The Lives Beneath the Ground

The American Purpose

Helping to tend a historic Black cemetery restores a sense of the lives it holds.

I love cemeteries. I know that sounds strange, but I come by my enthusiasm honestly. The family story is that a matriarch of ours, generations ago, used to collect “gypsy” tombstones and use them to decorate her living room mantelpiece. The idea grabbed my seven-year-old imagination. I envisioned slabs of indigo stone, engraved with roses and embedded with crystals, glinting in the light of a stoked fire. How exciting to live with things so beautiful and exotic, I thought. I didn’t think about the desecration that entailed.

Though I abandoned many—most, I hope—of my ancestors’ questionable habits, I’m still fascinated by cemeteries and the lives contained within them. A child’s name, scratched onto a worn slate shingle in the Great Smoky Mountains, speaks of the tragedy and weariness of Appalachian pioneer life. A tombstone in Brooklyn shares a recipe for spritz cookies—butter, sugar, flour, vanilla, other good things—and hints at laughter-filled afternoons and a giving spirit. These past lives seem to notice ours as well. Gravestones are content to share a companionable silence, like a good friend, or offer a new perspective that gently lifts the weight of everyday burdens. Grave markers, whether made of granite, wood, or metal, testify to what we all have in common: a date of birth and a date of death. They speak of shared human experience, hear our anxieties, and seem to say, It’s all right: That, too, is a part of life.

Many cemeteries suffer from extreme neglect. Throughout the East Coast and deep South, in particular, historic Black cemeteries and the burial grounds of the enslaved face circumstances that few of us can imagine. Many of these graveyards were created in the decades after emancipation by communities of people who were building free lives from the ground up. Underfunding, municipal neglect, race-motivated vandalism, and the destructive tendencies of nature are just a few of the factors that have led to the widespread erasure of gravesite markers.

Fortunately, a number of citizen efforts have now been dedicated to finding and restoring lost graves. Cemetery volunteer work offers a chance to restore some of what has been erased. When we take up this cause, it offers us, in return, a chance to connect and grow.

To read the full article, visit: https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/finding-the-lives-beneath-the-ground/

This article originally appeared in The American Purpose, August 25, 2021.