See Rock City: The Subliminal Message is Magic.
SEE ROCK CITY Birdhouse, East Tennessee. Photo by Stephen Newton
“—and don’t forget that the structure of the atom cannot be seen but is nonetheless known. I know about lots of things I’ve never seen. And so do you. You can’t show proof of the truest thing of all, all you can do is believe.” —Clarice Lispector
Long before I moved to Tennessee, I was familiar with the ubiquitous SEE ROCK CITY signs. They’ve been around since Rock City became a public attraction in 1932. Rock City’s founder Garnet Carter and his wife Frieda moved to Lookout Mountain near Chatanooga back in the 1920s with the intention of creating a residential community. Along the way Rock City was born, the game of miniature golf was invented, and, in exchange for a free paint job, farmers let Carter paint SEE ROCK CITY on their barn roofs from Tennessee to Michigan and as far west as Texas. The stark, enigmatic SEE ROCK CITY signs were like hypnotic suggestions, perhaps one of the first subliminal advertising campaigns, entrenched in the American landscape and part of its psyche.
My wife Angel visited Rock City with her aunt in the late 1950s. She has a vague memory of a rock village in Fairyland, all of it built on a mountain so high, you could literally see the boundaries of seven states from Lover’s Leap. Angel has no souvenirs from that time, no photos, no one still alive who could verify that she was ever there. It was a nostalgic impulse when she purchased the red SEE ROCK CITY birdhouse sitting atop our bookcase at an airport kiosk years before me met. It‘s followed her everywhere she’s lived across the country, a tongue-in-cheek reminder of her home state.
So, when I spotted the red SEE ROCK CITY birdhouse on my morning walk, I was reminded of all the things I knew were true but couldn’t prove. Since childhood, my life has unfolded like a novel steeped in magical realism; an endless reservoir from which I continue to draw inspiration for my stories. For that, I hold my maternal grandmother responsible.
Gram listened to my weird dreams, ghost sightings, and prescient intuitions when no one else would—but most important, rather than discarding them as childish imagination, she helped me understand them as omens of things to come, and accept them as facts of life that needed to be heeded. She sensed I was a kindred spirit, sensitive to the unseen, but nonetheless powerful forces surrounding and influencing our reality—what we refer to as magic, or the supernatural—a literary subject legitimized for me by the inclusion of the three witches’ prophecies in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s MacBeth, not his first ghostly play.
For 10 summers I listened to my grandmother’s stories—mostly real-life morality tales of good and evil— while she chain-smoked Camel cigarettes and drank percolated black coffee from a gold-rimmed china cup. Her tiny kitchen was a sanctuary where I was always welcome. That I was breathing second hand smoke, or biting my fingernails to the quick, or drinking more coffee than was good for me, was not important. Gram was teaching me to be a story teller.
And I believed all of her stories, never once asking her to prove they were true. Gram spoke to me as if I were her equal, expecting me to grasp the subtle meanings behind every word. “You mark my words, Stevie,” she’d say, wagging her gnarled arthritic index finger at me. “what goes around, comes around.”
In time, the future events she foretold by reading the portents of our everyday lives came to pass, and they did so in a perfectly natural way without fire and brimstone. Only the two of us, Gram and me, knew the truth. For me, that was enough.
—Stephen Newton