The Cherokee Nation: Unseen Footprints

Lyrics

I stand here, where the street sign reads your name.
Green metal, white letters.
Cherokee.
Cherokee Road.
It's just a name, now. A direction.

Before the asphalt, there was a trace.
A path worn by moccasins, not tires.
Through a forest that breathed a different air.
Then, in '28, a glint in the red clay.
Gold.
And the fever started.
A hunger for land that was not empty.

And oh, the irony hangs in the humid air.
Cherokee Road, a monument to what isn't there.
Paved smooth over a million unseen footprints.
A quiet street that holds a violent secret.
Your name is a ghost.

I hear the scratch of a president's pen.
Andrew Jackson, May 1830. An Act of Removal.
I see John Ross, his face set against the tide.
I see Major Ridge in the cold hall at New Echota.
December '35.
A treaty signed by the few, damning the many.
A quiet, terrible bargain.

And oh, the irony hangs in the humid air.
Cherokee Road, a monument to what isn't there.
Paved smooth over a million unseen footprints.
A quiet street that holds a violent secret.
Your name is a ghost.

Then came the soldiers. Winfield Scott's orders.
Eighteen thirty-eight.
The summer of dust and tears.
Sixteen thousand people driven from these hills.
Four thousand shallow graves along the way.
They walked west, so men like H. Gordon Jones could build east.
This green lawn, this perfect symmetry...
bought with their leaving.

Now the sprinklers hiss on manicured grass.
At number twenty-one, the lights come on.
And the sign just stands there.
Cherokee.
A name.
A road.
An echo under my feet.