REMOVING THE OLD SLAVE CEMETERY

“There used to be an old colored slave cemetery in Arlington Virginia at the terminus of the “Pike” but it was dug up in the early 1970’s to make way for a new hotel.  Many of my ancestors were buried there it being one of the few cemeteries for colored folk in the area.  Nobody knows what happened to the remains of those men and women…” D. Vollin

There used to be an old colored cemetery there,

Underneath the waist-high weeds… the empty eye-sockets of slaves,

looked up to the heavens from their graves,

though no reference remained to mark just where.

So long that field had lain without ceremony or gathering,

whilst poke weed climbed and quickly ripened in the spring,

when its sanguine berries swayed on withered stalks as the land was autumning,

and when the smooth snow leveled it, hiding it away from reckoning.

O’er time I imagine that every plot had been filled,

It being the only place around for burying the colored dead,

the land climbed a steep embankment flattening as the slope came to a level head,

but remained untended by the colored folk still living near that hill.

When time remembered where my father’s lay,

it knew their families had not died out or moved away,

we all watched as the green hillside was cut down deep beneath the clay,

so the wheels of progress could have their way.

By David Vollin

GALLERY OF RELATED IMAGES