Let’s circle back for a moment to Wilson Communications and Marketing Director Rebecca Agner’s comment about the status of the cemetery ditch incident:
Let me tell you the problem with this.
Pro-blems.
First, “the marker near the ditch” is at least two Vick Cemetery markers uncovered and broken when contractors scraped the ditch bank. It’s also sections of concrete kerbing damaged at the Tate family plot in Odd Fellows.
Let them dismiss that as semantics though. There is a more critical issue.
New South Associates is a highly respected cultural resource management firm. Many regard them as the Southeast’s gold standard for geophysical services like ground-penetrating radar. Kudos to the City for contracting with New South to handle this work, both at Vick Cemetery and, earlier, at the private Farmer family cemetery at the corner of Kenan and Pine Streets downtown (a project no one had to beg them to do.)
However, for all the expertise it brings, New South is operating at a glaring deficit here: its “additional guidance” on “next steps” comes with no input from or critique by Vick’s essential stakeholders, the descendant community.
Nearly everything we know about the history of Vick Cemetery comes from the collective memories of its descendant community and the six years of my research as documented in Black Wide-Awake. It is we who have cried out for years that graves lie in the public right-of-way and must be located and protected. It is we who have pulled back the curtains on the repeated abuses the City has heaped upon the bones of our ancestors. Yet, even as our fearful prophecies have manifested, we remain shut out of discussion and decision-making about our own dead. The City stands mute, ignoring our pleas for information and demands for inclusion. And New South, under contract to the City, cannot talk out of school.
Whose graves are these? How many others lie next to the road? Who authorized excavation in the ditch? In Odd Fellows Cemetery?
New South and the City will decide what is best for Vick. They will cover up, or move, or whatever, the grave markers broken on December 10, and you and I will find out about it when they feel like updating their webpage to tell us. When it comes to decisions impacting our sacred spaces, Wilson moves in silence. In darkness. Undercover. Black Wide-Awake and Lane Street Project, however, will continue to train a sharp and steady white light on Vick Cemetery and on every person who claims a superior right to decide its future — or who hangs back and lets others exclude us.