They offered to build highway, a ripple of hot, black tar jobs, they said, money in your pocket, smooth motoring all day long they’d carve it through thick forest, over steep hills, across our wide, fertile valleys with their slow rivers So we took their jobs, because we were hungry and poor we sold our youth on empty promises, our backs on endless toil for a few dollars a day to put a little bread on the table we cut and dug and drove that line right through the heart of our land And when exhausted we lay on that flat slash of dirt, the soil that we had turned and leveled, beaten down and tamed they paved right over our bodies, didn’t slow down no how for anyone drove tractors over us, flattened a shroud of hot asphalt over all But they made sure the white bodies lay on top of the black bodies and told us that was proof some had it better than others
