Snakes rain down on a forgotten cemetery
A sign from the heavens for unknown site
WASHINGTON — Around 11:40 on the morning of Thursday, May 23, a call came in to the dispatcher at the Metropolitan Police Department about a rather unnerving occurrence at the toddlers’ zone of Walter Pierce Park in an upscale neighbourhood of the American capital.
Live snakes, the caller said, were falling from the trees.
We pick up the story with the responding officer’s report:
When the snakes fell they scared the children, and everyone fled. This was in the playground area.
I responded but found no snakes. I caught one small enough to fit inside an empty water bottle I had. It was probably a black rat snake. They are indigenous to trees and the warm weather is drawing them out.
With typical celerity, I rush to Walter Pierce Park to investigate, six days later. I may be timid when it comes to skydiving reptiles, but still I get there a whole hour before a one-girl camera-and-reporting crew from trusty News Channel 8.
Plummeting vipers, it seems, is an even bigger story than the eight-week-old kitten named Callista that was stolen — stolen! — from an adoption event at the Washington Humane Society last Sunday. Plus, Barack Obama is in Chicago and Congress has the week off.
“Did anybody here see snakes fall out of these trees last Thursday?” I call to the parents and nannies who are supervising some of Washington’s least-impoverished onetwo- and three-year-olds.
“I saw one after it hit the ground,” one father reports.
“It was heading toward those bushes.”
The stalwart young journalist and I venture to within 20 metres of the hedgerow, but whatever serpents were or were not there 144 hours earlier have moved on.
Beyond the slides and jungle gym and swing-set, I notice now, Walter Pierce Park — once the bucolic retreat of President John Quincy Adams — expands to include a large, flat athletic field. And there is more: a basketball court decorated with giant, graffiti-style homages to murdered and martyred district youths, a dog run, and a couple of inconspicuous signs that note the ground on which we are walking, gambolling, and/or slithering is no ordinary urban green space.
It’s a long-forgotten cemetery that still holds the mouldered bones and mourning trinkets of perhaps 8,000 souls. Some few were Quakers. Most were African-Americans who were born as slaves and died in Abraham Lincoln’s Washington, beyond the reach of whips and chains, as free men, women and children; liberated twice, once in life and once in death.
Heedless, we trample their long-eroded tombs in a city where other men are eulogized in obelisks and equestrian statuary.
I ask a local historian to join me at Walter Pierce to help me interpret this place and Mary Belcher walks over from her home. She is 61, a slim, compassionate former newspaper reporter who once worked with the legal team that prosecuted several of Ronald Reagan’s lieutenants for their complicity in the Iran-Contra scandal, back in the mid-’80s.
At Walter Pierce, Belcher — “a lapsed Quaker who believes in ghosts” — has worked for nearly a decade to protect the gravesites and says the smallholders, hirelings and carters who were placed in this ground had no expectation the consecrated earth would be bulldozed, paved and over-planted, at one point, with a community vegetable garden.
“There was no respect being shown to the people who are buried here, and they earned our respect by living through the most turbulent period in U.S. history,” Mary Belcher says. When she heard heavy equipment was being brought to bear on the site, “I became enraged, and that rage never went away.”
“After desecration comes forgetfulness,” she says, encapsulating a century in four words. The historian has compiled a folio of the names, ages and causes of death of as many of the interred as she can find in city records: they perished, we read, of scrofula, apoplexy and starvation; of worms and “poison – sausage;” of old age and “utter neglect.” She estimates the 4,000 adults who lie under the playground and the kickball field and the doggie park engendered more than one million living descendants, of whom only a few dozen have been tracked down and invited to commemorative events ‘neath the spreading serpent-trees. Now Belcher tells me some of her own Virginia forebears were slaveholders, perhaps – this never could be proved – the masters of the very dead of Walter Pierce Park.
“Do you still feel guilty about that?” I ask her.
“No,” she replies. “But there always need to be repairs made to history. If we connect people to their ancestors, this will be social reparation.”
She wasn’t here last Thursday when the babes of Washington got a rather rude introduction to the Year of the Snake.
“What do you think happened?” I ask Mary Belcher.
“Maybe it was the wrath of God,” the historian says.