A survivor of a Tennessee mass shooting reflects on violence, PTSD, and healing through humor.
by Brian Griffin
One Sunday morning during a worship service, a man walked into my church in Knoxville, Tennessee, with a sawed-off shotgun and opened fire on the congregation during a youth-led worship service.
It happened during the opening scene of the play “Annie Jr.” The gunman was tackled by a man dressed as Daddy Warbucks.
It was a bloody scene.
A hate crime.
An atrocity.
You can come up with lots of ways to describe this. You can name various levels on which this atrocity exists. You can make a list of adjectives that describe and illuminate it. That might be a good way to let everyone know how bad it was. With such a list, perhaps we would begin to understand the power of language. It might suffice.
But I suspect not. My hunch, after having lived through this atrocity, is that any list of words I create would only go so far. We could expand their power with analogies and metaphors. That might help. But it dawns on me that this atrocity was, in addition to much else, a literary atrocity, too. It was a failure of language on many levels, a failure of simple human communication — that much seems obvious. But for those of us who witnessed this massacre unfold on the pews of our church, spattering with blood the hymnals and texts we hold dear and cutting from beneath our feet the very notion of sanctuary, it was an atrocity that threatened a shared heritage, a heritage bound up in words, the literary legacy of spiritual search. At the end of that day in 2008, I sat finally in my office in the religious education wing of the church, and gestured at a wall of books and curricula. “All this,” I said to a friend, “is meaningless now.” And for this reason, among others, I knew almost instantly I would write about it. Call it a sickness of my generation, the compulsion to write about everything that happens to us. Call it a need. It just is.
But in my case, it came from a place of despair. Because I really meant it. All those curricula, all those books — it really did seem meaningless to me then. I can’t explain it, but in my nest of books I felt not solace but despair, and a strange sense of need.
Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five wrote of a similar need. He witnessed the firebombing of the city of Dresden in the Second World War and spent years struggling with a compulsion to write about it. He wrote “thousands” of pages that he threw away, he tells us. Or more accurately, that’s what we are told by the narrator of the novel, who, it turns out, is a novelist, too, much like Kurt Vonnegut himself. One day, the narrator presented a manuscript to his publisher, Sam, and said:
It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre. Things like Poo-tee-weet?
I thought of those words late that Sunday night after finally leaving the scene of the murders at my church. I had a volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry in my car, so I brought it into a bar and drank a beer and felt the first wave of numbness come over me, the first instance of feeling that I could never communicate what had happened — after all, the facts were too simple to match the horror, the surrealism too disrespectful to the dead, the need to write too self-involved to be worthy of the memories that everyone shared. The whole thing felt like a wall. It felt like a wad of horror wrapped in a blanket of numbness behind an impenetrable wall. I put down the Dickinson poems, hung my head, and stared at the bar. That’s when I noticed I had blood on my necktie. It was flashing neon, I swear it was. I knew I was broken.
But in spite of that, three or four days after the shooting, I wrote an essay that was published in a local alternative weekly. Below is a part of that essay. Just know that I have avoided neckties since.
When the first shot came, the children had just begun their play and I was in the main hallway, maybe about 30 feet away, walking away from the sanctuary on my way to do a routine check of the nursery and toddler room. The shot was impossibly loud, and I turned back toward the sanctuary. Right then, I saw a sight that I have decided not to describe for you.
I remember thinking of the photograph from Time magazine, the one of the little girl fleeing her burning village in Vietnam, her clothes burned from her body. There were more gunshots and children running, and suddenly I found myself sending children to the Presbyterian church up the hill. I ran to the nursery and sent them up the hill, too, to find sanctuary in that place.
I thought of the skirmishes that led to the Battle of Fort Sanders during the Civil War, fought in part on the very ground the children were on as they ran up the hill. I thought of soldiers on horseback, cannon fire, sweaty yelling men, and, again, I entered the sanctuary, where I saw things that I wish I had not seen.
