One envelope becomes two.
One generation becomes two.
“About three days later, I had someone helping me do the cataloging. And I just told her, here’s my family names, Lavender, Bellegarde, Herman—if you find them, let me know. And she said, I’ve got a Mary Herman here. And I looked at the number, I looked at the age, and I did the quick math. And I was like, that’s my great grandmother.”
To continue cataloging is to continue touching what was taken. To hold it, even briefly, is to participate in its afterlife. The reversal is not that she stops. It is that she understands what it means to keep going.
What had been a single moment of recognition began to widen. Still, she continued the work. The envelopes still need to be returned, even if was inside them herself. Just then, Meredith Vasta felt complicit in the system.
“They said, we understand when this happened, science was different. Norms were different. This was a different time period. We understand that. And they felt bad, they didn’t want us to overly apologize. But I think the leadership we have are like, no, we’re happy to say we were complicit. Things have changed, but we held on to it for 80 plus years. And we could have, we should have done better.”
