Associate Professor Airea D. Matthews wrote "Don’t Forget to Remember" to mark the dedication of "Don't Forget to Remember (Me)" on April 24, 2025.
Don’t Forget to Remember
-for the 248 Black laborers and servants who served this campus in the late 19th to early 20th century.
-for the others who served whose names we cannot hold
Don’t forget to remember:
the young women like Etta
who bade their family goodbye,
speaking tongues of ghosts from future
or Nellie, Sarah, and Braxton carrying
valises packed tighter than an AME
pew on Easter, who left home
in Spring for elsewhere, bundled
in cotton and grit.
Don’t forget to remember
how they practiced saying their names
in a mirror-- sharper, straighter, landing
consonants like they could iron Eastville’s
lilt from the folds of their twang.
Don’t forget to remember
Ritta scrubbed limestone silent
with hands raw from weather,
cleaned white linens for girls
learning dead languages
she was never taught.
Those who scoured baths, hauled
books, turned down beds,
bound aprons, closed bodices,
laced shoes, tied curtains against
winter’s faltering light. Those who
overheard ugly asides and held
back. Those overseen, overlooked.
Don’t forget to remember
Lula knew to make a square knot—
the kind that held fast, grew tighter
if looped between duty and legacy.
A knot snug enough to stifle
a day’s worth of sorrow,
loose enough to undo at nightfall
when her body became her own.
Don’t forget to remember
men who rode iron corridors
through fields of flight, who slept
upright in their porter’s coats,
buttons glinting like borrowed stars.
Those who returned stray lanterns,
swept the steps of gothic libraries,
and rinsed regret from hardwood
for the good of girls born to gilded frame.
And as morning blistered leaded panes,
they moved like tide through tunnels—
unhaltered by shore,
drawn forward by moons
that rarely rose to meet them.
Don’t forget to remember
they, too, had dreams to soar—
not with wax and wing like Icarus,
but with grease on their fingers
and grace in their silence.
When they walked these halls,
they walked unseen,
bearing the weight of history
in their backs and knees,
their names charred in fire
by timeclocks and logs.
Don’t forget to remember
George brought his dignity
to each locked pantry door,
carried his blues in left pocket
next to a tintype image
he never stopped touching.
Don’t forget to remember.
daughters who airmailed hope
so their brothers could finish school,
or sons who bowed their heads
in deference but never in denial.
Those women who wore braided
legacies—not just styles
but cartographies.
Tight rows traced
routes of escape,
paths crossed in night’s lacuna,
rivers waded in secret,
a map twined down a daughter’s
nape by a mother who delivered
the North Star’s promise.
Don’t forget to remember
Irene, Alice, Mary, Emily crossed
thresholds—some proud, some shame-slicked,
some weary of work, and all half-named
for need’s sake and want’s glory.
May we never forget those
once hidden, whose labor
brings us here and binds
us, even now, together
And may we always remember
it’s not simply the site
that helps us to honor.
It’s their honor
that helps us to see.