But I know now that what I “saw” was not seen in the normal sense of seeing, but was instead sucked in, swallowed, absorbed like a gas. I simply pulled everything inside myself the way cameras gather light. I gathered images of the murderer and his work, and I stored those images away in my mind, in my hippocampus, they tell me. I gathered Daddy Warbucks. Little Orphan Annie. Men struggling on the floor. Shotgun shells scattered across pews. And much more. To this day those images are vivid but jumbled, disjointed and cut off from time. I felt as though I were in the sky, above it all, looking down on everything.
Then somehow I was outside and everyone was outside and mothers were outside and they were calling for their children, running for their children, running the wrong way, and I suddenly felt the entire thing descend on me. Each mother calling was calling for me. Each person crying was crying to me. My mouth turned to sand. I couldn’t speak, so I ran to the Presbyterian church, where I had sent the children, and there I saw men in suits standing in a cordon.
“Who are you?” one of them said. He was a big man. They all gathered around me and stared, and I knew instantly they were protecting the children. They were saints.
I stepped to the big man and said, “I don’t know, but I think I’m in charge.” It came out as a whisper. “The children,” I said. “Where are the children?”
“We have them,” he said. “Don’t worry, they’re safe.”
I was trembling, nauseated. “OK, then,” I said. “I’m gonna send their parents.” So I ran back to my church and saw everyone on the lawn. The air was very hot. I tried to call out, but my mouth wouldn’t work. I thought of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus speaking to all those people. He must have yelled the Beatitudes. He had to, no way around it: Jesus on a hillside yelling about peacemakers. Yelling about the blessed. Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you. Suddenly, I remembered my Sunday School teacher at Middle Valley Baptist Church in 1966, Nelka Chandler. She thought Communists would attack us, steal our Bibles, but they never did. I can remember the Beatitudes because Nelka Chandler made us memorize them. If children memorized the Beatitudes, she said, the Communists couldn’t take them from us. They would live in every child.
And then came a miracle. Standing in oppressive heat on the lawn of Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church (TVUUC), I felt my mouth suddenly fill with water. I held my arms in the air and yelled for everyone to stop, to look at me. I told them where the children were, and while parents ran up the hill, I had everyone form a huge circle. We held hands in a moment of silence, and then I yelled out a prayer. I have no idea what I said. Inside, the paramedics were working and the police were searching the building and I was not even remotely Jesus. I was not even remotely blessed. There were cicadas in the trees. Did I say another prayer? Something about Buddha? Everyone held hands, everyone pulled out of their fear and pulled together, and suddenly in that moment those sweet, innocent people became Jesus and Buddha and Muhammad and every other healer that ever lived. They were divine, blessed, loving, whether they knew it or not. The light of all that we call God was in their hands, human hands, hands that held the hands of others, right then, right there. It was a holy moment, in spite of it all. I tucked it away like a photograph.
I know now that while I sat on that bar stool feeling numb and drained and wasted and tired, inside me that essay was taking hold like a broken chromosome. I know now that this essay and much else, including the book of poetry I am writing, was present in that moment in ways I could not articulate, like fragments of mutant DNA. But as I sat on that bar stool, I felt a sinking feeling, something akin to the feeling you get as a child when your mother picks you up at school to take you to the dentist. Butterflies. I felt butterflies. A feeling of dread. A feeling that something unpleasant is about to happen.
But it was all behind me now, right?
It was over. Right?
Well, right. If time is nothing but chronology, it was over. But the feeling in my gut told me something else. As I sat on that bar stool at the end of the worst day of my life, I felt a strange apprehension, a feeling that what had just happened is still about to happen, is still poised teetering on the edge of a cliff. That feeling was accompanied, inexplicably, paradoxically, by a feeling of profound numbness. There’s much I can say about this, but I’ll skip ahead to something that took me a long time to understand. It’s simple: In trauma, time stops. Time and chronology split from one another. As trauma unfolds, time as we know it goes away and is replaced by a new kind of time. There are neurological reasons for this, I’m told. It’s natural. The problem comes when, for some of us, time doesn’t click back into place again, when we flash back. It’s called PTSD.
That’s the dilemma of Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut’s character in Slaughterhouse-Five. As Vonnegut puts it, Billy Pilgrim is “unstuck in time.”
