♪♪ ♪♪ [ Water lapping gently ] ♪♪ ♪♪ -I think all of our lives, there are opportunities for stillness.

Sometimes they're forced upon us.

♪♪ For many reasons, life will tell you to sit down, but for the most part, we're encouraged to keep moving.

♪♪ ♪♪ My grandmother used to live downtown.

♪♪ Whenever we came down, she would insist that we go on walks, and one of the walks that we would always take was down to Hart Plaza.

♪♪ And I just remember being at the river and looking out at Windsor and her, you know, telling me that water never stops moving.

And how profound that was to me, you know?

♪♪ You know, this idea of, like, constant motion.

♪♪ Whenever I come home, one of the first things I do is go to Belle Isle.

You know, I just do a lap around the isle.

It doesn't matter what season it is.

It could be the dead of winter or it could be a crowded summer day.

But that's like a real grounding for me, you know?

When I was growing up and when my daddy would come get me on the weekends, we would do a lap around Belle Isle in his '98.

He always knew somebody in the park.

It was always some family having a barbecue.

And even if he just knew one person, that was reason enough to, like, crash [chuckles] the barbecue.

The giant slide towers in my memory.

♪♪ First of all, me being super brave... [ Laughs ] ...surfing down there.

It was when I discovered that I was fearless.

♪♪ [ Water lapping gently ] ♪♪ ♪♪ And I was born in the Black Bottom.

When my family first came up from Alabama, they landed in the Black Bottom.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Women vocalizing ] There's this one beautiful picture of three or four generations of that side of my family on Belle Isle.

They went to Belle Isle, this place that had been so sacred to me my entire life, way before I saw this picture.

I'm probably connected to my egún, to my ancestors... through them having walked through this space.

And even if this space is something different, you know, now... it's still this space where they once were.

♪♪ ♪♪ When I look at the east side in particular, and I know how many people and families and literal homes are missing... Like, I remember driving through my old hood on Eastlawn at Charlevoix and Vernor and just crying... because none of the houses were there.

And it probably looks a lot like Alabama.

It probably looks like where my people came from, you know, quite frankly, on both sides.

My mother's from Indiana.

It looks like... something incredibly rural.

♪♪ [ Water lapping gently ] ♪♪ The flooding eats your memories.

It destroys them.

It literally, you know, takes your old photographs, your prom dress, your father's boots.

♪♪ ♪♪ When I think about flooding, I think about... you know, how when water is still.

Flooding is literally like water being trapped and having nowhere to go.

♪♪ Sometimes we don't even have not just the energy, but the means to, like, deal with flooding.

♪♪ I think about what's about to happen to this whole region.

I think about individual's basement and what it means every spring to have to, like, go down there and bail out your basement every year and try to repair that damage and then have some resilience against the way that it eats your house, the foundation of your house.

And so then what we do consequently with memories and with... just love thoughts really is we -- we store them in a place, and... sometimes we pull them out to tend to them, you know?

But for the most part, we have to keep moving because life is constantly in motion and it's constantly changing.

I try not to judge the changes, you know?

I like to welcome them, but I also sometimes bemoan them like I'm mournful of the things that are past.

♪♪ ♪♪ So much of what's important about Detroit is the blackness of it, you know?

And as we lose that, just how much gets buried, whether it's when freeways are created or when we just necessarily have to move forward and things just get, you know, stored away maybe to be looked at some other time.

But it could also be that they just end up, you know, being... eaten up by the water, by the mold, by the neglect.

I don't have anything profound to say about erasure.

It's just this sinking feeling of, like, cities that may or may not have existed, you know, whether it was Atlantis or some city of gold.

Will we exist moving forward?

And if not, will these memories and these stories persist in a thousand years?

[ Water lapping gently ] ♪♪ Like most people, I have an existential dread when it comes to thinking about climate.

I think about what it would look like if Detroit suddenly became home to a bunch of climate refugees, if Michigan is a safe place... and we had all the fresh water.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Music fades ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