Free Cat Power by Elizabeth Goodman Page B

in Chan's life, even when she was a little girl. For all of Myra's faults, she stuck around to raise her children. Charlie seemed to operate as if parenthood was a hobby, one you could take up in your downtime and drop when things got too hard. When Charlie kicked Chan out of his house, it only reinforced what her childhood had already taught her about herself: namely, that she was worthless. “I was kind of shocked,” Chan has said of her dad's decision. “But I was like, Who gives a fuck? I'm not gonna be anybody anyway.”

In 1881, construction began on the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills, a factory located near the railroad tracks in east Atlanta. Heading into the turn of the century, textile production in the South emerged as a major industry and the
mill expanded several times, bringing in workers, including Chan's great-great-grandparents, from South Georgia and the Appalachian mountains to live and work there. The insular neighborhood that was built to house them became known as Cabbagetown. “It got the name because you could smell the cabbage cooking,” Leamon says. “That was all they could afford.”
    After World War II, changes in the business rendered the mill's products increasingly obsolete, but the majority of its workers stayed in Cabbagetown until the mill finally closed for good in 1977. Afterward, most of the workers scattered in search of new work, while those who stayed watched Cabbagetown fall into disrepair. In the 1980s and 1990s, a loose-knit community of backwater punks, painters, sculptors, drug dealers, drug doers, and musicians like Chan took refuge in this curious little neighborhood of modest two-story shotgun homes sitting side by side on narrow, uneven streets. These artists sought the same stability and willful isolation that mill families enjoyed one hundred years prior.
    Cabbagetown's geography reinforces the sense of remoteness prized by those who live there. Railroad tracks separate the neighborhood from the leafy neighborhood of Inman Park to the north. South of Cabbage-town is East Atlanta, a formerly rough neighborhood where much of the city's recent music renaissance is taking place; to the west is Oakland Cemetery, and to the south is Grant Park. Even now there is a discernible sensory shift that takes place when you cross underneath the graffiti-decorated Krog Street Bridge and move south from the grand Victorians and established suburban splendor of Inman Park, under the railroad tracks, and into Cabbagetown. The air becomes thicker and more stagnant. The delicate camellia roses smell sweeter. The cicadas are louder on a summer night. The elms seem taller, their roots deeper, the expanse of their branches wider and more stately. Local women sip coffee and stop to gossip with each other on the way to get the mail. Ayoung man takes off his T-shirt to hose off his balcony revealing intricate, almost refined full-body tattoos. Children languidly ride their bikes around the narrow, shady streets, their calls to one another drowned out by that thick, still air as they race each other up the small hilly alley that connects Cameron Street to Berean Avenue, the very street where Chan's great-grandparents made their home, and where Chan would live, decades later, in the late nineties.
    Olivier Alary, the French musician who performs under the name Ensemble and who recorded the song “Disown, Delete” with Chan at Zero Return Studio in Atlanta, remembers Chan giving him a tour through Cabbagetown. “This old lady that had no teeth had this really angry dog that was swinging on the rocking chair,” Alary remembers. “She kept saying, ‘He's a bad dog!’ It really felt like we were stuck in two centuries ago. Really flowery and really dirty. We saw a dog attached with a rope, not a leash, and he had two really trashy white kids playing in mud. It reeked of poverty.”
    There's a deep, cultural richness to Cabbagetown that makes outsiders feel distinctly foreign. You don't know this