One minute he’s in an optometrist’s office in Ilium in the 1960s, and the next minute he’s back in a POW camp in Europe in 1944. Unstuck in time.
You know, I get that.
There are plenty of guys like Billy Pilgrim living on the streets of my city, many of them war veterans, still traveling back to Vietnam without meaning to, without wanting to. I met my share of them in my childhood, too, Vietnam veterans mostly, living in the special spaces they had carved for themselves with the help of family or friends who gave them space, places they can be unstuck in time with a minimum of dire consequences.
William Faulkner’s novel Intruder in the Dust is a paean to time, death, and guilt. Guilt, especially. Everything centers around a midnight lynching of a Black man and a white boy’s efforts to help him. The boy assumes this lynching will happen at midnight not because he has evidence that a mob has gathered — it hasn’t — but because that’s what the burden of the past tells him will happen. His gut tells him so. He just feels it, but he feels it with certainty. It’s in his DNA. It’s a chromosome of death. The horror that hasn’t happened yet exists already because the horror has happened before. Over and over again.
In a way, he has butterflies.
Existential butterflies.
Time out of time. A culture unstuck in time.
“Outside the quiet lamplit room,” Faulkner wrote, “the vast millrace of time roared not toward midnight but dragging midnight with it, not to hurl midnight into wreckage but to hurl the wreckage of midnight down upon them in one poised skyblotting yawn.”
Faulkner knew that the horrors we live with exist in time and out of time simultaneously. We carry them with us. They happen again and again. Faulkner’s Southerner is burdened with the wreckage of all that has come before. Each waking moment is weighted with the injustices and horrors of Southern history. The problem for Faulkner is the way this wreckage of time is reduced to a “skyblotting yawn.” Faulkner saw that the knot of atrocity and guilt in the Southerner had become a blinding, drowsy numbness, quite possibly the worst outcome of all. The white Southerner’s true sin lay in his ability to know the sins of his past — indeed, to constantly be parading those sins before his eyes on a daily basis — and still be comfortable with them.
Compare that with Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut’s book about the atrocities of Dresden. The book about Dresden begins like this:
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.
It ends like this:
Poo-tee-weet?
And in between that beginning and that end, Pilgrim and Vonnegut embark on the kind of examination Faulkner would urge on his fellow Southerners, an examination I urge, now, upon myself.
The look back, at all costs.
The reckoning.
The coming to terms with the jumbled, inchoate pastiche of time we call “the past.” It’s an examination I conduct while still “unstuck in time” myself, reeling from the unending sound of those gunshots in that sanctuary, that nauseating smell of gunpowder, my dying friends, that blood on the pews, on my necktie, on my Sunday shoes.
The TVUUC gunman thought of himself as a latter-day Confederate soldier. That’s what his neighbors told the reporters.
So this is a Southern story, yet again.
The South has been declared dead many times, but damn, there it is. In Charleston. In Charlottesville. And yes, a bit of the South was set loose in New Zealand, too. An angry, self-righteous guy with a gun is now a major American export. The mainstreaming of hate has become ordinary in both the media and politics, and increasingly, it knows no borders.
“You do not have to be good,” wrote Mary Oliver in her poem “Wild Geese.” “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
The TVUUC gunman turned away from what his body might have loved and let his mind be corrupted by hate.
Clearly, he felt that he would be admired for his actions, but like the Southerners Faulkner wrote about in Intruder in the Dust, he also hoped everyone would yawn at the deaths he caused. He was a Confederate soldier from a mythical past, striking out on a valiant mission.
He opened fire because he hates liberals. They are vermin. They are pests, like termites. Those are his words. He hates the Unitarian Universalist Church for accepting gays and lesbians. He hates my church for accepting Black people and supporting the civil rights movement. His chief sources of inspiration? Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity. That’s what the police investigation found. He imagined he was making a political statement.
