The Dark Water Gospel: An East Tennessee Anthology, a new book by Old North Knox expat Douglas Stuart McDaniel, came out last week and I read it cover-to-cover immediately. I mean, I couldn’t put it down. There are no sacred cows in his gloves-off, deeply funny examination of how civic power operates.
Doug, who now splits his time between Ocean Springs, Mississippi and Barcelona, Spain, previously lived in Knoxville for 30 years and knows the city intimately. He co-authored Images of America: Park City with the late Becky French Brewer in 2005, and followed it with two more neighborhood histories under their Park City Press imprint: Historic Oakwood Lincoln Park (2011) and Historic North Knoxville (2012). His first book, Images of America: Asheville (2004), remains in print 22 years later. Doug describes The Dark Water Gospel as “the longer, harder book” he and Becky, who passed in 2017, always meant to write.
Published by Premium Pulp Fiction, The Dark Water Gospel gathers 15 linked stories tracing a century of Knoxville’s hidden civic history: the McGhee-Capone Nash that turned up as the getaway car in Frankie Yale’s murder in Brooklyn in 1928; the Jones-McGhee-Howard courthouse feud; Hazel Davidson’s parlor and the trash can she hid a prominent civic figure in when the Morals Squad came calling; the Holston Hills Christmas killings; the 1919 Red Summer and Maurice Mays; the roadside casino kingpins; and the “quieter machinery” that ran the city for decades. The material is drawn from court files, police reports, planning documents, and the oral record Becky spent her life preserving.
Soon, I’ll share an excerpt from The Dark Water Gospel. For today: a conversation with Doug, who answered my questions generously from his sometimes-home in Spain.
First, we may have been neighbors for a while when you were on Glenwood… catch me up on how you got from there to where you are now. Mississippi? Barcelona? Both?
We likely were. My house was 125 East Glenwood, right on that long-disputed no-man’s land between Historic Old North and Historic Fourth and Gill, which meant we answered to both depending on who was asking — and appeared on both boards, both newsletters, and both home tours more than once. My late ex-wife Faith and I bought the house in 2005 out of Curly Dan Bailey’s estate and ran it for five-plus years as a licensed B&B called the Marble Hill Inn. If you were on North Fourth, we were around the corner and across the Glenwood bridge from each other for a decade, and I’m sorry we missed each other too — though for what it’s worth, if you ever drove past the place and saw the lights on, there was a decent chance John Stossel was in the dining room, Kevin McDonald from Kids in the Hall was running an improv writing workshop in the living room, or some Broadway actress, musician, or filmmaker like Reno Dakota from American Fabulous was visiting. Way too often, we had music jams and storytelling marathons happening on the porch. And Becky Brewer was there a lot. Curly Dan had left music in the walls, and the house kept inviting people and stories in.
The long version of how I got from there to here is another book — I’ve written it, actually, though it isn’t published yet — so the short version will have to do. I worked for Bechtel out of Oak Ridge for nearly fifteen years across nuclear, space, civil infrastructure, and smart cities. I left Knoxville at the end of 2019 for an assignment in the London office that lasted about three months before the pandemic caught up with it. In March 2020 I flew back to Knoxville on one of the last planes out before the UK closed its borders. Knoxville was a ghost town. Store shelves empty. It was a crazy time. After the divorce in 2018 and Faith’s death in 2019, through the worst of that long, horrible stretch, I moved to Savannah to work on Defiance — another book I’ve just released — and that move was meant to be a clean slate.
Then, in late July 2020, a phone call came in from someone on the NEOM project in Saudi Arabia who’d found my CV in a pandemic relocation pool I’d forgotten submitting to. I said f*ck it and moved that November into a one-room cabin in a construction camp in the Saudi desert, deep in the Hejaz Mountains on the Red Sea, where I learned how to snorkel and hike around neolithic, Nabatean, Roman, Islamic and Byzantine archaeological sites.
