Who wants to be a Millionaire?

Story by Chris Graham

I’m reading this book, The Millionaires: A Novel of the New South, by Inman Majors, and I’m thinking, Swear to God, this is Waynesboro politics in print.

Majors, a James Madison University professor, does live in Waynesboro, but after talking with him I realized I’m the only one who sees any Waynesboro in his book, a fictional account of two brothers in late 1970s Tennessee who run a gubernatorial campaign and lead the effort to land the World’s Fair in Knoxville.

Majors’ childhood experiences in Knoxville and Nashville as the son of a political lobbyist played a formative role in the development of the storyline. “When I was a kid, my dad would take me out of school for a couple of days – we were living in Knoxville then – and he’d bring me down to the state capital in Nashville and just let me hang out with him,” said Majors, who has “been around politicians my whole life,” and who was also around football a good bit in his formative years – his father and three of his uncles played major-college football, and one of the uncles is Johnny Majors, who won a national championship at Pitt before becoming the coach at Tennessee.

Majors said The Millionaires, as much as it’s a book about politics, is really a book about brothers. “My younger brother and me, we’re very close,” said Majors, talking about his relationship and sometimes sibling rivalry with his brother, Danny. “He’s very successful in business, and very ambitious, I’m very ambitious. You share so much history. You share DNA. And I started wondering, Are we ambitious because of DNA? Are we ambitious because of the way we were raised?

“These guys in the book, I think, had this sense of self,” Majors said. “Ambition is really good. You’re not going to get anywhere without ambition. But unchecked, it can be really dangerous. So in the book, these guys, I think they come in with good intentions. They just get ahead of themselves. They want to be known. They want to be at the big table. They want to have a say in city government. They don’t think it ought to be just old money and established people.”

Which brings us back to the dynamo that is Waynesboro, which has enough political clashes involving old money and new blood to keep things interesting. The Majors family – including wife Christy and children Tess, 8, and Max, 4 – landed here almost by accident. Inman and Christy had been searching for a home in the Harrisonburg market with no luck in the real-estate boom of 2005 when they ended up at the old Peck’s Barbecue at the entrance to the Pelham subdivision.

“We turned there, just drove by, and I said, This is the kind of neighborhood I’d like to live in,” Majors said. “So we drove by a house and just bought it. Didn’t know anything about Waynesboro. I moved in, and was unpacking the 18-wheeler, and I looked back and said, Is that the mountains? I didn’t even know that I could see the Blue Ridge Mountains from my backyard. That’s how hurry-scurry we were.”

And from there, “I don’t think I’ll ever get my wife and kids out of here. They absolutely love it here,” said Majors, who seems to have developed his own strong affinity for Waynesboro.

“We moved here from Tullahoma, Tenn., which is a similar-sized town to Waynesboro, but everybody had been there forever, so it was hard to make new friends. So we were afraid it would be the same thing here. But here, there were so many new people who’d moved here the past four or five years who were eager – Hey, we don’t know anybody, we want to get to meet some folks – that it has been easy to get to meet new people,” Majors said.

“I could never write in New York City. I like where I am to be settled, I like it to be laid-back and relaxed,” Majors said. “Waynesboro is the perfect town to write. I like that nobody knows I’m a writer. It’s nice. Most of my neighbors don’t even know. I’m just Inman the neighbor, the guy out there throwing the frisbee with his kids.”