“There was a knock on my door one night not long after my surgery, and when I opened the door, two men burst in and started beating me,” Maura said. “They knocked out my front teeth and dragged me through the kitchen by my hair and continued beating me until I was unconscious.”
She spoke in a matter-of-fact manner, rocking back and forth in her old recliner.
“When I came to, I was next to the garbage can. Clumps of hair had been ripped out of my head and there was blood everywhere. I could hear rummaging in the other room, and I knew they were looking for the pills I was prescribed after my surgery.”
I never used to lock my front door — no one did in Jamestown. But that’s changed.
The incident occurred eight years ago, when she lived in a house across the street from her brother on the other side of Jamestown, Tennessee. For months following the burglary, Maura didn’t leave her house, and for years never answered the door for anyone other than family and close friends.
“I never used to lock my front door — no one did in Jamestown,” she said. “But that’s changed.”
Maura has since had to leave that house because she couldn’t afford it thanks to a lung cancer diagnosis and other health issues, including ones resulting from her assault. She filed for disability benefits in hopes of being approved before having to move out, but is still waiting to hear back from the Social Security office. Today, she lives in a single-wide trailer filled with family photos and Americana on the outskirts of town. The siding on the trailer is falling off, and inside it’s dim and stuffy, the windows sealed with sheets of plastic and duct tape to keep out the draft.
Maura’s granddaughter has been living with her for several months, and while she says she is only babysitting her, it seems more like a permanent situation. Maura’s daughter left one day without saying when she was coming back, and the father is in a nursing home due to a degenerative illness. She tries to maintain some semblance of normalcy for her granddaughter — waking her up for school and making her breakfast, helping her finish her homework when she gets home — but it can be a challenge, especially since she relies almost entirely on her son, a veteran who served two tours overseas.
“It’s great to have him back in the States, but it’s been impossible for him to find work,” she said. “He’s been living off of what little he gets for his time in the army, which also has to support me. I suppose that’s why I’m living here.”
Jamestown is a quiet township tucked amid the rolling hills of the Cumberland Plateau. It has few claims to fame — World War I hero Alvin C. York was born in Fentress County and built a state-of-the-art school in Jamestown at the end of the war, and the town is the origin of the world’s largest yard sale, which stretches for hundreds of miles north of the Tennessee border. Jamestown and its residents are humble and unpretentious, sustained by generations of hard work and blue-collar values.
The story of Jamestown over the last half-century is a fairly typical one: once a thriving, working-class town, it gradually declined as factories and manufacturers closed, unable to keep up with the country’s shift from a goods-based economy to a service-based one. Today, the median household income is $12,800 and 56 percent of the population lives in poverty. On the surface, Jamestown seems to betray these statistics. Unlike many impoverished places in America, it’s filled with restaurants, pharmacies, and gas stations. It comes alive during the day, with cars bustling through the center of town to get to the McDonald’s on North Main Street or the Walmart off of Route 127.
Few cars actually stop in downtown Jamestown, though, because most of the businesses are closed. Small “for sale” placards are posted on many of the buildings and vacant showrooms gather dust behind storefront windows.
Down a gravel driveway beside the county fairgrounds is T’z pub, the only bar in Jamestown. It opens at 3pm and people trickle in until around 11:00, when nearly every barstool is occupied and both pool tables are full. T’z is run by a woman named Tracy, a quick-witted bartender. The pub was once considered a notoriously rough place, but when Tracy took it over a few years ago, she cleaned up its image. She has three strict rules: No guns, no fighting, and no smoking over the pool tables.
The consensus among patrons sitting at the bar in T’z is that Jamestown was never rich, but it hadn’t always been like it is now.
“This town has been poor for a long time,” one patron said. “But a ways back, there was at least a working poor. Now, most people are out of work, collecting a check, or involved with drugs.”
According to Tracy, it isn’t uncommon for these situations to overlap.
“I know older people on Social Security that draw $575 a month,” she said, shaking her head. “You can’t survive off that. So a lot of them have no choice but to sell their pills to supplement their income.”
“They might be better off selling them,” a man named Geoff said, stamping his cigarette in an ashtray. “I was talking to my neighbor just the other day and she told me she tapes her pain pills to her back in case someone breaks into her trailer looking for them.”
