ONE

Getting into
Love Cemetery

They are not powerless, the dead.

—Chief Seattle,
Suquamish and Duwamish
Native American leader

The road that leads to Love Cemetery is deeply rutted red clay and sand, and it winds for well over a mile through open fields and stands of East Texas pine until it arrives at a ten-foot-high chain-link gate just a couple hundred yards from the graveyard. On a chilly late winter morning in March 2003, the fence seemed impenetrable, with heavy metal chain woven around the steel end-poles clamped shut with a big brass combination lock. Mrs. Nuthel Britton, guardian and caretaker of Love Cemetery, had been given the combination, but the lock would not yield. This was a new fence, a new gate, and a new lock, and therefore, Mrs. Britton suspected, a new owner too. The 3,500 acres surrounding the old, overgrown cemetery, which she had rediscovered in the mid-1990s, had been cut up and sold off again. Whoever bought this parcel had fenced the cemetery in. The combination Nuthel had been given must have been for an old lock on the outer gate, the first one we’d come to. There was no fence attached to it; that one was just a free-standing gate. The deep ruts around it indicated that the fence had been taken down years ago. We drove past that first gate and continued on until this second gate stopped us. Now Nuthel stood there with Doris Vittatoe, who also had ancestors buried in Love Cemetery, and me, trying to solve this puzzle. This second gate was big enough for an East Texas logging truck to drive through—if you had the combination. We didn’t.

A manganese blue sky shone through the pines and the bare branches of a few red oaks that still grew here. The bright sun took the chill off the air. The quiet of the morning was broken by the resonant calls of mockingbirds, mourning doves, and a warbler. The familiar rat-a-tat-tat of a red-headed woodpecker echoed from deep in the woods.

We shook our heads, thwarted by the new lock. At seventy-nine, Nuthel—as she insisted we call her—was still lean, tall, and active. Doris, about twenty years younger, had an elegant oval face with big dark eyes. Like Nuthel, she mowed her own yard and worked in the garden, staying trim and fit. Nuthel wore a long-sleeved red sweatshirt and an army camouflage hat. As secretary of the Love Colored Burial Association, she was “the Keeper of Love.” Nuthel had wanted to show us the cemetery, but she was blocked this morning. Legally, she had every right to be there, and so did Doris. The land belongs to the dead in Texas. Cemeteries cannot be sold or transferred. In 1904 a local landowner named Della Love had deeded this 1.6 acre parcel to the Love Colored Burial Association. In turn, the Burial Association secured a permanent easement to use the road to the cemetery. Someone from the timber management company that once owned the larger, surrounding parcel had given Nuthel the combination to the lock some years before, but the property had changed hands many times in recent years—from a timber company to an insurance conglomerate to whomever the current owner was.

Last Nuthel knew the timber was owned by an East Coast insurance company. “It must have changed hands again,” she said, matter-of-factly. That would explain the fancy new fence and new lock. “Whatever they got in there, they don’t want it to get out, that’s for sure,” she said with a chuckle.

She pulled up her sweatshirt to get to her pants pocket and fished around. With a straight face and a solemn air, she pulled out a small strip of paper with the combination number written on it, glanced at it, then shot us a smile. Nuthel had an inscrutable face that I was only learning to read. She was a great tease. “Hmmm,” she said, shaking her head and chuckling, puzzled, “I see here that I put in the right numbers,” she paused. “Only thing is, it’s the wrong lock.”

A rifle shot cracked in the distance and startled me, a city dweller. Nuthel and Doris paid it little attention.

“Somebody’s back in there huntin’, I bet,” Nuthel remarked with another big smile, as Doris nodded. “It’s nothing. You’re just not used to it,” they assured me. Hunting was still a way of life here. We had passed a deserted duck blind and an empty hunting camp on the dirt road coming in.

“Look,” I said, “I’m going to get some folding chairs out of the trunk of my car. You can sit here in front of this locked gate; I’ll take your picture and interview you right here. The picture alone will tell a big part of the story.”

