I’ve been asked what the memorial at Vick Cemetery looks like.

There is a pale gray granite obelisk, perhaps twenty feet tall, atop a darker stone plinth seated in the center of a brick-paved circle. Hollies badly in need of trimming shelter the circle, and twin cherry trees flank openings on opposite sides. It’s barely visible from the street now, and in summer all these trees and bushes completely obscure the monument.

There is some irony to the poem embossed on a brass plaque on one side of the monument’s base. At least some of the dead of Vick cemetery would be known to more than God had the city not misplaced or discarded the key to cemetery survey or destroyed the remaining grave markers.

Photographs by Lisa Y. Henderson, February 2020.