Volunteer keeps Olivewood alive
Charles Cook comes prepared. He brings his own machete, the bulk order of red weed trimmer string his wife bought online and two boxes of doughnuts and kolaches. It’s the first Saturday in May, which means it’s volunteer day at Olivewood Cemetery when anyone can come out and help tend the 7.5-acre site that is Houston’s first incorporated cemetery for African Americans.
On first and third Saturdays, volunteers help manage the tangle of weeds and grass that threaten to overtake the property. For the newly retired Cook, every day is volunteer day. He estimates he put in 100 hours of labor in April alone and that’s on top of the countless hours over the nearly 30 years he’s been coming here, often on his own, to cut back the growth and tend the tombstones that lean and sometimes topple over with the ever-shifting ground.
This month, Olivewood Cemetery was recognized as one of the most endangered historic sites in the country by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Circled by development on three sides and the bayou on the other, it faces the threats of climate change, erosion and obsolescence in a constantly churning urban landscape.
While the site is, indeed, endangered, it has also survived for decades. That’s thanks in large part to Cook and the Descendants of Olivewood nonprofit founded by Margott Williams in 2003 and later granted guardianship of the cemetery after a legal battle in state district court. Williams counts some of her own family members among those buried here and she has worked tirelessly to maintain and champion it alongside a fellow descendant, whom everyone calls Mr. Cook.
When I first visited and wrote about the cemetery in 2015, it struck me as out of place. Sitting perilously on the southern edge of White Oak Bayou and tucked behind a Memorial Hermann health care clinic, the bang of construction noise is nearly constant these days as apartment complexes and parking garages rise across the street.
But once you pass through the gate, you are transported.
It’s the stillness that greets you first. The downtown skyline disappears behind the trees. Street noises seem to dim. Rows of heavy grave markers sink into the earth.
Then just as suddenly: there’s movement. The low hum of summer bugs. The rustle of the wind moving through the leaves. The upand-down, up-and-down warp of the ground that has weathered more than 150 years on the bayou’s edge.
It is here, shifting between the static and the flow, the dead and the living, that things have a way of coming into focus. What had at first appeared misplaced was, in fact, central to early Houston and standing there now, I felt that centripetal sort of force that must exist at the center of the universe, pulling me in one step at a time. At Olivewood, you aren’t just here, you are Somewhere.
The cemetery was officially founded in 1875 but community history suggests burials had begun there even before emancipation. It was connected to the railroad just south of the site and the repair shops and cottonseed oil companies that sprang up around it, Cook explains, and just beyond that, Freedmen’s Town.
Through the graves and records, a community emerges. There has never been a comprehensive map of the estimated 4,000 burials at the site but Cook can map entire generations of Houston history as he surveys the land. He sees the teachers that ran the early schools, the lawmakers who, for the brief period of Reconstruction, led the state and the mothers — always the mothers — who supported the many social clubs and institutions that provided for a community making its way in the post-slavery South.
As Cook talks, he seems to disappear into other people. Or is it that he exists in their combination? When you ask Cook, a wiry man with a wide smile, why he does it, you’ll hear instead about his grandmother and her garden in her public housing home in Corpus Christi where she served on the residents’ council, his aunt who taught at Booker T. Washington High School for 50 years or perhaps his uncle whose Fifth Ward grocery store was the first place Cook worked at as a teenager. Growing up near Frenchtown, Cook remembers the Zydecos, the bazaars at Our Mother of Mercy and dinners of ‘coon and rabbit.
Cook took his family’s civic spirit into adulthood, serving in the military and working as a bus driver at Metro for 20 years. Passengers on his route became family. They knew that he’d wait for them if they were running a few minutes late to get to their stop, he says, or make sure they made their connection. And when they made it to his bus, he would greet them with a smile.
He first discovered Olivewood in 1993 after volunteering at a cleanup day at College Memorial Park Cemetery, another historic African American cemetery founded not long after Olivewood. Another volunteer mentioned that she had relatives buried at Olivewood and so they ventured over to see it.
“It was all overgrown,” Cook remembers, “nothing was visible.”
That day changed his life. Always a student of history, Cook knew just how much of Houston’s Black history was missing from the books on his shelves. Tending to Olivewood let him honor his family’s civic legacy while reviving some of the city’s long-buried stories.
“When you start looking at Olivewood, you start looking at early Houston,” he told me, standing in the shade of a tall tree just inside the gate.
The cemetery has faced significant threats over the years, including the erosion that eats away at the back corner of the site and flooding. A National Trust for Historic Preservation grant-funded study currently underway will assess the extent of the problem and suggest possible solutions in a report Cook said is expected sometime near the end of this summer.
The rise and fall of development around it has brought traffic and complications to the site but also city agreements that included a proper fence and a shared parking lot visitors and volunteers now use. Meanwhile, volunteer efforts are helping to map the site and match death records to burials. But to fully address the challenges the site faces will require money. Cook says city and county government leaders have insisted there’s little they can do to address flooding on private property.
“We have to be able to start an endowment so then Mr. Cook can go ahead and die,” he jokes. “I’ll be at peace because I know it’ll be taken care of.”
He deserves peace. Houston has a national reputation these days for ambitious redesigns of its parks, often on the banks of our bayous, using creative funding strategies. Surely some of that creativity can find its way to caring for Olivewood Cemetery.
For everything Cook has given the cemetery, it has also given back to him. Through hardships, including job loss and the death of one of his two children, Cook has turned to Olivewood. Somehow, he says, when he walks through the gates, his problems wait there. “It’s always a breeze. It’s always peaceful.”
The site is endangered, yes, but it is also a testament to survival. From the community at rest that calls it home to the community of volunteers who tend it now, Olivewood lives on.
On Saturday, the breeze is there. And so is Cook. We talk for hours in between greeting volunteers and passersby who are curious about the space. His care for the cemetery extends to everyone who steps foot in it, including me. When I finally let him get to work cutting back weeds, Cook — ever the elder — has to first make sure I know not to let my gas tank get too low or else it’ll suck up dirt. As I go to leave, I glance at the epitaphs on some of the gravestones. Some have military titles. Others just read: Brother. Sister. Husband, father, grandfather, veteran, advocate, storyteller, caretaker — Cook has earned these and more. And recognition for his service shouldn’t wait.