According to Fentress County Sheriff Chuckie Cravens, extended unemployment and the lack of ways to make money in Jamestown drives many people to drug dealing. “A lot of people don’t have jobs, but they have to find a way to make money, and the drug trade is easy money,” he said. “We see a little bit of everything around here. You have some marijuana grown in the area, some methamphetamine production — and then there’s prescription pills. That’s the big one.”
Cravens faults local clinics for the ubiquity of prescription pills in town, believing that prescribers have created easy access for people to get their hands on pain medication. “Clinics around here are writing all these prescriptions, and while I’m not a doctor or anything, I believe they should be a little more careful. I think that would help a lot,” he said.
A lot of people don’t have jobs, but they have to find a way to make money, and the drug trade is easy money.
On a one-mile stretch of Route 52 west of downtown Jamestown, there are 12 medical facilities — private practices and larger clinics — many of which specialize in “pain management.” While none of the medical facilities offered to comment, several offices had voicemail messages specifically stating that all narcotics prescriptions must be written in person, not over the phone — “no exceptions.”
Sheriff Cravens was forthright about the pervasiveness of drugs in Jamestown. But he noted that this doesn’t make the town unique. “It’s important to realize that this problem isn’t only in Jamestown, Tennessee. It’s in every state across America.”
He admits that he doesn’t have all the answers for solving Jamestown’s drug problem. “If I did,” he said, “I’d have a much better paying job.”
He is adamant, though, that a strong community is crucial when combating any crime-related issue, especially drug abuse. “You [need to] get your community involved — to be successful in combating the drug problem, you have to have the help of the people, and the people have to have trust [in the police]. I was born and raised in Jamestown, so [I know] these are good, God-fearing people. They see the same thing that I see every day — people hurting, people struggling over this drug problem.”
Money from drug seizures also makes up a sizable portion of the sheriff’s department’s budget — a fact is also reinforced by the slogan on the side of each squad car: “This vehicle was paid for by local drug dealers.” Without this added funding, there would likely be cutbacks on equipment and personnel, leaving some officers ill-equipped and others out of a job.
Earlier in the afternoon, the sheriff’s secretary summed up the relationship between officers and offenders as one of “familiarity.”
“We see the same people come in and out, in and out — it’s like a revolving door. They get arrested, face a judge, commit to getting clean, and then wind up right back here,” she said. “When I first started this job, I can say I had a lot more faith that the work I’d be doing would help reverse the problems I saw in this county.”
Some people in Jamestown believe the best way to fight the drug problem is through the law; many others believe it’s through the Lord.
Against the front of nearly every building in Jamestown are large stone slabs containing Biblical scripture. Some of the stones lean against businesses and government offices, freshly painted with elaborate stencils of Jesus’ visage above scripture, and others lean against vacant storefronts, weather-worn and crumbling.
The man behind these stones is named James, founder of the Jesus Rocks project. He had the idea for Jesus Rocks 25 years ago when, sitting on his neighbor’s front porch turning a rock over in his hands, he wrote the name Jesus on it. James left the stone on the railing with the Jesus-side facing down, and when the neighbor turned it over, he started crying.
“That’s when I knew this was my calling from God,” James said.
From the outset of the project, James was determined to take on the drug problem in Jamestown by spreading the Lord’s message, one rock at a time. As a former addict himself, he believes he can connect with local drug users and convince them to follow in the path of God.
“The whole point of this project is to get people off that stuff,” he said. “I go right into the toilet bowl with them — ’cause I’ve been there brother, and the only way out is Jesus!”
He frequently meets with families whose members are battling drug addiction, especially households with young children.
“I work with the parents to find salvation through the words of Jesus, but I work with their kids, too. I call them my Jesus Writers — we sit down and I show them how to write Jesus’ name on these small rocks. Even if they don’t know how to read, a three-year-old can write Jesus on a rock, and then he has Jesus in his heart. After all, how did Jesus fight Satan? It was written — it was written, brother.”
James often parks his white pickup truck around Jamestown with a stack of stone slabs in the bed, talking to whoever passes by. He calls it “holding church,” and he’s usually accompanied by his pet pigeon, Jobie. At a local grocery store, a couple approached James’s truck and asked if he was selling the his stones. He told the couple that he doesn’t sell his Jesus Rocks — that the word of the Lord has no price — but accepts donations from people who want to support the project. He climbed into the bed of the truck and began flipping through the large stone slabs, encouraging the couple to take whichever ones they like.