But when I brought the chairs back, I noticed that there was something strange about the gate. It didn’t look right, it wasn’t straight—something was awry. “Wait a minute,” I said. I looked at the hinge on the right and—sure enough—the gate had been lifted off its hinges and opened from the side. Maybe someone had slipped inside and was poaching. That would explain the rifle shots we had heard even though hunting season was over. I pointed out this opening to my companions.

“Since you have family buried back there, you two have a right to go in,” I said, “at least that was how the attorney explained it to me.”

They considered this a moment. Then Nuthel grinned and clasped her hands together, “And you’re with us, China,” she said, “so you can come too.”

“Well, that would be my logic,” I said, laughing.

Doris nodded in agreement. “Of course.”

We picked up the gate and inched it open just wide enough for us to slip in one by one. We laughed like schoolgirls, excited by our unexpected adventure. As soon as we were on the other side we pushed the gate back just as we’d found it, so close to the pole that it looked all the way shut.

Nuthel assured us that the cemetery wasn’t that far anyway—straight down the road we were on, close enough that she could almost see its boundary from where we stood. She tried to point out a railroad cross-tie that marked the corner, but everything was so overgrown and covered with vines that I couldn’t distinguish the dark brown of a cross-tie from a tree trunk. Doris couldn’t either.

“Come on,” Nuthel said and started ambling down the road with Doris walking next to her. I hung back a little out of respect. This was their burial ground and these were their ancestors. I was there only because Nuthel had asked for my help.

A solid bank of young pines, ten to fifteen feet tall, continued on our right as we strolled. On our left, the woods were mixed, the pines thinning up to a row of elms. That was where the cemetery started, Nuthel informed us triumphantly.

“Keep lookin’ for that cross-tie,” she instructed us. “My sons put one in at each corner of the cemetery and set them in concrete so they couldn’t fall over.”

The road we were walking down was in much better condition than the logging road we had driven earlier in the day. This road was even-surfaced and well drained, largely sand and weeds flattened by tire tracks. About two hundred yards from the gate, Nuthel pointed out the dark wood of the railroad tie.

“Now look at this,” she called happily and stopped walking. “This is it,” she said, punctuating her remark by pointing her index finger in the air, tapping it like a teacher would a chalk-board. “See that row of trees on your left? Those trees are the northern boundary of the cemetery. Come on now,” she said and took off from the road to clamber up a sandy embankment into a dense web of leafless vines.

Doris and I followed. “Go slow now,” Nuthel said. “This old wisteria’ll get you. Watch your feet or you’ll get all tangled up.” She pushed aside shoulder-high dry weeds and proceeded twenty or thirty feet, then stopped and looked around. She hadn’t been here for nearly five years and she was disoriented. “We’ve got to go back,” she announced. The vines and underbrush were too thick to get through. She couldn’t see any headstones. We retraced our steps to the road and continued walking toward the woods. Sure enough, farther down, the road turned left along the southern border of the cemetery. We found a duck blind and an easier entrance where the underbrush hadn’t grown so high. Within ten feet of the entrance, we began to see flashes of pale headstones through the sinuous, interwoven loops of brown, green, and gray vines. We went over to investigate, pushing aside the vines and overgrowth.

“See, there they are,” Nuthel said. We stopped a minute to brush aside the dirt and fallen leaves and read two granite headstones: “Albert Henderson, born April 16, 1865, died May 22, 1929 and Mattie Henderson, born October 29, 1875, died March 16, 1951.” Doris went on by herself, deeper into the underbrush. She had caught glimpses of more headstones and kept going.

Nuthel and I made our way to her, as the vines snapped and wild rose and blackberry thorns raked our pants. Doris had stopped and was bent over a large headstone. She read the inscription to us slowly: “Ohio Taylor, died 1918. 84 years old.”

“Do you have a pencil to write that down?” Nuthel asked me with the mock sternness of the schoolteacher she had been. I told her I did and reminded her that I’d promised to write down everything. Breaking into a smile, she said, “Good, ’cause I didn’t bring a pencil or nothin’.”

“This is amazing,” Doris said quietly, as Nuthel and I made our way closer to the granite headstone she was standing in front of. “Ohio Taylor,” she repeated. Then, suddenly, she drew her breath in sharply, “Why, he’s my great-grandfather!” she said. “I didn’t even know he was back here.”