I spent four years there as senior manager of urban research and innovation for THE LINE, the city of the future, along with the other NEOM regions. When I wasn’t working sixteen-hour days, I was working on drafts for multiple books, traveling to 32 countries, and interviewing global architects for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale like Sir Peter Cook, Jean Nouvel, and Thom Mayne, MIT’s Dr. Kent Larson, Hollywood production geniuses like Alex McDowell from Minority Report and Fight Club and Olivier Pron from Guardians of the Galaxy and Dr. Strange — architects, urbanists, and futurists who were working on the project.
Right after the Venice biennale exhibition, while still working in Saudi Arabia, I flew back to one of my favorite pandemic refuges — Barcelona — and made an offer on a small atelier on the edge of the Gothic Quarter, right off La Rambla and above the Mercat de la Boqueria, the 800-year-old public market. I also share a place in Ocean Springs, Mississippi as my American base. Barcelona is the European one.
How do you leave a city when you’re so deep in its weeds?
You don’t, not really. You just carry it. I was a community activist and passionate Knoxvillain for thirty years. I first yelled at a City Council meeting around 1992. Helped save places and neighborhoods, including the old South High and Brownlow School. I was an unapologetic loud-mouth on the old K2K message board and on Randy Neal’s KnoxViews.com. I shot films and music videos there. So many memories of family and of Knoxville came with me to London and NEOM and Barcelona, and Knoxville is still with me in Ocean Springs — which is where I wrote Bloodwater, the third novel in what I’m calling my Southern Civic Noir trilogy. All three books came out this spring. You can get them as an autographed bundle at www.citizenone.world.
The thing distance actually gives you is the one thing proximity won’t: the broader shape of a place. When you’re inside Knoxville, it’s a thousand small intimacies and grudges and the particular way a stranger at the hardware store will bring up your late ex-wife while ringing up a light bulb — talking shit about her, making you miss her, and reminding you that things will never be the same. From a balcony above the Mercat de la Boqueria, the same city reveals itself as a time machine with very specific urban mechanisms — courthouse hallways, lodge basements, porches and terraces where gossip and stories wait until discretion loosens. Both readings are true. I needed both to finish writing The Dark Water Gospel. And now I’ve also started writing books about Barcelona and Catalonia.
You worked closely with Becky French Brewer for years, and you’ve said you “finished this book in her voice.” What did that mean in practice as a writer?
It meant writing with Becky in the next chair. Chain-smoking over my shoulder. Bossing me around like she used to. Telling me when I’d gone soft or missed the point.
Becky French Brewer was a Knoxville original — political operative, community historian, the person who knew where the bodies were buried because she’d registered most of their cousins to vote. She grew up on Woodbine Avenue next to Chilhowee Park, and lived many years next to the old Christenberry Clubhouse in Oakwood Lincoln Park. She loved animals, was generous with the Humane Society, Knox Heritage, Positively Living. She loved Knoxville. She worked like a stagehand, as I put it in the book — quiet and fast in the dark, love for the city driving the whole machine. If you knew, you knew; if you didn’t, you looked up one morning and a corridor that had been rotting for decades suddenly had a plan attached to it. We co-authored Images of America: Park City in 2005 — a thin Arcadia local history, the kind you can still buy at the Cracker Barrel, that should have disappeared into the local aisle and instead kept walking around town. We turned a dime store book in a civic call to action, and also wrote a 40-page rescue plan, “How Park City Got this Way,” and hand-carried it to every city council member. Becky took Mayor Bill Haslam on a three-hour tour of East Knoxville in her big ol’ green Cadillac, smoking and pointing the whole way. That’s how you change a neighborhood and a city.
Ten years after we wrote it as that call to action, AIA Knoxville used it as primary source material for a centennial planning study and design charrettes that brought about $10 million of real investment into the Magnolia Corridor, an area the city had written off for far too long. That was Becky. She understood that storytelling was a tool of civic imagination, documentation sure, but also an instrument to pry open the conversations that needed prying open. She fought like hell for neighborhoods, was wary of both gentrification and the profiteers of public housing. She wanted pragmatic investment in the parts of the city everyone else had given up on. She would utterly hate the housing prices today. And she would do something about that, too.