The couple chose two rocks — one with John 3:16 written in neat cursive, and another with an eagle stenciled above the Ten Commandments. James helped the couple carry the stones to their van; the woman gave him a long hug, and the man passed him a few crumbled bills with a handshake.
“That’s what this is all about,” James said when he got back to the truck. “Spreading God’s word to everyday people — wherever I can, and to whoever will listen.”
Butch leaned his Schwinn bicycle against the front of the True Value on North Main Street, which is at the end of a row of vacant buildings. He is in his late 50s, but the bulging side bags on his bike and the milk crate filled with his belongings give him the appearance of a teenager on the run. He was waiting for a few friends to meet him in the parking lot — they meet up in front of the hardware store on weekends after it closes.
When asked what he does for a living, Butch said, “Collect my check from the government, and other than that just hang out.”
He receives disability insurance. After working as a logger for 27 years, he was injured on the job, which he said isn’t uncommon.
“I’ve known people who died on the job, including my dad. He was coming down the hill and a tree fell right on top of him,” he said. “Took off half his face — we couldn’t even have his casket open it was so bad.”
The reason he followed in the same line of work that caused his father’s death is straightforward: That was the only work to be found.
Aside from a few houses at the beginning and end of Sunshine Lane, the street is dotted with crumbling trailers, mostly singlewides, though some are two trailers clumsily joined to form one unit. Old cars sit in disrepair on front lawns with spare parts strewn around them, disabled and idle, unlikely to be repaired and put to use. Stray dogs wander from one yard to another, picking through trash and lying in the shade.
A man named Mark, who lives in one of the small houses at the beginning of Sunshine Lane, said that the only thing he’s seen change around this neighborhood is the cost of living.
Gotten to the point where a person making 10, 12 dollars an hour can hardly survive here anymore.
“Gotten to the point where a person making 10, 12 dollars an hour can hardly survive here anymore. I’m lucky I bought my house when I did — been living here for 15 years. Otherwise I probably couldn’t afford it. I can’t work no more, been on disability after I got in a car wreck a ways back. Broke nearly every bone in my face.”
Further along Sunshine Lane, a woman named Judith sat on her front porch stroking the matted fur of her dog, Buttons, lying in her lap. “It’s $200 a month for rent here, and that’s all I can afford,” she said. “I was in a car wreck about 17 years ago. Got beat up pretty bad, and I’ve been living on disability ever since.”
Buttons jumped down from her lap to greet and sniff a wandering pug in the front yard.
“I do what I can to keep the place looking all right, but there’s only so much you can do,” she continued. “I don’t even have a working stove. The fridge works, but I can’t cook the food I have. I told the landlord, but he hasn’t done anything.”
Judith worked for a cleaning service for most of her career. She started as a chambermaid in a hotel, and within a few years she became the manager of a cleaning team that traveled to businesses throughout Tennessee and Kentucky. “I liked traveling and seeing different places, and I liked the responsibility of managing people,” she said.
She worked until she got into the car accident, but that only accounts for a fraction of the health problems she suffers from. She had her breast partially removed when a doctor misdiagnosed her with breast cancer. Her tailbone stuck out about three-quarters of an inch after she broke it when she slipped on a rock in a creek. As recent as two months ago, Judith fell in her kitchen and dislocated her shoulder, but didn’t see a doctor until weeks after the injury.
“’I don’t have a car, so I had to wait until someone I knew could take me to the doctor,” she explained. “’You have a high tolerance for pain,’ the doctor said when I told him how long I waited to come in. And I said, ‘Well, I guess a person in my position has to.’”
For Fentress County Executive J. Michael Cross, revitalizing Jamestown comes down to one thing: creating jobs. Cross has set his sights on several key initiatives, such as completing the Highway 127 project, which would connect Interstate 40 with State Route 62 in order to increase commercial travel through the area. Cross also wants to give downtown Jamestown a “face lift,” which he believes would attract more businesses. Although unemployment numbers have dropped from nearly 14 percent in 2009 to 7 percent in 2014, Cross believes much of that improvement exists only on paper.