But here’s what I’ve discovered about political violence: No matter how strident the politics, no matter how spiteful the rhetoric, no matter how vehemently hatred is directed at broad groups of people — people of color, people of faith, people who espouse ideologies that have been demonized by politicians and talk-show hosts, people who have sexual identities that are imagined as threats — in the end, in spite of the rhetoric and the tweets and the manifestos, mass shootings are not directed at those groups and those faiths and those imaginary threats.
People are not ideas. People are not constructs. People are not abstractions.
Mass shootings are directed at human beings. Innocent, individual human beings.
I experienced this firsthand. So have many others. We live in a world in which men revel in anger and political hatred, then lash out blindly with guns. But the reality of these shootings is not ideology or rhetoric. The reality of political violence is not even political.
The TVUUC gunman thought he was sending a message — but there was no message. There was only death.
Later we analyze it; we pick it apart and talk endlessly about it, but in the moment, in the here and now of gun violence, it has no explanation, no rationale. It is senseless. It has no meaning other than what it is — an attack on the very idea of human dignity.
A bullet does not strike an ethnicity or an ideology or a faith or an identity. A bullet strikes the soft animal of who we are.
The body. The bone. The flesh.
So when the gunman entered our sanctuary and opened fire, he failed completely. The bullets he fired did not hit godless liberals, did not hit subhuman vermin, because such things did not exist in that building or anywhere else.
No, the bullets hit innocent individuals, human beings full of hopes and dreams and love.
It was an act that was simultaneously personal and impersonal, human and inhuman. It erased from his sight, during those few seconds, the humanity that was right in front of his eyes. It was an act of pure, unadulterated evil.
And here’s the thing. Those bullets made it evil.
Those bullets, those shotgun pellets.
They erased any hope of shared humanity in that moment, any hope of dialogue, any hope of reconciliation, reducing not the victims to something less than human, as he liked to imagine, but reducing the gunman himself to something less than human, something that lacks what makes a person a person — the shared humanity that defines us all.
In the act of tackling him and disarming him, those Unitarian peaceniks did something remarkable. They saved the congregation from further bloodshed, true. And beyond that, in the act of disarming the gunman, they restored his humanity.
Was it broken? Yes, it was. Was it hateful? Yes, it was.
But once he was disarmed, he became once again a person. Once he was disarmed, evil left the building. Once he was disarmed, the sanctuary was again a sanctuary.
Allow me to mansplain.
Look, I might have been that gunman, except for chance and luck and the privilege of having parents who insisted I take a path that most of my extended family never took. College. Daddy was a poor man, but he made college happen for me. Daddy said, “Brine” (that’s what they called me), “if you join the Navy, you’ll be makin’ the biggest mistake of yore life.” That’s how he talked — deep and slow, the way a cow walks.
On the surface, my dad and the gunman seemed to have a lot in common — as though the gunman were one of us. He would have fit in at our family reunions. He might have laughed along with Dad while cramming green bean casserole in his mouth.
My dad — he who insisted I go to college simply because he never had that opportunity himself. He who helped guys in the community who had become unstuck in time because of the Vietnam War.
He who repaired damaged roofs for widows, who fixed leaky faucets for the elderly, who loaded kids from “the Children’s Home” onto his pontoon boat and let them swim in the deep current of the Tennessee River.
He who volunteered to fight the Nazis in WWII, walking the decks of the USS Fitch like a seasick Angus cow.
He who grew up in the white bubble of Jim Crow and the KKK but finally listened to the words of Martin Luther King Jr. after the assassination.
He who repented for the sins of the South by allowing my brother to bring a Nigerian college student to our home for the weekend.
He who took that young Nigerian to our church one Sunday in 1968, a few months after King’s death, knowing full well the consequences of bringing a Black person to our church for the first time.
He who was aware that he bore responsibility for inviting a Black person to cross the blinding white threshold of that snow-white church full of cowardly white people consumed with anger at one small instance of desegregation, one small instance of applying the Golden Rule to a person deemed unworthy of Christ’s grace because of the color of his skin.
He who watched those butt-hurt whites storm out of the sanctuary in anger, only to form their own little white “religious” compound, a ghost of a “church” that would have excluded Christ himself if they had an inkling of the truth.
