The Old Jail: Echoes in the Walls

Lyrics

One twenty-five East Trinity Place.
Just a brick building, an office for today.
Public Safety, the sign says, clean and new.
But you can feel the air is heavier here, pulled down by something old.

I close my eyes and see nineteen-oh-five.
The smell of wet mortar, the Georgia sun on raw lumber.
J. W. Golucke drew the plans, a specialist in civic shadows.
Romanesque Revival... a fortress of forgetting.
Thick walls to hold the sound in, stone arches that promised nothing but the slow turning of the earth.
Each brick laid was a promise to hide a story away.

The walls came down in a cloud of red dust.
The bars were sold for scrap metal and rust.
But you can't demolish the weight of a place.
You can't bulldoze a memory from the red Georgia clay.
The echo is in the ground now.
A cold spot on the map of this town.

I think about the hands on the cold iron.
Polished smooth by decades of waiting, of pleading.
The names scratched into the mortar with a stolen nail. A date. A prayer.
The scrape of a metal cup on concrete. The long silences between the turning of a key.
All those lives, stacked in cells, their stories ending in a docket book, a single line of ink.

The walls came down in a cloud of red dust.
The bars were sold for scrap metal and rust.
But you can't demolish the weight of a place.
You can't bulldoze a memory from the red Georgia clay.
The echo is in the ground now.
A cold spot on the map of this town.

I heard the dust was thick for days in sixty-eight.
The roar of the machines, a public forgetting.
Breaking stone, shattering glass, erasing the facade.
But some things stain the dirt, seep down to the water table.
Did they think the silence that followed
would be an empty one?

Now the new sirens sing their modern song.
Or maybe it's the same song, just a different key.
The ghosts here don't rattle chains. They just make the air colder.
One twenty-five East Trinity.
I stand here on the spot.
And I listen to the walls that aren't there.