By Dativa Eyembe
Unknown…
Unknown…
Unknown…
Faces we must imagine, names we do not know.
Hearth stands tall in the center of campus, forcing us to look, to remember.
But do our fellow students look, do we collectively remember? What do such monuments to history like Hearth and the Bray School mean to us all?
As Student Thought Partners with the William & Mary Bray School Lab, we are haunted always by the past, as we look to it, remember, transcribe, study.
We know that voices carry.
On wind: the flutter of children’s laughter on Nassau Street.
On time: the echoes of life from centuries ago.
Both are just as present, all at once, standing in front of the Bray School.
We question the discreteness of bounds like time and see connections to our own lives in the 18th century. But are we alone in this?
W&M Bray School Lab Graduate Assistant Nicole Brown and I hosted the Student Partner Panel to pose these questions and support fellow student thought partners in leading this discussion.
Home. Community. Historic.
These touchstones were provided by fellow students for a community word cloud to answer these questions at our Student Thought Partner Panel. Students asserted that the historic is still a reflection of home, and of community, as we know it today.
Students agreed that various projects in which Student Thought Partners participate at the Bray School Lab – such as the Virginia Gazette Project and the Mapping the Literacy of Enslaved Virginians Project — provide mirrors through which we can see these reflections with real names and moments in people’s lives.
“It was like their social media.”James McCormack, a Student Thought Partner on the panel, points out cogently about the striking familiarity of these community formations as related to the Virginia Gazette Project.
This awareness was mirrored by fellow Thought Partners Lee Cox and Erin George, as well as the audience of students on campus who collectively remarked on the importance of seeing these connections to the past.
For me, the past, and fighting its erasure, is at the heart of my work: as an Africana Studies major and a Student Thought Partner.
That is to say, that very often I go back and get it – which many will recognize as Sankofa methodology: I look backwards in order to move forward.
That is because my peers and I understand that everything we know today does not exist in a vacuum; if we want to understand why we are where we are in the present, we need to honestly and intentionally understand our connections to the past.
This is why when I posed the question to students:
Is this work important — does it matter?
The answer was resounding affirmation.
Students shared that history is often erased, and the William & Mary Bray School Lab helps provide critical remedy. Perhaps most importantly that history is real and relatable because it is made of life.
Just as real and relatable as the present day.
Dativa Eyembe is a 3rd year student majoring in Africana and minoring in Creative Writing. Dativa will be a W&M Scholars Undergraduate Research Experience (WMSURE) Student Fellow next year, and is excited to write as much as possible, whether it be for the Sharp Seminar or her Honors Thesis centering James Baldwin and performance/fiction!