The All-American town of Brevard, NC has a seedy underbelly

People usually use articles of this nature to segue from how they disliked their hometown growing up, but subsequently, this dislike turned into love further down the road. With Brevard, this is not the case.

Keep in mind that I am not a negative person. On the contrary, I am a very positive person. But with Brevard, while there are positive aspects on the surface, it is a town that has a dark underbelly typical of the average American town.

Whenever I reluctantly have to hear people talk about how much they love Brevard, I try not to be patronizing, but I feel guilty about being negative and ruining their positive impression. Lately, however, I just don’t care.

It’s true. Brevard has waterfalls. Brevard has white squirrels. Brevard has mountains. All of these things are good and fine and jolly. It’s the reason so many elderly Northerners who moved to wealthy retirement communities in Palm Beach suddenly move there to escape the heat and high prices, rediscovering the happiness of youth as they whip out their binoculars to bird-watch and paint pictures of the mountains and white squirrels.

Waterfalls-one of Brevard, NC's
hallmarks. Photo by Larisa Karr.

That’s about as good as it gets.

What the tourism board and a majority of cemented middle-class families who work in the very corrupt city government fail to mention is that Brevard is a town rampant with racism, drug addiction and bigotry.

I will never forget the elderly black woman, Edna Glaze, who was allegedly murdered in the mid-’90s by a member of one of the town’s most prevalent Southern families. He was released and not charged with the murder, according to a 2014 news release by District Attorney Greg Newman.

Recently, the FBI is investigating a case where three boys who attended the local high school went to a black classmate’s house with ski masks, a rope, knives and a stick, threatening to lynch him. I’ll also never forget the time that a former classmate of mine from this high school showed up at a party in blackface, thinking that it was a genuinely funny joke.

Another incident that will never remove itself from my mind is when I was seated in a car, taking the test to get a local driving permit. I was sitting with two girls who attended the high school. One of them opened her geography book and said to me, “You seem smart. Could you show me where the United States is on the map?”

The methamphetamine, heroin and pill addictions prevalent in the town of Brevard have been a sustained aspect of the community. In my senior year of high school, the vice principal took the entire school into the auditorium, informing us of the latest phenomenon of 2009 --  Pharm Parties, where people emptied out the contents of their parents’ medicine cabinets and chased those jagged little pills down with liquor.

In the high school, students were subject to frequent drug raids where security guards essentially locked students in the classrooms they were currently in. They held onto tightly-roped German Shepherds, who scoured the classrooms for any trace of drugs. Such a regularized drill encouraged an environment of fear, paranoia and genuine lack of enthusiasm to go to school.

View from the mountains at Hooker Falls, close to Brevard, NC.
Photo by Larisa Karr.

Another fucked-up facet of Brevard is the church culture, the good ol’ boy network who constantly humiliate and discourage women from wearing pants because they are part of the “lesbian movement.”

Women are made to feel inadequate, incapable and genuinely shamed for possessing the bodies that they do. The bigotry does not stop there. Nearly every sermon includes a heavily course, abrasive rant against the “damned homosexuals,” liberals and Muslims who are “destined to burn in the eternal damnation of hellfire.” Hearing these tyrannical and horrific diatribes instills a sense of mistrust, fear, anger and paranoia, which, when coupled with all the other horrible elements in the city, foster a brutal coldness to other members of the human race.

The people who attend these churches, of course, are the same people who drive around with huge polluting pick-up trucks and Confederate flags. They shoot animals with their beloved rifles and skin them after, load themselves up on Roxies and Klonopin, and slowly kill their brains and their genuine interest in life.

A man walks into Henry's, a restaurant in
Brevard, NC. Photo by Larisa Karr.

I’ll always remember sitting in a class at a local community college, which I was taking for dual credit in high school and college. The professor, a rare brave foreigner from Australia who for some reason decided to live there temporarily, was asking a woman from Rosman (a town that is 10 times worse than Brevard) what she wanted to do with her life. Her response? “Stay in Rosman.” “Don’t you ever want to leave?” he inquired. “Nah,” she replied.

It was at this moment that I knew beyond a measure of a doubt I had to leave. This despicable, disparaging black hole that sucked people up and made them completely ignorant was killing my spirit.

The depressing silence that I experienced each and every day in Brevard had taken its toll on my psyche. There was nothing there for me. Nothing inspired me. The backdrop of pristine nature felt hollow to me, especially in the context of just how ugly the people in the town could be.

When I was younger, if I went to some semblance of a place that had a city feel, especially near Asheville, my spirit was lifted and I became excited. A cluster of buildings where I smelled fried food, people walking inside and outside, and cars pulling up and backing out was thrilling to me. I just wanted to feel the world move, to experience the passing of time as I watched people move back and forth, to know that there were places, experiences and hopes that existed outside of the dead lull of the “city” I had grown up in.

A passerby walks on the streets of downtown Brevard.
Photo by Larisa Karr.

Now, at 24, I have lived in other places, and I have realized that sadness and silence are not necessarily things that you can permanently get rid of. Still, whenever I go home and pass the border into Transylvania county, and roll past the gas stations with signs that say “All guns allowed” and the fake, middle-class suburbia centered in the middle of the city, I am immediately hit with a pang of sadness that multiplies itself as the journey continues to my house.

There is, however, one positive aspect to living in Brevard: It teaches you a lot about the sinister elements of human nature, and makes me alert to characteristics of people I don’t want in my life.

This article was originally published in The Blue Banner and The Tab.