Bankhead and English Avenue: The Adjacent Histories

Lyrics

The Norfolk Southern line draws the border.
Hot brake dust on the August air, 2012.
Sweet rot of kudzu on a chain-link fence.
This side of the tracks.
That side of the menu.

These shotgun houses, straight and narrow.
Built between 1920 and 1940.
Fulton County ledger, a single line for a life's deed.
Names on a page, holding title through the lean years.
The porch swing chains are rusted, but they hold.

This is English Avenue. This is Bankhead Highway.
The memory is longer than the new brick sidewalks.
The roots run deeper than the poured foundations.
The porches still hold court, and the stories don't fade.

The Constitution wrote of disinvestment in 1968.
A WPA photograph from 1937 shows a goat tied to a post.
Eighth hundred block of English Avenue.
Just a few streets from the place they now call the Goat Farm.
Some names are lost. The wives who argued rent. The men who patched the roofs in the 1990s.
But the work remains.

This is English Avenue. This is Bankhead Highway.
The memory is longer than the new brick sidewalks.
The roots run deeper than the poured foundations.
The porches still hold court, and the stories don't fade.

Saturday morning, 2008. The bells from Mt. Zion Baptist.
They still ring.
They mix with the turning trucks on Howell Mill now.
John Hope's name is on a boulevard, but his work is in the meeting rooms.
In the voices that say: this is our home. We are still here.

The train passes.
The air clears.
The sound that's left is a screen door closing.
A voice calling a name from a porch.