The air was still cool, not a breeze stirring. I leaned over to read the inscription. “If he was eighty-four,” I said, “that means he was born in 1834.” I said slowly, “He lived through slavery.”

“Okay,” Doris said matter-of-factly.

I knew enough to avoid calling someone a slave. People were enslaved. Being enslaved by someone was a condition, a degraded position, not a category of being. Calling people “slaves” was a way of denying that they were human beings first. Still, I had to stop and think and choose my words to reflect an understanding that did not come naturally growing up in northeast Texas. The region from Dallas to Scottsville—the part of Texas where I grew up—was part of the cotton-growing, plantation-holding South, not the mythic West that most people imagine Texas to be.

Nuthel, Doris, and I walked around Ohio Taylor’s rectangular headstone and discovered large stone pieces scattered around it on the ground.

“These pieces belong to this headstone,” Nuthel announced authoritatively. “Now look at this,” she said, pointing to the outline of a rectangle on top of the headstone, indicating where a rectangular-based piece had once sat. I got down on my hands and knees and dug through the dead leaves. I felt something hard. Brushing away the leaves I found a small footed granite bowl. Its bottom matched the shape on top of the headstone. Then I saw two three-foot-high fluted columns lying nearby at odd angles on the ground, but they were too heavy to pick up. I couldn’t budge them. We found another piece of stone, the delicately carved plinth that must have crowned the columns when the marker was assembled. The plinth had an ornate letter T for Taylor carefully incised in it, with an oak leaf pattern trailing down one side and ivy on the other.

“What Taylor is this?” Nuthel asked. She had moved to the grave next to Ohio.

I squatted down to make out the letters on the foot-high white marble headstone, and read: “Fr. Anthony Taylor.” I asked Doris who he was, but Doris wasn’t over her elation and amazement in finding Ohio Taylor’s headstone. She would not be distracted.

“I tell you now, at that time, back then, for 1918, that is a nice tombstone,” she said. “Honey, they paid good money for that, a long time ago. It has lasted all this time.”

Ohio Taylor had been a person of means. Later, I would learn from Doris’s brother that Ohio had owned maybe two hundred acres of land or more. This was especially interesting because he had survived slavery. I had read historian Randolph Campbell’s work on Harrison County, A Southern Community in Crisis, as well as Grassroots Reconstruction in Texas, 1865–1880. Thanks to Campbell, I had some appreciation of the obstacles that Ohio Taylor might have had to overcome to become a landowner. Whatever land he had came from what he and his family were able to acquire after June 19, 1865, when federal troops arrived in Galveston, finally bringing Emancipation to Texas.

Though Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, a good two years earlier, Texans ignored it until after Lee’s surrender, when Major General Gordon Granger and his Union troops arrived in Galveston to enforce the proclamation and to protect those newly freed. Granger gathered a crowd on the street and read the Emancipation Proclamation aloud on June 19, 1865. Only then did Texans, stubborn to the end, begin to acknowledge the new legal status of freed men, women, and children. From that day forward, there was no more enslavement of African Americans in Texas. The word spread swiftly in the enslaved community, producing a tide of joy and bewilderment. Some people stayed put, others left immediately—to get away from former owners, to find family members who had been sold off, to go North, to leave the country. Some came back, some never returned. It was a tumultuous time. African Americans had only first names, and for the most part, they had no money and no land. After slavery ended on that June day, people made up names, took the names of former owners if they had been decent, or used someone else’s if they hadn’t. It wasn’t until the 1870 census that African Americans were officially listed with first and last names.

Ohio Taylor and others buried here in Love Cemetery had managed to acquire parcels of farmland. Taylor would have been thirty-one years old in 1865. The fact that he became a landowner was remarkable in itself, but to think that he might have held on to his land after Congressional Reconstruction ended in 1870, and kept it through the White Citizens’ Party rise to power in 1878, when they “redeemed” Harrison County, and after, was also significant. When the federal troops left Harrison County in 1870, all hell broke loose. The Citizens’ Party set out to again disenfranchise African Americans and put an end to the substantial progress they were making in political and civic life, especially in education. Much of the white community was terrified and angry at finding themselves outvoted at the ballot box and, in some cases, actually represented in the state legislature by black men who had only recently been enslaved by them. Women, of course, no matter what their color, were not allowed to vote until 1920.

