Old Fourth Ward: Rust Belt Echoes

Lyrics

The air tastes like coal ash before the sun is even up.
Just another Tuesday on the corridor.

The first shift whistle screams from the Fulton Bag Mill.
Smokestacks exhale a thick, grey breath into the sky.
Covers everything in a fine film, a second skin of soot.
On the brick of the Virginia Docks, on the tenement window sills.
Wagon wheels grind on the cobblestones down by the siding,
a sound like breaking teeth.
And the ground never stops shaking.
Not really.
The BeltLine trains pass right underneath, a constant iron tremor in your bones.

This is the rhythm of the ward.
The pound of the loom, the shriek of the steel.
The weight of a cotton bale hitting the dock floor.
It’s the only song we know.
A heartbeat of hammers and gears.
These are the rust belt echoes.
The story told in sweat and steam.

There are men with no names heaving white gold onto freight cars.
Their hands are cracked, their shoulders permanently stooped.
There are women inside the mill, their faces pale as the lint that hangs in the air.
Deafened by the dynamo's roar by the time they’re twenty.
Kids play in the narrow dirt alleys between the company houses,
dodging the filth and the foremen.
They learn the sound of the shift change before they learn their letters.
This is the fuel.
This is the cost.

This is the rhythm of the ward.
The pound of the loom, the shriek of the steel.
The weight of a cotton bale hitting the dock floor.
It’s the only song we know.
A heartbeat of hammers and gears.
These are the rust belt echoes.
The story told in sweat and steam.

And then one winter morning, nineteen fourteen… the rhythm breaks.
The great machines fall silent.
A different sound takes over.
A quiet, angry hum from a thousand throats.
Even the silence has a weight here.
A promise of violence.
A demand to be seen.

But the trains keep running.
The smokestacks keep breathing.
The soot keeps falling.
And the echoes…
The echoes just find new walls to bounce off of.