“Sure, some of them. A lot of them are moving into neighborhoods like the one you came from. East Nashville is filling up with artsy types and yuppies migrating from out of town. They’ve already broken ground on a new condo development right where Montague Village used to be. You better believe those units won’t be occupied by your old neighbors. People from New York and Chicago come down here, decide they like the weather, and see a slick new condo or an old Craftsman they can buy with cash or for a note that’s a third what they used to pay for half the space. They can’t believe their luck. They aren’t turned off by discount cigarette shops and check-cashing businesses. Some of them lived in rougher places back where they came from.”

“What’s so bad about that?”

“Nothing,” he said, “if you forget about the people who lived there before. What’s going to happen to them? Terrence and his grandmother couldn’t live in East Nashville today unless they went into public housing in some shithole like Cayce Place. So they get pushed over to Bordeaux, where half the blocks look like fucking Sarajevo, or they move out to Madison or Donelson or Antioch and have to spend three or four hours a day sitting on a bus. That’s no way to live. And where are all of these new people going to send their kids to school? How are we going to move them around the city? Who will pay for all of this shit Metro’s buying on credit? It’s a real problem. And if you want to make a difference, you need to be at the top of the chain. There’s a way to fix these issues, but it needs to be top-down. We don’t want to end up like Atlanta.”

I thought of all the old talk of tradition back at Yeatman—the notion that we were obliged to uphold our way of doing things, to push back against the tide of mediocrity and vulgarity. And I remembered what Yeatman had taught me about Tennessee history—how the gallant knights of the South had fought and died for the Southern Way of Life; how they had resisted the so-called tyranny of Reconstruction, often under the cover of white hoods; how they had rebuilt their fortunes and the order of things and somehow managed through the civil rights era to avoid being cast as scoundrels or losing control of their city, the way it had happened in Memphis and New Orleans and Jackson and Birmingham. I doubted that Arch’s desire to prevent Nashville from ending up like Atlanta had as much to do with keeping down housing costs, fixing the schools, and keeping the traffic under control as it did with preserving an order in which people like him continued to decide what was best for the rest of us.