Auburn's Future: Pavement and Promise

Lyrics

Here. Stop here.
Run your hand over this part.
Feel that?
That stubborn line that won't stay healed.

They say a great oak tree stood right here.
Before the constant hum. Before the long shadow.
Before they poured the sky full of concrete and called it the future.
The I-75/85 Connector.
It breathes hot exhaust down on us, a river of steel nobody asked for.
And this pavement, this thin gray skin, it remembers the roots.
It splits every time they patch it.
A stubborn refusal. A memory in the aggregate.

This is Auburn now.
Pavement and promise.
Every crack a story, every new shoot a prayer.
We don't build on perfect ground.
We build on the ground we have.
We build on the scar.
This is pavement and promise.

Just west of here, a ghost city breathes.
Buttermilk Bottom.
Sometimes the backhoes turn up old pottery, a teacup handle from 1962.
Fragments of a life bulldozed flat.
But you look up, and there’s Ebenezer's spire.
Still cutting the sky. Still holding the line after all this time.
The King Center keeps its eternal flame, a quiet promise against the noise.
Some roots, you see, they can’t pave over.
They just go deeper.

This is Auburn now.
Pavement and promise.
Every crack a story, every new shoot a prayer.
We don't build on perfect ground.
We build on the ground we have.
We build on the scar.
This is pavement and promise.

I hear John Wesley Dobbs, still walking this street, measuring its worth in footsteps.
I see Grace Towns Hamilton, drawing an unbroken line on a City Hall map.
They left us the blueprints, not the finished house.
See that vacant lot over by the viaduct?
Last year, just broken glass and kudzu.
Now, it's collard greens and tomatoes reaching for that same sun.
A community garden.
That's the work, you understand?
Planting something beautiful in the dust of what they took.

So run your hand over it one more time.
That stubborn line.
It isn't just damage. It isn't just a crack in the pavement.
It's an opening.
It's where the rain gets in.
Where the light gets in.
It’s our promise.