Granger’s arrival in Galveston is the event celebrated on the holiday Juneteenth.⁵ Now, as we stood before Ohio Taylor’s damaged grave, the era of Emancipation seemed so real, and so close. Nuthel suggested that the damage must have been caused by the wind. I took that to be her way of avoiding the possibility that someone had intentionally desecrated the headstone out of racism or wanton vandalism. To me, white racism seemed obvious; I assumed that was why the community had been locked out of Love Cemetery to begin with. But I followed Nuthel and Doris’s lead and did not broach the subject. Instead, I asked Doris what it was like for her to see her great-grandfather’s grave for the first time.

“I am elated to be able to come back here!” she said, “I am sixty-one years old, and this is the first time I’ve been able to get back here to see this. This is amazing.”

“Do you have children?” Nuthel asked her.

“Yes,” said Doris.

“Well, you bring your children back here so they can see this,” Nuthel said.

“Oh yes,” Doris replied.

“Here’s another one,” I called out. I could make out a nearby headstone in the shape of a lamb at rest, underneath more vines.

“You know these ancestors are happy to see us back here today,” Nuthel said.

I hadn’t noticed any wisteria on the drive out to the cemetery, but suddenly I was in the thick of it. Some of the graceful woody gray vines were as thick as your finger, some were as thick as your wrist, it had been growing back here so long. In East Texas people say wisteria takes over so fast you can hear it growing. According to unverified family lore, it was my forebearers who introduced wisteria into East Texas in the 1920s. My great-grandfather started a nursery business here in 1900, after moving his large Catholic family from Chicago to Scottsville. An older cousin told me that wisteria was not native to East Texas, that it was originally from China and that the family imported it and now it grows everywhere here. When I was a child, that sounded distinctive, but as an adult, I grew to doubt it. Whether it was native, non-native, a tall tale, or true about where this wisteria came from, it didn’t change the fact that I’d never seen such a tangle of it.⁶ As I stood there looking at the twisting, balled up, overgrown vines that blanketed these graves, Nuthel explained the connection.

Doris Vittatoe

“Some of these people used to work for your family, at the nursery. They brought wisteria cuttings over here from the nursery and planted them to decorate the graves, it was so pretty.” She herself had even worked for my family’s nursery at one time, she said. The Ancestors must have been laughing indeed. “My, when this is all bloomed out, you ain’t never seen anything like those purple blossoms. They smell so good. Sweet. It’s so peaceful out here, so quiet,” she said. “It’s the most beautiful place in the world.”

“I tell you,” said Doris, “I have you to thank for this, Mrs. Britton—somebody had to know how to get back here.” Doris said she was going to have to call family, “This is something.”

“You know if we come back with machetes and spray the roots, we can clear this,” Nuthel told us. I didn’t want to talk about toxins, and I was too overwhelmed by the magnitude of forty years of overgrown wisteria. If we cleared it, it wouldn’t be with herbicides. I changed the subject.

“When were you made the Keeper of Love?” I asked her.

“Oh, I don’t know, I just got out here and started working. First I had to find out who owned all this property and get a key to the gate—that first gate we drove around today. One of the county commissioners helped me track it down. Once we were able to get in the gate, it still took us three days of looking and traipsing around back here to find this cemetery, it was so overgrown. You just couldn’t see it. The man who helped me find it again, after I moved back here from Ohio, told me to put posts around so I could always find it. I had my sons dig holes and put those railroad ties in vertically, in concrete, so they couldn’t get knocked over. They dug down deep, put one at each corner of the cemetery. I found only one today, I guess the other ones are still covered up. My sons helped me out here until they got transferred to the Middle East—Kuwait and Iraq.”

Nuthel had been married to a career military man herself and had lived away from East Texas for over thirty years. She met her husband at the Tuskegee Institute, where she had gone for a college summer session.