We had other writing adventures together, including one-act plays we wrote for the Tennessee Stage Company under grants from the Tennessee Arts Commission. These were for the Mabry Hazen House Museum, including Evelyn and Evelyn and Gunfight on Gay Street. I miss those times especially, when descendants of both families of the shooters – the Mabrys and the O’Connors – were in the audience, and they both shook our hands and gave us big hugs. Becky died in 2017, and I finished The Dark Water Gospel without her.
“In her voice” is perhaps imprecise. She’s not the narrator — I am. But she’s the protagonist of the anthology, the character the whole book turns around, and she’s the reader I wrote it for. The dedication says it plainer than I can say it here: she is present in every footnote I didn’t write, every joke I didn’t explain, and every sequence that mattered more than the moral. When I got stuck, the question wasn’t what’s the right sentence? It was what would Becky say if I read her this paragraph on my porch? Usually she’d tell me I’d written too much and to cut half of it. She was right about that almost every time.
She was, as I put it in the book, Knoxville’s unofficial memory keeper — half journalist, half provocateur, full-time witness. A keeper of mischief and memory. I owe her more than a dedication can carry. She taught so many people storytelling in the best Appalachian tradition. This book is the nearest I can come to paying her back. The last chapter — “This Is Not a Toupée” — was the hardest to write. It is not intended as elegy, but as a self-contained one-act play where I put the reader in the dining room on Glenwood with us.
The stories here are rooted in real events and archival material, but you allow for reconstructed dialogue and memory. How did you think about truth and responsibility in shaping those narratives?
The prologue puts it about as plainly as I know how: this is neither a newsroom nor a courtroom — it’s a noir city. The book isn’t trying to adjudicate disputed events or establish a record of individual acts. It’s trying to show how power routed itself through a particular place over a particular century.
Inside that frame, I set some rules and didn’t break them. Every person named did the thing the book says they did, or was reliably reported to have done it in the sources I could find — court files, police reports, planning documents, news clippings, and the oral accounts Becky spent decades collecting. Nothing material is invented. Reconstructed dialogue is dramatization, not transcription, and the prologue says so on its face. Where a scene is built from accounts that didn’t include a transcript, I tried to let the dramatization carry the weight of the record rather than replace it. One of the funniest examples: ten different people will tell you the names of ten different men who likely found themselves in Hazel Davidson’s trash can during a morals raid, and at least half of them could be right. And — Becky told me she once dated Chubby Smith. Lord, the stories I haven’t told.
The responsibility part is harder than the truth part. These are real families, some of whose descendants still live in Knoxville, some of whom I’ll run into at a Market Square restaurant the next time I’m home. The test I kept coming back to was whether I’d feel all right about the sentence if a grandchild of the person in it read it over coffee tomorrow. Sometimes the answer was yes and sometimes the sentence got cut.
What I wasn’t willing to do was soften the civic record to protect individual reputations. Knoxville has been very good at that kind of softening for a hundred years, and the softening is part of what the book is about. Becky had a line I think about a lot: proof fades, truth lingers. The book tries to earn the second one.
The book has a very sort of noir-meets-Southern Gothic style. Is that something you set out to do, or is that just where these stories naturally live?
The material chose the register. If you spend a few years in the court files and back-room histories of an Appalachian city in the 20th century, you are not writing from a comfortable point of view. A madam hiding a prominent newspaperman in a trash can while the Morals Squad knocks at the front door isn’t a tonal decision. It’s the historical record. It happened with monotonous regularity, as Becky would often say. The Southern noir was already in there. I just stopped pretending it wasn’t.
It is worth being specific about what I mean by noir, because the word gets thrown around loosely. I ;t mean detective-with-a-trenchcoat noir. I mean the older American tradition — moral ambiguity treated as the baseline condition, institutions that protect themselves before they protect anyone else, a city where the line between the people who enforce the law and the people who break it is mostly about who’s paying for dinner. Add the true-crime bones — real cases, real names, real court records — and you get something that sits in the overlap of noir fiction and historical reportage. The Dark Water Gospel lives there on purpose.