Now I can see that both Momma and Daddy, by inviting a Nigerian person into the church, were trying to “repent,” at least in their own hearts, for the sins of the South. To this day, I do not know if Daddy was following her lead or if Momma was following his. (I think the former.) But I do remember seeing Dad standing like a giant bear, a grizzly bear dressed in his Sunday best, staring down those white ghosts as they abandoned their own “Savior” that Sunday morning to revel in Southern sin once again. Dad stood tall. He took off his jacket and tie, and stared those white ghosts down. He was a big man, strong as a mule, and they were afraid of him. That very day he got death threats. So he drove his pickup to the homes of the white ghosts who were threatening him. And he threw a few punches.
Momma was threatened, too. One of those white ghosts called my Momma and said, “Where do you Griffins come off bringin’ n------ to church?” and Momma says, “That warn’t no n-----, he’s from Nigeria,” and the lady says, “It’s the same dang thang, you moron. If I was 10 years younger, I’d come out there and whoop your sorry ass,” and Momma says, “Well, take your Geritol and come on, darlin’, I’m ready for you.”
So Momma and Daddy repented.
But it didn’t last. At least for Daddy it didn’t.
Dad had spent a lifetime following the Golden Rule and the Beatitudes. Then, in 1968, he learned to include Black people in that language — to do his best to accept Black folks as fully human in the way Christ intended for all to be accepted.
Then, years later, one hot July day when the gunman opened fire on my church, a broken chromosome of hatred released its poison and transformed Dad back into a reservoir of Southern sin and hatred.
He got brainwashed by talking heads — the same talking heads that brainwashed the gunman.
The poison that infected Dad was not a return to the dehumanizing racism of his younger days. Instead, it was the poison of dehumanizing homophobia — the poison that caused him to turn on me, his own son. After the shooting, he learned from Fox News that my church had been targeted by the gunman because we actively welcomed the LGBTQ community. He realized that, in my role as Director of Lifespan Religious Education, I was working to keep our doors open to all — even “them gays.”
Dad began reading more about the Unitarian Universalist Church, about our embrace of agnostics and atheists, of Jews and Buddhists and Muslims, of teens and young adults who were questioning their sexual identities.
He learned about Unitarians from Fox News and from the Southern Baptist Convention. And he didn’t like what he learned.
He stopped answering my phone calls.
Finally, I drove from Knoxville to our old family home near Chattanooga, just to see his eyes. I walked into the house and found him asleep in his easy chair, with Fox News blathering into the room. I turned the television off, and Dad stood up and towered over me.
Then he pushed me in the chest and slammed me against the wall. “Brine,” he said. “Don’t y’all think y’all deserved that shooting?” He was like a 2-ton, dizzy grizzly. He pushed me again and said, “Yeah, Brine. You done did. You done deserved it all.”
Those were the last words he ever said to me.
Not long after that, he died.
The poison that infected Dad was not a return to the dehumanizing racism of his younger days. Instead, it was the poison of dehumanizing homophobia — the poison that caused him to turn on me, his own son.
After his funeral, I was broken. I was disabled. I began to long for the impossible — I wanted my father back. Not the father who pushes and hates. Not the father who condemns others who are different from him.
Instead, I wanted the grizzly bear back. The one who knew right from wrong. Not a grizzly dizzy from fighting against inclusion, but fighting a righteous fight for inclusion. The bear of a man who talks the way a cow walks and laughs like a pickup truck trying to crank its engine. I wanted my real father back, the one who had at least attempted to repent for the hatred and sins of the South, the sins he was raised to revere. I wanted the hero, the guy who stood for humanity, the guy who opened his arms to hold every heart.
Time passed. PTSD, agoraphobia. And to compensate for agoraphobia, I became addicted to Facebook. After a while I began to remember that old version of my father, the one from my childhood — and I tried to reconstruct that person on Facebook.
I tried to tell true stories from my childhood on my FB timeline. I created my own therapy by re-creating small snippets of a better time, a time arcing toward a semblance of justice, when Dad was the good person he made of himself — when he understood racism just enough to attempt to do something about it, as best as he could. I wrote over 200 little Facebook posts about my dad, my mom, my grandparents, but mostly my dad.
