SIX

The Reconsecration of
Love Cemetery

One summer we found the past in ruins.

—Steve Orlen,
“Abandoned Places”

I rode out to the cemetery with Father Denzil, and I asked him to pray for Doris and me, saying only that we’d had a misunderstanding. “Our Lord, help your servants China and Doris….,” the lilt of his Sri Lankan accent was comforting, but no prayer seemed to dissolve the heaviness I felt.

Philip and Doug began to hand out work gloves and tools as soon as we got there. Willie Mae had brought her own long-handled clippers, and Geronimo proudly showed off his father’s machete from Mexico, which he had been allowed to bring. He wore it slung over his shoulder in a rawhide case his father had made for him. Coach and R.D. helped Philip unchain his tractor and back it off the trailer. The scouts scattered like quail into the brush, but Philip and Doug called them back so that we could all circle up for the ceremony we had planned with Father D. and the others.

While we waited for everyone to gather, I walked over to a shady place where Albert, Doris and R.D.’s brother, was standing. He was even taller than R.D. His open face was framed by close-cropped white hair and sideburns. After I introduced myself, Albert told me how glad he was to be back here. It was his first visit since 1943, when he had come for the funeral of Melvinie Brown, one of the many Browns to whom the Johnsons were related.

“I was here alright, that was the last time I was here,” he said. “Everything was clean and beautiful.”

Gail and Greg Beil strolled over with Julia and Annye.

“People here were farming and sharecropping, people lived around here, everywhere,” he said. We all drew closer.

“A lot of African Americans used to own their own land out here, didn’t they, Mr. Johnson?” Gail asked.

“Oh yes,” Albert said. “Ohio Taylor, his son—my grand-daddy, Richard Taylor—lots of ’em.”

“And they were farmers, right?”

“Sure they were,” Albert agreed.

“See,” said Gail, “they weren’t only sharecroppers. African Americans—those who could—bought land after Emancipation.”

“That’s what I’m sayin’,” Albert Johnson agreed.

“But when the Depression hit,” Gail added, explaining to the white folks who were listening, “people started leaving their farms. Then there was World War II. They started taking defense plant jobs, at places like Longhorn Munitions up at Caddo Lake.”

I wanted to hear more about Melvinie’s 1943 funeral, but the scouts were back, everyone was milling around chatting, and we had to get started. A welcome cloud cover and the relatively early hour made the sun tolerable.

R.D. positioned himself next to Ohio Taylor’s headstone, leaning on it to include Ohio—and by extension, all the Ancestors—in the circle we were forming. The scouts piped down and people grew quiet. I looked across the circle at Doris. Her head was down. No one said anything. I realized that it was up to me to welcome everyone. I thanked our volunteers. I announced that Pastor McCain from Shiloh Baptist Church had to send his regrets because of an unscheduled funeral that would keep him away. Then, I formally acknowledged Nuthel and Doris—“Mrs. Britton and Mrs. Vittatoe”—for their roles as instigators and prime movers in this restoration. “Mrs. Britton will be here as soon as she can,” I said. “She’s waiting for her daughter to drive up from Houston.” I heard murmurs of understanding from the gathering. Having dispensed with the logistics, I wasn’t sure what to say next. How could anything that I had prepared last night be relevant this morning, now that everything had changed between Doris and me? I told everyone how honored I’d been when Mrs. Britton had asked me to help. Working on this cemetery, I said, was teaching me a lot about love. People listened politely, Doris nodded a little and kept staring at the ground.

“There’s a special debt owed to African Americans,” I said, “a people who were forced to be here, who did not come to America by choice.” I was on automatic. I heard myself say something about Native Americans. I was drifting. If I kept going in this vein, I would soon be talking about white people needing to make amends and reparations to African Americans. Fortunately, I realized that I was indirectly speaking to Doris, trying to apologize for my part in the misunderstanding. But, now, everyone was staring at the ground. I made another try: “Cleaning up this cemetery together creates a larger sense of community….”

I stopped and turned to Doris and asked her to tell the story of what we were doing here. With new family members and first-time volunteers from Marshall with us, there needed to be a brief history of Love Cemetery and our efforts to reclaim it.

Doris spoke easily: “When we first came out here, a year and a half ago, I was elated to be here that first day. We found some cousins, my great-grandfather Ohio Taylor here, but I’m still trying to find my grandparents, Richard and Irene Taylor. I know they’re here. Thank you all for coming today.”

I wanted her to go on. She had a natural ability to speak simply and succinctly. But once she finished, everyone seemed to wait in silence for something else to happen. Instead of simply introducing R.D., who was stepping in for their pastor and, we had agreed, would lead the first prayer, I fell back on an outline I’d written the week before and launched into an eighteenth-century Hasidic tale from Eastern Europe about how the legendary Ba‘al Shem Tov saved his community from catastrophe.