“I’m a road lizard,” she told me. She liked to get out and go. She finished her bachelor’s degree at Bishop College in Marshall, Texas, and after living in Taiwan, where her husband was stationed during the Vietnam war, completed her master’s degree in Ohio after they moved back to the States. Eventually Nuthel came back to the area to take care of her grandmother Lizzie Sparks’s nearby farm.

“You’ve got people buried back here too,” I said to Nuthel. “Shouldn’t we visit them?”

“If you want to,” she said. “We’ve got to work our way around here,” pointing to the thickest part of the wisteria and grapevine.

The vines didn’t look as bad over by the big pond that bordered the cemetery. If we walked toward it and then cut along the edge between the water and the wisteria, we reasoned we could zigzag back into the underbrush when we drew parallel to Nuthel’s family graves. As we got closer to the water, I could see that what I had thought was a pond was more like a small lake. We couldn’t tell how big it was because of the trees that edged the perimeter and curved away from the clearing we were in. The water continued out of sight—a hundred yards, a mile? No way to tell.

As we made our way toward the pond, Nuthel said, “You know, some of these graves used to have little bottles on them,” and told me to keep an eye out.

Doris suddenly exclaimed, “No way! Here’s Harvey Johnson—he was one of my dad’s uncles!”

I spied another stone and made my way over to it, as I called out to Doris, “There’s another marker by the Hendersons. Are those your people too, Doris?”

“No,” she said. After a few more steps, she told us that she’d found another one. “Look, Sidney Johnson. Died in 1963.”

Then Nuthel called, “Look here—Bettie Webb, 1840 to 1923.”

Bettie Webb’s stone was knocked over, flat on the ground, but it wasn’t broken. It was a traditional white marble stone with a rounded top. “We will meet again” was incised under her name and dates. I moved to Nuthel’s side. Ten feet farther we found another Webb headstone, Claude Webb’s. It was a nicely shaped concrete stone with an engraved brass plaque giving his name and the year of his death, 1954.

I paused to take notes on the graves we had found. I drew the markers as quickly as I could in a small notebook while Doris and Nuthel kept going.

“Wait up, please,” I said. I told them I was trying to draw a map but I was disoriented. “Which way is north?”

“That’s a good idea,” Nuthel said, “We’re on the west side of the cemetery. Let me see…no…no…this is east. By the water. We’re going north.”

Finally we got to Nuthel’s relatives: Daily and Oscar Sparks, her uncles, buried side by side under a double headstone. A few feet away we found Daniel Sparks, another uncle, his traditional headstone buried in vines. Lizzie Sparks, Nuthel’s grandmother—that’s the grave she wanted to look for. Nuthel kept a small garden for tomatoes and onions at her house in Marshall, but she raised the corn and other crops at Lizzie Sparks’s out here in Scottsville, in the country, where there was room—thirty-three acres.

Nuthel remembered that there was no headstone for Lizzie Sparks, and I didn’t see how we’d ever find her grave in the thick growth of vines. Nuthel stared at the ground and then pointed.

“See that glass jar sunk in the ground?” Nuthel said. I saw—barely—a thin circle of glass in the leaves. “That’s it.” Nuthel said grandly. “That is Lizzie Sparks’s grave.” A jar as a grave marker? I would have walked right by it.

Doris and I crouched down to look. I ran my hand through the dead leaves on the grave, and sure enough, within a foot or so was a small, rusted, blue metal funeral home marker on a stick—a temporary marker—protruding six inches or so from the ground. The glass cover on the marker was broken and the slip of paper with the name was missing. Nonetheless, someone had written on the soft metal inside the marker: “Lizzie Sparks d. 1964, 100 yrs.”

“This is my grandmamma,” Nuthel said proudly. “She was Indian. She was real Cherokee.”

She used the word Cherokee as an adjective. I asked her what she meant. Was she from the Cherokee tribe?

“I mean she was Indian. I’m not sure which tribe she was from: Cherokee, Caddo, I can’t remember. I’ve got a portrait of her I’ll show you back at the house.”

Lizzie Sparks was Native American and black. The Caddo were the indigenous people of this part of the world. They flourished in East Texas, Louisiana, and southern Arkansas as early as 600 CE. But the Native American presence in East Texas, at least to a white person like me, had been particularly elusive. Years ago I had tried, unsuccessfully, to find a member of the Caddo tribe to speak with. Local black history, much of it, lies forgotten or buried, but local Native American history has been virtually obliterated.

