The last stop on my Nashville swimming tour was a place I am as familiar with as any spot in my hometown — Seven Hills Swim and Tennis Club. Eight miles from Hadley, five miles and a world from Rose Park, Seven Hills was the pool my family belonged to. I parked by a stone wall, climbed a magnolia-lined stairway and opened the door to the clubhouse. Every sensation of summers long past returned. The smell of short-order burgers and the sound of ping-pong drifted down the steps. Upstairs, circular glass-topped tables were surrounded by kids who have the day to do what they please. We walked along the edge of the pool and climbed a steep hillside behind it, and I saw that Seven Hills was still an L-shaped glimmer of blue tucked between Shy’s Hill and Laurel Ridge.

Kids still called out dives to each other in mid-air (“Can-opener!” “Pencil!”) and still sulked along the pool’s edge during 10-minute mandatory rest periods every hour. Back down by the water, moms (and they were still all moms) sat under umbrellas next to tote bags stuffed with towels, snacks and sprayable sunscreen. The mothers and I chatted about our respective Middle Tennessee childhoods; they listed the private clubs in town where they’d swam as girls: Wildwood, Temple Hills, West Meade, Hillwood, Maryland Farms — all places I knew, though no place was as evocative as that pool at the bottom of the ridge. With my toes on the edge, I watched the shifting patterns the sunlight made on the bottom and kept thinking of E.B. White’s line from “Once More, to the Lake”:

“There had been no years.”

And there hadn’t.

When the public pools were closed in 1961, Rose Park was a quarry where black children went to cool off, and Seven Hills had just opened in a brand-new suburb. Today, 55 years later, these swimming spots were still essentially segregated.

It might be overly idealistic to think public resort-style pools like Centennial, Hadley and Shelby would have brought blacks and whites together across the South had mayors and city councils not closed them at such a pivotal moment in our collective history. Still, as I drove from the Cumberland River, past TSU, to Hadley Park, Rose Park and finally Seven Hills last month, I couldn’t help but think these groups would enjoy each other: the elderly women greeting me as they waded through the indoor pool with their kickboards and the mothers sipping punch out of YETI tumblers, the boys waiting for their pool to reopen after lunch and the ones eating sandwiches packed from home while playing cards near the diving well — but they’ll likely never know each other beyond abstractions.

Minnie remembers that in 1961, “we just didn’t know that many black kids,” and a man I spoke with from Hadley told me that the only time he saw white people back then was when they came to the door to sell insurance. Both said this lack of knowledge bred fear.

Fifty-five years ago, Lillard told a hateful, fearful gate attendant that his presence would not change the water. And even today, author Jeff Wiltse maintains that public pools “are a pretty cool blank slate” for kids to play and interact with each other.



It’s enough to make you wonder if Southerners missed a chance to write a different story of racial reconciliation across those clear blue waters.