The longer I spoke, the more out of place I felt. But, unless I told it all, the story would make no sense whatsoever. I forgot to make the connection I’d planned between the loss of the forest in the legend and the clear-cuts of the East Texas woods that we had driven past on the way out here.

R.D. kept leaning on the plinth of his great-grandfather’s grave marker, waiting patiently for me to finish. One of the scouts seemed to be looking for bugs on the ground. Everyone seemed to be avoiding eye contact with me. Only Father Denzil, next to me, his gold-rimmed glasses sparkling in the sun, seemed to be listening. Mercifully, the story reached its end, and I could stop trying to tell it.

When I stopped, R.D. didn’t miss a beat. He spoke up and got us back on track with his own words of welcome and thanks to all. Then he started singing and I could breathe again.

“Oh, there’s a cross for everyone and there’s a cross for me…,” he sang in his sonorous voice, a hymn the African American descendant community knew well and echoed back: “Ohhh, go down…” Doris, standing next to her brother Albert, may have been singing softly under her breath, but I couldn’t hear her.

“Yes there is a cross for me….” R.D. sang a few more verses, then the song broke into a spontaneous, syncopated spoken prayer of call and response. “Our Father in heaven, here we are again, assembled ourselves together once more.”

Yes, sir, Albert says softly under his breath on just the right beat.

“Father, we come today in the name of Jesus,” R.D. half-spoke, half sang. “We give thanks for the friends and family that have come from far and near. Bind us together, Father, in one family of Christian love.

“Father, you said there’s no chain stronger than its weakest link….”

Yes, sir.

“We are weak, our Father, but we know you’re strong….”

Yes, sir.

“Father, we pray that you will come in our midst today.”

Yes, yes.

“Build us up and tone us down.”

Oh yes.

“Father, I pray that you bless every home that is represented here today. Give us that eternal love, Father, that runs from heart to heart and breast to breast.”

Umm, oh yes.

“Then we pray, our Father, for the less fortunate. Let us pray, our Father, for those who had a desire to be here this morning and were unable to come.”

Yes, Lord.

“Then, Father, bless those that could come and that were too mean to come,” I was surprised to hear him say. “Father, we pray that you continue to lead us and guide whichever way we go.”

Oh yes.

“When this old world can’t ’ford us a home no longer…”

Yes, yes.

“Father, when we come down to the end of our journey, we ask you to come so close.”

“Amen, amen,” we all answered.

Still leaning on Ohio’s plinth atop the two columns on his headstone, R. D. pointed to Father Denzil, indicating that it was his turn now to pray. Father D. stepped forward a little and opened the slender black book of Prayers for the Departed.

“Dear friends,” he began, first explaining a little about the Catholic view of a burial site. “This is hallowed ground. We come together this morning because we believe in the power of life, we believe in the power of love. We believe in the resurrection of the body….” As he spoke, Father Denzil opened a tiny box of salt and sprinkled it on the earth, and then made the sign of the cross over the site where it fell and pronounced the ground reconsecrated. And so Love Cemetery became again—officially, formally, between R.D. and Father D. by communal agreement, witness, and participation—holy ground.

Father Denzil ended by asking us all to pray the “Our Father” together. Then, carried away by the moment, he turned to Psalm 8 in his book and spontaneously burst into song, “We praise you, O Lord, how great is your name.” R.D. and the descendant community came in humming underneath Father Denzil’s hymn as though they knew the song he was singing and accepted his offering.

With the prayers and reconsecration finally done, it was Philip’s turn to talk about what he hoped to accomplish by bringing the tractor that day, where he wanted to start in the cemetery. “What do you think?” he said to R.D., who’d been wanting to get a tractor out here since the first cleanup. R.D. was fine with the plan. It was going to take a lot of people working with R.D., Coach, Doug, and Philip to do it right. A brush hog can kill you if you don’t work it right or watch where you are when it’s spinning. Some of the scouts would go ahead with Ben, helping him by diving down underneath the wisteria to check for tree stumps, markers, and headstones.

While Philip and Doug got that effort organized and the tractor started up with a small roar, Coach just picked up a hoe and started cleaning around Melvinie Brown’s grave, scraping dirt off the concrete slab and using the corner of his hoe to dig up weeds around her cracked white headstone.

Father Denzil had put on a blue baseball cap. He walked over to me while I was watching Coach quietly at work. Father D. had to leave to do a baptism back in Marshall.

“Before I leave, China,” he said, “I wanted to tell you that I’m completely fascinated with this name, Love Cemetery. You know that even Mary Magdalene ran to the tomb of our Lord because of love. Love is everything!”

“Yes Father,” I said, unable to meet his excitement.

