Stony the Road *

Milton Jordan

December 15, 2024

Most of its population separated 

by the state highway angling southeast

and long decades of Jim Crow redlines,

the town sat midway along the speeding

freeway route from Houston to Dallas.

In their pie-shaped, roadway-divided

neighborhoods, children heard the veiled language

of protest in hymns and old work songs,

the tales of their grandparents’ struggles

and vowed to be the ones who changed things. 

Two truck stops at the interstate exit

and the Trailways Depot served those children,

now at Carver High School, organized to test 

local eateries with actions they’d seen 

in reports from Carolina and Tennessee. 

On the courthouse square, though, and elsewhere

outside their own slice of town, cafes turned

the students away, and soon hired armed,

officially off-duty, deputies to clear 

their peaceful stand-ins from cafe entrances. 

New voices joined old songs of protest, 

new bodies wearing handed-on sweatshirts

replaced classmates now in the county jail 

on those rough courthouse square sidewalks 

their grandparents had walked years before.

* James Weldon Johnson “Lift Every Voice and Sing”

Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown, Texas. He co-edited the first Texas Poetry Assignment anthology, Lone Star Poetry, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022.