As a genre, Southern Gothic is generally more atmospheric than structural, and I want to be careful not to use that label because people hear “Southern Gothic” and jump to Anne Rice or haunted mansions. This isn’t that. No ghosts. No vampires. No fog machine. What I mean is the O’Connor and McCullers strand of it — a region whose landscape, weather, and long memory press down on the people living in it until their choices start to look inevitable. There’s a quality of late-afternoon light in East Tennessee, and a way that history sits in its houses and on its river bluffs, that I don’t know how to write around. It’s always been a part of my writing. Becky and I used to say the landscapes and the fragrance of East Tennessee can carry half of the storytelling before anyone opens their mouth. I tried to let it.
A through-thread in the book is what you call the “quieter machinery” of how the city actually works. What drew you to that layer of the story? What has changed, and when/why?
What drew me is that it’s the true layer, and almost nobody writes about it. Headlines are the noise; the machinery is the signal. Knoxville has been, for most of the period the book covers, a city run through relationships — courthouse relationships, lodge relationships, banker-to-banker relationships, pew-to-pew relationships — and decisions are so often made in rooms that don’t keep minutes and corridors of power that don’t have cameras. If you want to know why a particular building got built, or didn’t, ask yourself why one neighborhood gets paved and flowers planted regularly by city crews while another gets paved over. Ask yourself why James White Parkway and Hall of Fame Drive both created such an impenetrable wall between East Knoxville and downtown. There are people who may read this who could have prevented that from happening, and they know who they are. The headlines almost never tell you. The relationships do.
What’s changed in how the machinery now works is in civic form, not function. The old machines operated through handshakes, card tables, talcum powder on voting machines, fifths of whiskey, and men who knew each other’s papaw or mamaw. The newer versions operate through LLCs, development agreements, PACs, block grants, group chats, and certain very powerful churches, nonprofits, and foundations. The vocabulary has been upgraded; the mechanism is the same. Decisions are still made in rooms. The rooms are just different rooms.
What has also changed — and it matters — is that the city is larger and more plural than it was, and more people now expect to be in the room, or at least to know which room the decision is in. That’s a real change, and a healthy one. But the quieter machinery continues to adapt faster than accountability has, which is a pattern as old as cities. Becky used to say power has already left by the time the meeting starts, and all that’s left is the patting: citizens on the head, “We hear you. You matter.” She wasn’t wrong. The book tries to ask readers to notice the part of the story that has already walked out the back door.
Storytelling and oral history is a significant part of this book. Can you speak some to the value of its preservation?
Institutions don’t preserve oral history. People preserve oral history. And when those people die, what they knew dies with them unless somebody sat down with them and a recorder while there was still time.
Becky sat down. She called it R&I — research and intelligence — and she did it for decades. She carried whole generations of the city around inside her head and in her notebooks: who did what to whom, who owed whom, who was in the photograph the paper decided not to run, why a particular investigation went cold, which judge had which brother-in-law.
She’d be dazzled by the research tools that exist now — the ability to map entity relationships, to pull up a civic leader’s board seats, votes, LLCs, nonprofit donations, and campaign contributions in an afternoon.
What she used to do with Rolodexes and courthouse visits, somebody with the right AI software and the right stubbornness could now do in a weekend. Like an Open Secrets on civic steroids. I’d love to see someone take that on. Becky’s gone and I’m frankly too tired. I was a Knoxville activist for thirty years. It’s someone else’s turn.
Most of her R&I she gave away freely to any reporter or organizer or neighborhood who asked, which is why she was one of the most cited and least credited sources in Knoxville journalism for forty years. But she kept her secrets, too. Some of it she saved for the book she and I were going to write together. Some of it she told me on my front porch in Old North while the cicadas ran interference. When she passed in 2017, my porch went quiet, and a library’s worth of Knoxville went with her.