This is the very first one:
Daddy said, Brine, I’ll work the chainsaw. You just push on the tree and don’t let it fall on the house.
It’s just something I remember Dad saying — a very Southern moment involving a chainsaw and a small child tasked with not letting a falling tree destroy the family’s house. I was 10 years old.
I've deliberately sheared this vignette of all context, leaving the reader to imagine the situation. Every snippet about family that I wrote on Facebook is something my mom or dad said — the reader constructs the context.
I created my own therapy by re-creating small snippets of a better time, a time arcing toward a semblance of justice, when Dad was the good person he made of himself — when he understood racism just enough to attempt to do something about it, as best as he could. I wrote over 200 little Facebook posts about my dad, my mom, my grandparents, but mostly my dad.
I joke about this and the ones that follow as “Hillbilly Haiku.” Obviously, they do not have the 5-7-5 syllabic structure of traditional Japanese haiku, which is precisely what you would expect if a hillbilly were to write haiku. After all, nobody can tell a Southerner how many syllables he has to use, bigod. I was making fun of my family on Facebook in an attempt to feel better about the whole blood-soaked racist mess.
All 200 of these fake haiku are like that. Just reconstructions of things Dad and Mom said. They are childhood memories written on the spur of the moment on my FB timeline.
Here are a few more:
Daddy said, Brine, just because you got water stuck in your ear don't mean you can't go to church. They's a lot of people there that can't even hear.
Daddy said, Brine, if you don't turn off that radio, I'll bust it with the axe. We's trying to have a deacon's meeting.
Daddy said, Brine, y’all need to come in here, sit down, and shut-up. Billy Graham’s on.
Daddy said, Brine, I told yore Maw-Maw, I said, Momma, here’s the Bible. Show me where God says you can’t get on a airplane, and she said, I know that verse by heart, and I said, You do? and she said, Ben, the Bible says, and lo, I am with you always, and I said, well Momma, so what? and she said, It don’t say up high, it says lo, so they ain’t no way I’m getting on no plane.
Daddy said, Brine, we sure are sorry. We tried to name you after William Jennins Brine but yore Momma spelled it wrong on the forms.
Daddy said, Brine, see this here toy truck? I done made it myself out of one of them church pews. It’s got Jesus in it.
Momma said, Brine, Paw-Paw set his hearing aid on fire in the microwave. If you need a microwave, we'll keep it for you. They ain't nothing wrong with it except it’s black inside and won't light up.
Daddy said, Brine, balance my coffee in the glove compartment and grab the steering wheel. I gotta put my seat belt on.
Daddy said, Brine, I tied my hearing aids to my glasses with fishing line and I told that smart-aleck little Yankee doctor, I said, Doc, something’s really wrong. Ever time I take off my glasses I can't hear a blame thing.
Daddy said, Brine, when we got to Daytona yore Maw-Maw seen a bunch of seagulls and said, Ben, don’t get fooled. These ain’t real chickens.
Daddy said, Brine, when I went to whoop Hitler’s sorry butt, I ended up on a ship instead. But it sure beat choppin cotton, and I learnt how to do things. If you’d git your nose out of them books you might learn how to do things, too.
Daddy said, Brine, I’ll be by at six in the morning to cut a hole in yore roof.
***
And boy, did he ever. He cut a hole in my roof, a hole in my head, and a hole in my heart.
So, dear reader, do you understand how? Do you understand why?
I’ve done my best to try to explain. Can you explain? Can we somehow, together, reconstruct the heart? Can we somehow put the bullet back into the gun?
Can I explain how to break a hateful heart and resurrect a shattered soul?
Brian Griffin holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia. His fiction, poetry, and essays have been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, and his collection Sparkman in the Sky was chosen by Barry Hannah to receive the Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction. Single Lens Reflex, a collection of linked poems about surviving a bloody domestic terror attack, is forthcoming from Iris Press. Brian has taught writing at the University of Virginia and the University of Tennessee. He is the former Director of Lifespan Religious Education at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville.