“Thank you for including me,” he said. “This is wonderful! The Lord will take care of your misunderstanding with Doris.” I could only hope for as much.

Nuthel finally arrived with her daughter. Wanda Gale was a tall, handsome, big-boned woman in her late thirties, about the same age as my daughter Madelon. Wanda Gale joined in, laughing and talking with Madelon and Sondra, R.D.’s daughter, as they cut and pulled wisteria from around an elderberry bush. Greg Beil, down on all fours trimming, had discovered a funeral-wreath holder when he cut back some undergrowth. “Now look at this,” he said in his soft-spoken way, wiping the perspiration from his heat-flushed face. Gale, Madelon, and Sondra gathered round to help.

Nuthel Britton

Nuthel and another elder sat in folding chairs among a cluster of graves out of the sun.

The air was filled with a shrill cacophony of Doug’s whining gas-powered weed-whacker and Philip’s roaring older tractor pulling the brush hog close to the ground, chewing up and spitting out vines, branches, small trees, rocks, and whatever Philip pulled it over. R.D. and Coach guided Philip along. Ben and the scouts were diving into the undergrowth to get below the wisteria and check for headstones or grave markers. Ben popped up, his face drenched, raised both his arms above the shoulder-high wisteria, pulled off his cap, and waved, whistling and shouting to make himself heard by R.D. and Philip, “Clear to here!” That meant that Philip could run the brush hog up to where he stood, that they’d found no markers.

Doris was working off in another part of the cemetery. I didn’t try to approach her. I’d gotten myself into this—whatever it was—and I had to just be with it. I swore and cursed for a moment, but I’d never been able to take much satisfaction from that kind of behavior. I tried to pray, but I was too furious with the weather, with Doris, but most of all with myself. Then I remembered, with chagrin, the can of peanuts and the small but expensive bottle of rum waiting in my day pack.

In preparation for the reconsecration, I had tried to learn something about traditional African beliefs regarding the Ancestors. My curiosity had grown deeper on that song-filled night at Doris’s house, which now felt so very far away. Back in California, I had an African American friend who had studied the Dagara tradition from Burkina Faso, with Malidoma Somé. Malidoma, born and raised in Africa, had been educated as a Westerner by the Jesuits. He attended the Sorbonne and earned a Ph.D. in the States, from Brown University. Then he had to go back to Africa. He realized that he was a black African who knew only white ways. He went back to his village and over time was initiated into his own Dagara tradition. He returned from Africa to the United States, and now teaches the wisdom of the indigenous Dagara ways to Westerners. My friend told me he knew exactly whom to talk to: Reda Rackley. She was one of the few students his teacher, Malidoma, had sent back to his own village in Burkina Faso for an initiation by the tribal elders. She worked specifically with the Ancestors. He gave me her phone number and said to call her right away. I did.

During that first phone call, I discovered that Reda was a white southerner like me. I felt tricked. How could she help? Another white southerner? She and I were part of the problem. But her voice—even over the phone—was compelling. I listened to her story.

Reda was a descendant of Georgia slaveholders on both sides of her family. After years of study with Malidoma, blonde, blue-eyed Reda had indeed been sent to Africa for an initiation. Her specific task had been to learn how to receive guidance from the Ancestors, known as Kantomble. Two weeks of initiation by the tribe’s elder diviner turned her world upside down. The elder did a divination for Reda and told her that she had a role to play in bringing the wisdom of the Ancestors back into a world that has come unmoored from its foundation—the world of the spirits. That experience, which felt like a homecoming to Reda, prompted her to dedicate her life to racial reconciliation, reparation, and healing.

Calling Reda, and later spending time with her, gave me a new sense of both the limits and the possibilities of my upbringing, my own mixed European heritage. Though my mother’s family hadn’t come down from Chicago until 1900 and had never enslaved people, that didn’t mean they hadn’t taken advantage of a system that exploited and disenfranchised African Americans. Reda’s example offered an alternative to the extremes of denial, guilt, and anger that had too often been my response to the racism I bumped against in my background and in myself. But I would never have suspected that these unlikely ways of connecting to the Ancestors could have any bearing on my search.

The simple instructions that Reda had given me to pray and purify my heart before this trip felt very close to what I would do anyway. I knew long ago that I had to “water my roots,” to return to Texas regularly. When in Dallas I always visit Turtle Creek and stand on the limestone bed of its tributaries to give thanks to the spirit of the waters. Though the language Reda used was different, the spirit felt much the same.

Reda’s instructions to bring peanuts and rum to make an offering at the burial ground I took at face value and simply followed them, unfamiliar as they were. The important thing was to approach this other world on its terms, not mine. I did this to show respect, like I did when I was in another country and visited someone else’s temple. Why not here? I reasoned.

