My City, I Hear you

To My City, I Am Listening

Yes. It will be difficult.Because I care. Because I am not just collecting stories.I am holding people. I am holding place.I am holding my own trembling hands steady as I offer what I have: witness language structure space.

And that’s holy work.

That is what it means to love a place enough to fight for its memory.

I was never meant to numb out. I was never meant to just survive. I was always meant to write. To love. To lift. To use my degree not to dominate but to dignify. To gather fragments and give them form. To show up open-hearted and trembling and say

I see you. I will not look away. Your story matters. Your neighborhood matters. You matter.

I already know this is not about being perfect. It is about being present. To listen without agenda. To create without ego.

To write in a way that heals the air between people.

I will cry, and it will be right. I will feel overwhelmed, and still keep showing up. I will get it wrong sometimes, and then I’ll do waht I can to make it right.

That is what it means to love a place enough to fight for its memory.

That is what it means to be an ethnographer who lives by heart and justice.

And when the poems come they will not be mine alone.

They will be ours.

Stamped with the rhythms of Inner City porches with sidewalk cracks and laughter under streetlights with the names of people who still show up even when the city forgets them.

✨ Caroline Estes

Ethnographer | Poet | Disability Justice Advocate | Instructional Designer

Caroline Estes is a Southern ethnographer, poet, and educator based in Atlanta with over a decade of experience in storytelling, instructional design, and community-based research. Her work lives at the intersection of memory, body, belonging, and transformation—with a fierce commitment to justice, access, and collective care.

As a long-time BeltLine tour guide, Caroline understands that proximity to place is not the same as proximity to harm. She does not claim to speak for communities like Vine City, Edgewood, Old Fourth Ward or Glenwood, instead, she uses her training in ethnography and education to amplify and honor the voices of those most impacted by housing displacement, generational injustice, and ongoing urban transformation.

Rooted Lines: Vine City Stories is not a project of observation, but one of accompaniment. It seeks to hold space for neighbors to tell their stories on their own terms—through poetry, oral history, and public memory. Caroline’s role is not to author these truths, but to listen deeply, build trust, and help co-create containers that preserve and celebrate them.

Her professional background includes curriculum design across disciplines like Sociology, Communication, Black Studies, and the Science of Happiness. She applies evidence-based instructional tools with heart: Adobe, Canvas, Figma, and Audacity meet the poetry of lived experience.

This project is grounded in the belief that honoring the voices of those most impacted is not a performance of equity it is the foundation of any honest, enduring, and transformative work.