“Who told you about Love Cemetery, Nuthel?” I asked, as I stood up again.

“Oh, my grandparents, and my parents,” she said. “I always knew about Love,” she laughed.

Again, I asked her if she knew how the community had been locked out in the first place.

“I think when the farming went bad,” Nuthel replied, “when the farmers sold their land, they just got up and went. Everybody left, and they forgot about this place. And the ones was here, they just don’t seem to know anything about it,” she said with a shrug of her shoulders.

“If nobody told you about this cemetery,” Doris said, “you wouldn’t have known Love was here.”

“That’s right,” Nuthel nodded.

Doris looked around, trying to orient herself. Lizzie Sparks’s grave, where we stood talking, was on the pond side of the cemetery, the eastern edge.

“Somewhere near here was my grandmother’s house,” Doris told us, “on the other side of this pond. When I was little my mother was still coming back out here and planting cotton. I probably wasn’t ten years old. My mom used to say, ‘Love Cemetery’s back there,’ but I never did see it.

“Richard Taylor and Irene Taylor,” she continued. “That’s their names—my grandparents, the ones who lived on the other side of this pond. We didn’t see their graves today, but they’re back in here somewhere,” she said, looking around again. “We need to watch out for them.” Then another memory surfaced. Doris told us, in low tones, how her mother had never been able to get back into this cemetery to clean her mother’s grave before she died. By the time Doris moved back in the 1980s, the community was locked out. “Mother was so sad. She never got over not being able to clean her mother’s grave. It was awful,” she said, frowning. “I tried to help her when I moved back here, but we were locked out. That’s all there was to it.”

“Could not come back,” Nuthel said softly, like a refrain.

Doris, like Nuthel, had moved away and lived in Seattle and Los Angeles until the 1980s, when her mother became ill and she returned to help care for her.

Geese honked overhead as they flew in a V toward Caddo Lake. Nuthel spied dewberries coming out. The rain forecast for the day had never arrived.

“You can see the little buds coming,” Doris said. “Look, everything’s going to pop—the wisteria, the grapevine, elderberry, all going to be taking over again, any time now, it’s coming.”

I asked Doris and Nuthel if the cemetery had ever been cleaned up before.

They both started talking at once. “They used to keep it up,” Doris began rapidly. Nuthel overtook her in slow, measured tones, contrapuntally. “This was the prettiest place….”

“My mom used to come back here,” Doris continued, “and clean off her parents’ graves.”

“They had a tool shed back here,” Nuthel recalled, “where they kept all their tools for cleaning up. Once a year—and it was in August—and there’d be so many peoples out here, the men would come and clean the graves, and the wives would come and bring…”

“Food!” said Doris.

“Food!” Nuthel said. “It was a real good time. Now you talking about cookin’, they cooked! Mmhmm. There was fried chickens, pies—berry pies, lemon, cherry—you name it, greens—all kinds—beans, collard greens, squashes, and onions, the little pearl kinds, and peas, fresh peas, oh it was all fresh, ham, barbecued beef, corn on the cob….”

“How many people would come?” I wanted to know.

“I would say around fifty,” Nuthel answered, “it was like a church out here, lots of people would come. People everywhere for grave-cleaning day.”

It was time to go. We needed to start back while the sun was still high. After we made it to our cars, we still had well over a mile and a half on a logging road full of ruts and low points of red boot-sucking sand-and-clay muck.

It took us a good half-hour to work our way back through the vines to the first road, the well-drained one to the gate, tiptoeing and pushing dry shoulder-high weeds. We had just emerged from the cemetery and stepped back out onto the road when a huge crash stopped us in our tracks.

“What’s that?” I asked, looking at Doris and Nuthel. Nuthel didn’t look the least bit startled.

“Must be one of those big elms coming down,” Doris said. “Those wisteria vines are so strong they can pull a whole tree down over time.”

But Nuthel just smiled sweetly and shook her head. “That’s just the Ancestors lettin’ us know that they’ve seen us,” she said, “and that they’re happy we’re here.”