in a glittering sea of moments when Philadelphia took care of me.

One of the city’s most important unspoken rules is to never say that you’re “from Philly,” unless you were born right there in the city. People get away with this bogus claim once they leave the state. You’ll hear folks from Delaware County, Montgomery County, and even the edge of New Jersey say they’re “from Philly.” They do this because there’s no one around to challenge them.

If you say these words within the city limits, you should expect to be quizzed on the neighborhood and street where you first came into the world. Claiming Philly is serious. It means claiming the good along with the bad; the Philly that was left behind after white flight to the suburbs, when it was nicknamed the murder capital of the world, and when the birds never won. If you didn’t ride with Philly through the highs and lows, and spend your childhood in an asbestos-lined public school classroom, you’re not from there.

So, for 9 years, I loved Philly. It was my home, but I was careful never to say I was from Philly. I lived in neighborhoods that were gentrifying and I felt bad about it. Eventually, I resolved to give back some of that love I had gotten from the city. One method was doing a lot of volunteering for electoral politics. I knocked on doors and made phone calls for candidates who talked about rent control, funding public schools,and taxing the rich. I bared my heart to a lot of people, speaking to them as a fellow Philadelphian. Although it was mostly well received, I would sometimes get pushback that got me down. If somebody told me to go back where I came from, where would I go? After 9 years, where was that?

The decision to move back to Chattanooga had a lot to do with that feeling of wanting to be home. By most people’s definition, I am “from” here; in the sense that I was born at Hutcheson hospital and then placed in a crib at the foot of Lookout Mountain.

But if you ask the lady at the dive bar where my cousin and I did karaoke last summer, you’ll get a different opinion. She was a fixture of the Chattanooga scene, she let us know, and had been coming out to sing every week at the Brew ‘N’ Cue for over a decade. That night, she cornered us at our table between songs, wanting to know where each of us was from.

“I’m from Chattanooga,” my cousin Jacki said, “I live in East Lake.”

The woman narrowed her eyes, and Jacki sheepishly added, “…but I grew up in Baltimore.”

When it was my turn, I said, “I’m from here. I was born here.”

“Your accent don’t sound like it.”

“I’m from Philly.”

“That’s it,” the woman said triumphantly, and then returned to the stage.

I tried to finish my drink, but I had just broken the Philadelphia oath, and I had done it in my own hometown. I couldn’t even swallow.

Now that I’ve moved, I tell the cashiers at every checkout line that I’m new here, but I’m also from here, and no amount of practice makes it an elegant thing to say. Today the librarian asked if I’d ever had a card in Chattanooga before, and I said, “maybe once, a long time ago, like 16 years ago?”

He typed in my name, and said kindly, “I don’t have you in the system.”

So far, coming home has been more heartbreaking than I expected. I’ve been away long enough that I gave away little pieces of myself to all these other places I’ve lived. In exchange, I’ve soaked up a Philly accent, a Philly fashion sense, and the scarlet letter of habitually wearing a mask in public in the South.

I don’t remember how to orient myself on the roads in Chattanooga, so I let Google navigate for me, robotically reading off all the names I recall from a distant childhood. Making my way up the mountain highway, I see the kudzu that’s swallowed the trees since before I was born. I see the blue silhouettes of the Appalachians to the North, and the heavy clouds that sink low into the shape of the valley between us.

It’s going to be weird for a while, but I hope it works out.

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Thanks for reading — I promise to write about art and socialism in the future! But I also hope this is a space where I can generally share what’s going on in my head.

Love that we’re staying in touch, email me anytime, xoxo

Tabitha