Castonoble Hooks and I met today with Mayor Carlton Stevens, City Manager Rodger Lentz, Assistant City Managers Albert Alston and Bill Bass, Councilmember Susan Kellum, Sarah Lowry of New South Associates, and Melissa Timo of the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology to talk about Vick Cemetery. This was a conversation more than five years in the making, and I deeply appreciate this shift in the City’s response to our concerns about Vick. 

We heard Lowry’s report on New South’s assessment of the markers unearthed in December and her and Timo’s recommendations on further action at Vick. We asked questions of them and each other and talked frankly for more than an hour and a half. It’s premature to share much of the discussion here, but I do want to say this:

The stones that a contractor unearthed in the ditch bank at Vick Cemetery were pieces of a marble box, a sort of proto-vault, that once held an ancestor. The broken marble slabs are all, beyond chemical changes in the soil, that are left of the burial. The top slab, which likely would have been engraved with the name of the deceased, was not found, and we do not know whether this was the grave of a woman, man, or child.

The accident that dislodged this box was awful, but has been transmuted for good. I am grateful to the ancestor who, by losing his or her repose, opened a path for us to move forward in our fight for respect and due care for Vick Cemetery. May we continue to walk in our purpose and always remember and honor our dead.