US graveyards reveal segregation, surprises
‘Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America’s Cemeteries,’ by Greg Melville (Abrams Press)
It turns out that America’s graveyards are much more than keepers of our bodily remains until the organisms within the soil reclaim everything. Cemeteries tell us about our beliefs, principles, economics and cultural values, says Greg Melville in this fascinating examination of how we treat, and mistreat, our dead.
Given the topic, Melville moves briskly and with a keen eye for connections, trends and the absurd.
He notes, for example that post World War II layouts of suburbs were inspired by the simplicity of design that began decades earlier in cemeteries.
Cemeteries can be much more than collections of burial plots. Green-Wood cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, is famed for its sculptures and the art, artifacts and books also housed at the site, which also hosts exhibits and concerts.
America’s favorite place to scatter cremains? It may be Central Park in New York although the high concentration of calcium in cremains makes it advisable to spread them out widely.
Descendants of the Seneca Indians who lived in the area where Central Park was built had no chance to scatter their relatives’ cremains — the park was built over the village’s graveyards.
Dying is big business in America; Melville writes that the “death industrial complex” generates $20 billion in annual sales.
The book peeks over the horizon at what’s ahead in the dying business, given how many urban cemeteries are full or nearly so, and having trouble maintaining themselves because they lack new income.
The book says the 144,000 cemeteries in the United States collectively take up more room than the entire state of Delaware.
New burial grounds in Philadelphia and Marin County, California, wrap bodies in cloth and bury them without preserving chemicals, metal caskets or concrete burial vaults.
The book’s most powerful sections are those explaining the lengths whites often went to so no Black people would be buried nearby. We shunned early Chinese immigrants also when they died despite their roles in building the transcontinental railroad and western cities. We looted Indian graves and built on top of Indian burial grounds.
Not even in death could Blacks escape segregation. Melville’s book documents how in many states, cemeteries were segregated and remain that way.
In 2021, he writes, the family of a Black deputy sheriff in Louisiana was barred from burying him in a local cemetery because it “enforced an illegal whitesonly policy.”
As Melville explains, the Black cemeteries generally remain visibly interior to those established by and for whites. Still, spending forever in an unkempt graveyard remains outwardly better than the fate of the 6 million enslaved in America from when the first ships with human cargo arrived until emancipation. Melville says we only know where “a fraction” of the 6 million are buried.
While the federal government funds maintenance on Confederate soldier burial sites, it allocates no funds for “restore of preserve historically Black cemeteries.” Maryland’s legislature has discussed funding historically Black cemeteries but hasn’t yet taken any action.
Melville has researched, reported and written a powerful book that not only summons us to embrace equitable treatment of all Americans in death but also in life. It’s up to us to remedy the injustices of the past in America’s burial grounds because as Melville reminds us, the “the dead have no voice.”
“The Hero of This Book” by Elizabeth McCracken (Ecco)
Don’t be fooled by the fact that this slim new volume from Elizabeth McCracken has the words “a novel” on the cover. It’s a memoir. The reason it’s not referred to as such is clear from the dedication page — a handwritten note from McCracken to her mom in 1993 promising that she’ll never appear as a character in her work.
Semantics aside, “The Hero of This Book” is simple and lovely. McCracken’s easy prose is a joy to read, right off the bat. Here’s part of the opening paragraph: “This was the summer before the world stopped. We thought it was pretty bad, though in retrospect there was joy to be found… I’d gone to London, where a heat wave had bent train rails and shut down art exhibitions and turned the English into pink, panting mammals.” The narrator — she uses the first person and readers can interchange the word narrator and author if they like — is in London 10 months after her mother’s death to revisit places they loved together while reflecting on their relationship. “Once somebody is dead, the world reveals all the things they might have enjoyed if they weren’t,” writes McCracken.
From August 2019 the narrative jumps around to past moments which reveal the mother’s values and the bond she shared with her daughter. Cleaning out the kitchen in 2002, as the narrator prepares to introduce her future husband to her parents (“I was trying to make a house he could visit without being appalled”):
“I brandished the cheese. ‘Three years out of date!’ I said to my mother. …
’No,’ she explained. ‘I just bought that.’ ‘1999!’ I said. ‘Look!’
‘Printer’s error,’ said my mother, who generally used her considerable powers of stubbornness for good.”
Beyond honoring a mother, McCracken does something else remarkable in these 177 pages. She writes about writing. Despite her narrator’s admonition early on — “Don’t trust a writer who gives out advice. Writers are suckers for pretty turns of phrase with only the ring of truth” — nuggets of advice pop up throughout like bubbles: “I don’t think writing is that hard, as long as you’re comfortable with failure on every single level.” Or: “Why do I write? To try to get human beings on a page without the use of vivisection or preservatives or a spiritualist’s props, to make them seem lively still.”
McCracken does that with this book, processing her own grief and honoring her mother’s life, even if the subject — her hero — would assuredly have scoffed at the idea. (AP)