The Dark Water Gospel recovers what I could of what she trusted me with, and what I could piece back together from the documentary record around it. It isn’t enough. It won’t be enough. The only honest response to that inadequacy is to encourage other people, in Knoxville and in other cities, to go find their own Becky and sit with her before it’s too late. Every city has one. Most of them are older women who know their civic leaders are often full of shit, and whose knowledge is being treated as gossip. It isn’t gossip. It’s the record. And I was so fortunate to have had her trust and friendship.
You’ve lived away from Knoxville for some time now. How did distance affect how you approached the city in this book? How has it colored your relationship with the city today?
I couldn’t have written this book from inside it. I tried for years and something kept stopping me. It wasn’t craft; it was proximity. In the years after my divorce and Faith’s passing, Knoxville felt like a mausoleum of shared history, and my daughter Jolene and I were the ones left to keep vigil. That’s not a vantage point you write from. You grieve from it, and we did.
Distance gave me two things. First, the ability to see the century-long shape of the city instead of just the intersection I happened to be standing at. Second, and honestly more importantly, it gave me back my affection for the place. When you leave Knoxville and miss it from seven thousand miles away, you remember the river and the ridges and the porch evenings and Market Square on a Saturday in May, and you stop remembering the sharper edges. That recovery of affection is what let the book get written. The book is fond of Knoxville. It couldn’t have been, from inside the grief.
Today, Knoxville is still the city I measure other cities against. I asked Becky once why she loved Knoxville so much, expecting something sentimental. She chuckled and said, “It’s simple, Doug. This is where I keep my shit.” That’s stayed with me in more than two dozen countries since. It’s also the most honest definition of belonging I’ve ever heard.
Anything else you’d like to share, or be asked?
Three quick things.
First, the book is part of what’s become my Southern Civic Noir trilogy.
In addition to The Dark Water Gospel, Bloodwater is the Gulf Coast novel — a small town quietly reorganizing itself around a charismatic street preacher whose ministry offers salvation to the desperate and obedience to everyone else. To escape his orbit, a woman returning to the town to settle her family’s estate forges a bond with four women who see what the town refuses to name: her twin sister, a bail bondsman who trades in leverage, a bar owner who knows how the money moves, and a yoga instructor with her own reasons to want the homeless ministry exposed. Mob money, do-gooder charities, and casino cash all run through it. The book moves between domestic thriller and civic indictment — tracing how moral authority is manufactured, how corruption hides behind good works, and how the Gulf Coast’s long history of storms, segregation, and extraction still decides who gets protected and who is expendable. Knoxville may also notice some parallels in this.
Defiance: A Reckoning with the Dream is the Savannah book. It’s the one I moved to Savannah to write, and I’ve been working on it for six years. A true-story novel set in 1868 Reconstruction-era Georgia, it follows Reverend James Simms — a freedman newspaper publisher, teacher, and preacher — as he risks his life to run for the Georgia state legislature. Against a backdrop of escalating racial violence and political turmoil, Simms becomes a symbol of hope for a fractured community claiming its seat at the table of American democracy. I had to get this one out before the mid-term elections. The country is facing active voter suppression across more than thirty state legislatures, and the 1868 story speaks directly to 2026.
Second, a thank-you. To Leslie and Alan and the team at Inside of Knoxville, for taking up a book about home from someone who isn’t there anymore. To the readers in Knoxville who have been emailing and messaging the minute they heard about it — some of them people I last spoke to in 1999, some of them strangers, most of them with a story of their own to add. Keep sending them. Perhaps there’s a sequel in there somewhere.
Third, Becky. Oh, Becky. I don’t know what the afterlife is, but if there’s a porch in it, she’s on it, smoking a cigarette, correcting someone’s memory in her wayback machine and laughing at exactly the wrong moment.
This book is for her.
We look forward to sharing an excerpt from The Dark Water Gospel: An East Tennessee Anthology by Douglas Stuart McDaniel (Premium Pulp Fiction) right here on IOK very soon. Signed editions are available for $27.99 from CitizenOne.world here, or you can order The Southern Civic Noir trilogy as a bundle for $69.99 here. The book is also available from Amazon and other booksellers.
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