Buttermilk Bottom: The Erased City

Lyrics

There's a map in my head...
The streets have no names now.
Just ghosts of houses.
Ghosts of porches.
They called you Buttermilk Bottom.
Not a slum, not to us.
I remember the smell of damp clay after a rain.
The long, straight lines of the shotgun houses.
Each one holding a life, a kitchen prayer, a Saturday night song.
Woodsmoke in the evening, from a hundred chimneys.
A city inside a city.
We knew the shortcuts, the loose fence boards.
We had our own geography.
Then the river of progress came rolling through.
A river of concrete and steel.
It didn't bend, it just broke.
They wiped your name off the city plat.
Said it was for the best.
Said it was clearance.
But what they cleared... was us.
Buttermilk Bottom, you're just a whisper now.
It started with a tremor in the ground.
A low hum you could feel in your teeth.
The surveyors came first, with their cold-eyed tripods.
Then the notices, tacked to the doors we'd just painted.
Nineteen sixty-two. Nineteen sixty-three.
The air got thick with the dust of our own walls.
The sound of the grinding... the wrecking ball's slow swing.
Each crash, a memory erased.
A roof I was born under, turned to rubble by noon.
And the river of progress kept rolling through.
A river of concrete and steel.
It didn't bend, it just broke.
They wiped your name off the city plat.
Said it was for the best.
Said it was clearance.
But what they cleared... was us.
Buttermilk Bottom, you're just a whisper now.
They built the John C. Calhoun homes on your bones.
Stacked families in the sky.
And the Connector, that long, grey scar...
It screams all night with the sound of somewhere else.
I stand on the overpass sometimes.
Try to see where my grandmother's garden was.
But there's nothing.
Just pavement. Just promise.
Just the shadow of the highway.
They erased the city.
But they can't erase the map in my head.
Buttermilk...
Bottom...