Friday, May 17: @ Brooklyn Central Public Library

Miriam Neptune is an impressive person. The work that she has done over her time, the years she has spent fighting up to provide opportunities for everyone around her. 

The work expressed right in front of us of what it truly meant for a Black woman to truly work twice as hard to get half as far. Yet, if given the time and space, she can transform a space.

To come from the Archives and my musings about it to then learn about someone making moves and transforming the world around them was a kind of whiplash to me. Yet it answered the questions I had about my own worth, my own history, my own legacy. 

I remember a phrase that was thrown around when I was still teaching, that the fruits of my labor as a teacher are rarely things I will get to see. That was a truth that I had accepted knowing that maybe the lessons students learned from me won’t manifest until later on, until they’ve graduated from my class. Librarianship is similar in that we’re not typically privy to the results of the growth that the students and patrons journey through, but that we are hopefully helpful guideposts or checkpoints along the way.

Yet it mattered to me during the Fridays in May sessions about my own legacy, about what happens when I’ve retired, when I’m gone. Will people know about the work I’ve put in? Does it matter if I’m named? Would the accolades make me feel better while I’m still alive?

I was demanding to be remembered, but I thought about what I was doing to remember. 

The answer is that I am not doing anything. Truthfully, painful as that might sound now that I see myself write out these words.

This reminds me of posts I’ve seen on the Internet about the cultural divide that comes from older generations saving their special China and other heirlooms and expecting the younger generations to hold onto them, to pass them off, without teaching them the importance of these special things. Or without cultivating the curiosity in maintaining that history. So you have complete sets of plates and cups that have been passed down in past generations losing its value, losing its place in a home, because people sat on their assumptions despite the changing times.

If I do not remember, how can I be remembered?

The connections from the past to the present to the future requires the time and resources and effort to connect them. I want to be a connector. I was once featured as an ACRL librarian of the week and I remember calling myself a kind of ‘conduit’.

At the time, I was focused on being a conduit of information, but perhaps I can be a conduit of remembrance as well for the things that matter to me and my work. If I’m lucky, I can be connected to that, too.