“My educated guess is that the unemployment rate is closer to 13 or 14 percent right now, and when it was listed as 14 percent, it was probably closer to 17 or 18 percent,” Cross said. “After a certain length of time, people just drop off the rolls.”
This is the case throughout the country, given that those who give up looking for a job aren’t counted among the official unemployment numbers. But there is another factor that’s had a major impact on employment in Jamestown: disability.
“[Many] people here between the ages of 18 and 64 collect Disability Insurance, which means they likely aren’t working,” Cross said. “And if they are, it’s very little — maybe a few hours a week. ”
The percentage of the national workforce collecting Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI or DI) is just above 4 percent, but in Fentress County, where Jamestown is located, the percentage of residents age 18 to 65 collecting disability is 14 percent. A rate this high would have a major impact on unemployment statistics. When individuals are approved for benefits, they exist in a kind of statistical limbo: they’re considered neither employed nor unemployed. In a sense, they vanish from labor statistics until they return to the workforce (which is uncommon — the CBO estimates that a mere 4 percent of recipients eventually return).
Disability rolls in struggling, blue collar towns like Jamestown tend to be high for several reasons. Most jobs in the area involve manual labor, which means employees are more prone to injury on the job. Residents in economically depressed areas are forced to rely more on government programs like SSDI for support.
The town’s higher rates of disability insurance may also tie into its prescription drug problems. Today, nearly 35 percent of disability benefits are awarded for musculoskeletal conditions, such as back pain, which often require pain medication. It’s a trend that isn’t lost on lawyers like Mike Walker, the most prominent disability attorney in Fentress County — in over a dozen of his commercials, his daughter recites the tagline, “Back pain? Call my dad!” The number of clinics prescribing pain medication has to match the high demand.
Everything we do now [to address the drug] problem is putting a band-aid on it.
“Everything we do now [to address the drug] problem is putting a band-aid on it — [but] if you’ve got something that’s endemic to your community, a band-aid is not going to solve anything.” Cross understands that holistic solutions cannot come from one man in one government office — but he’s still willing contribute everything he can to the effort. “If we can create enough industry to employ at a competitive level, to get people off the streets — which would take nearly a generation to do — we can create an environment and an economic system where the drug problem becomes minimized.”
Louise sat on a plastic chair behind her house on the corner of Maynard Street, holding her bundled granddaughter in her arms. The baby slept soundly, despite the crack and thunder of splitting pine as Louise’s husband chopped wood in the yard.
“I’ve seen a lot of good things leave town and a lot of bad things come in,” she said. “Stores closing downtown and never opening back up. Factories leaving and putting a lot of people out of work. The only new businesses coming into town hardly hire anyone. And the drugs — drugs just flooding the town.”
Louise’s daughter, Audrey, and her fiancé, Shawn, stepped out of a mobile home on the far end of the yard and joined Louise behind the house. They both work at a chicken plant that’s an hour’s drive away.
“See, that’s another issue,” Louise said. “A person should be able to work in the place they call home — they shouldn’t have to drive to a different county to find a job. But if they stayed around here, the only job they’d find is at the McDonald’s, and you can’t pay your bills and support a child flipping burgers.”
Shawn lifted his daughter from Louise’s arms, and the baby let out a soft whimper before settling back to sleep.
“We’re trying to save enough to move into a new place,” Shawn said, looking down at his daughter. “The trailer at the end of the yard is falling apart — many of the appliances are broken, hot water is a gamble, and there’s no insulation, so it’s freezing in the winter. It’s no place to raise a baby.”
The house Louise and her husband live in isn’t much better. Water leaks through light fixtures in the kitchen and bathroom when it rains, and the floors are riddled with large holes that open into the crawl space below the house. Quilts are tacked to the walls to help insulate the house, which is heated by a small wood stove about the size of a microwave in the living room.
“A lot of people don’t understand the responsibilities of the poor,” Louise said. “There are things we have to do that most people don’t even have to think about — like chop enough wood for heat through the winter, and it takes a lot of wood to heat this house.” There were stacks of wood about four feet tall and eight feet wide lining two sides of the house, as well as a massive pile of wood in the yard that her husband still needed to chop. But Louise didn’t believe it was going to be enough.
“It’s not a matter of if we’ll run outta wood this winter, but what we’ll do when it happens.”