Nashvillian of the Year

In an abandoned house on Eastland Avenue, Clemmie Greenlee withered to a frail, gaunt 85 pounds. Smoking crack cocaine incessantly, she sometimes went days without eating, sleeping or bathing. Consumed by addiction, Greenlee was living for the next high, as she had for years. When her supply dwindled, she would sell her brittle, worn-out body until she earned enough money turning tricks to replenish her stash.

Brutality and violence were occupational hazards Greenlee had come to expect. She was thrown from moving cars, pistol-whipped, stabbed in the back, beaten until barely conscious and raped. Despite these horrors, prostitution was her only means of getting the fix she so desperately craved. It was a vicious cycle, and it was killing her, but she couldn’t stop.

After more than two decades of selling sex in dark, dank crack houses, filthy motel rooms and dimly lit alleys, all to feed an unrelenting addiction, Greenlee was exhausted, feeling utterly alone.

It was a cool morning in early spring when Greenlee scanned her grim surroundings—a boarded-up house infested with vermin, fellow addicts passed out on the floor. It was the first time in years she had seen her life clearly, and what she saw both sickened and saddened her.

“One day I just got up—I probably hadn’t even been to sleep—and I just looked around at all the men I slept with. I seen all the dope on the table that I continued to smoke, I seen all the feces from all the rats and dogs and some of us,” she says. “There was just something about that morning. I just didn’t want that life no more.”

Clean and sober now for six years, Greenlee recalls this chapter of her life without a hint of shame. It’s part of her history, and she believes it’s the path God intended for her.

Not only has Clemmie Greenlee turned her own life around, she’s since dedicated all her energy (of which she seems to have an unending supply) to helping others in desperate situations do the same. Whether teaching classes to homeless men at the Union Rescue Mission, arranging rehabilitation services for addicts, talking to young gang members in search of a way out, or walking the same thoroughfares she once worked, urging prostitutes that there is another path, her goal is the same—helping the hopeless find hope. For these reasons, Greenlee is the Scene’s 2007 Nashvillian of the Year.

“All along I had this in me, I just didn’t know how to bring it out,” she says, talking excitedly with her hands, which jingle as the gold bracelets stacked on her wrist clang together. “Once I got back on the right trail, I found out that I was capable of not only having the love and compassion that I have for others, but knowing I can make a difference and I can speak out.”

Sitting among a bustling lunchtime crowd at a café in downtown Nashville, the 48-year-old Greenlee recounts the harsh realities of her past. Even while relaying heart-wrenching stories, she manages to find humor in the present, like the sight of a man dressed as Nashville’s famous “Snowbird” strolling by. “Oh my God, it’s Snowbird,” Greenlee shouts, before breaking into a boisterous laugh that seems too big for such a small woman. Every few minutes a wide smile emerges on her round face, which is framed by dangly gold-coin earrings. Twice during the conversation a passerby on the sidewalk knocks on the café window and waves, mouthing the words, “Hey, Clemmie!”

Not once does Greenlee notice the occasional glance from a stunned patron overhearing the conversation, or if she does, she doesn’t care. She talks openly of the poverty she experienced as a child; the first time she turned a trick at the age of 13; the first time she took a hit from the glass crack pipe, leaving her limp and wanting more; sleeping in abandoned houses, or worse, on the streets.

The only time Greenlee’s self-assurance seems to fade is when she talks of her son, who was born when she was still a child herself, and left in her mother’s care. By the time she kicked her addiction more than 20 years later, her son was grown and had become immersed in a life of crime on the streets, where he was fatally shot in 2003.

“I’ve beaten myself up so much, blaming myself for his death. I think if I hadn’t shown him this or that, things would be different,” she says, warning that at any moment she’s likely to break down. But she doesn’t cry, and instead goes on to talk of her son’s pretty white smile, his devotion to his own son, and how although he was caught up in crime, he had a loving heart and tried to steer others in the right direction. She’s comforted by the fact that before her son was killed she was a positive presence in his life, if only for a short time. “Not only did I corrode him with the wrong stuff, but I embedded him with the good stuff,” she says. “He saw me clean, he saw me powerful, he saw me speak out, he saw me come back to the community.”