Belief in the world of Ancestors is common to indigenous cultures the world over. From the indigenous perspective, the unseen world where the Ancestors reside, a world that defies measurement, is as “real” as the world of materiality, of things, of all that we can measure. Reality is also made up of what is nonvisible and nonmaterial.

Though physicists and shamans describe the path and the contents of their nonvisible worlds quite differently, they seem to agree on two points: we cannot see it, and it is powerful beyond our most extravagant imaginings. No wonder South American Indians teach that to become human, one must make room in oneself for the immensities of the universe.

How close this idea of the Ancestors is to the story that Einstein told, in response to repeated requests to explain what he was seeking: “I want to know how the Old One thinks. The rest is a detail.”⁴¹ The Old One. The Ancestors.

Reda supported my sense that the world of this historic black cemetery was very different from mine, no matter how ordinary it looked, and that I should approach it with respect. I didn’t have to understand the world of the Ancestors to make offerings to them. Though I might not be able to translate the language of which the offerings were parts of speech, the Ancestors could, and Reda’s suggestions had helped me approach this day of reconsecration with a sense of wonder. I would bow to that mystery, to all I did not know. Humility was essential.

While looking around for a good location to make my offering, I came upon a low spot in the ground near where I had been working. It looked as though the earth had collapsed above a coffin. I could find no marker of any kind around. I decided that this sunken ground was the place, so I knelt down on the warm earth and dug a small hole for the offerings. I unzipped my day pack, pulled out the blue can with Mr. Peanuts on it and the unfamiliar small bottle of Puerto Rican rum. Under my breath, I called on the Ancestors of Love to please be with us that day and to please understand and accept my offering, humble and culturally garbled as it might be.

I worked furtively. I was especially afraid of being seen by my devout African American Baptist friends and being asked what I was doing. I didn’t want to have to explain that this was a fragment of an African ritual I’d been told to do in honor of their Ancestors. It was enough that Doris was upset with me. I took a quick look around to be sure that no was looking, shook the can of peanuts and poured it out into the ground and followed it with the rum. I looked up again. The coast was clear. I covered up the hole, zipped the empty peanut can and bottle back into my pack, took a deep breath. No one had seen me or asked what I was doing. I could relax.

We made a lot of progress that day and left well after noon to get back to the community center for our potluck. Carolyn was there putting out coleslaw, bowls of potato salad people had brought, cold bean salad, a tray of deviled eggs and raw vegetables, ham, beans, chicken, and of course Gail’s cake. There was watermelon and iced tea, and the air conditioner had been working to cool the space since Carolyn arrived earlier. We had a place to wash up, cool off, and eat—you couldn’t ask for much more. At first there was so much to do, I forgot about the hard place I was in with Doris. Nuthel’s daughter Wanda Gale dived right in to help, while Nuthel sat at a table inside, where it was cool. I sat down with Nuthel for a minute. She said it was good, really good, that we finally got this to happen; she was happy, even if we did have a ways to go.

While we worked on putting the food out, and the napkins, paper plates, and utensils, the scouts were horsing around outside, hungry and ready to eat. There were too many people in the kitchen, so I went outside to see what was going on there. Off a little ways from the building, out in the field, Ben was interviewing Geronimo on camera, asking him why he took his Saturdays off to help us. I went over to listen.

Geronimo, a growing fourteen-year-old, about five feet ten, told Ben about how, on both parents’ sides, his family visits their families’ burial grounds and takes care of the graves regularly. He didn’t think it was right that these descendants of Love had been locked out. He seemed offended by the idea that people had died and been buried and their gravesites had been lost. He said that he couldn’t imagine going to where his family is buried and not being able to find his relatives—his great-grandmother, his aunts, his uncles, any one of them. Geronimo’s father was from Mexico, and his mother came from Chicago. He never met his grandfather, and yet he has visited his grave several times and talked to him. He would have loved to have known him, and he tells him so on his periodic visits.

“Here there are family members we’re helping who’ve been looking all over the place for their relatives,” he said. “It takes a long time to cut down that wisteria to where you can even see the ground. We have been trying our best to find their relatives. It’s hard, real hard, but it makes me feel good to try.”

Finally it was time to eat. Julia, Gail, and Nuthel circulated outside, inviting people to come inside. We stood and said a quick blessing, giving thanks for all the hard work, the food, and the cooking. People then filled their plates and took seats at the four rows of tables. As the places filled, my heart sank. I watched the group divide itself almost exclusively into black and white. One table was all African American but for one white woman; the other table was exclusively white. After all this time working together with seemingly little sense of separation, here it was. I tried to tell myself that it was natural, folks wanted to be with family members. But I felt a pall in the air. Whatever misunderstanding I had with Doris seemed to have grown and spread beyond just us. I sat down at a table with Nuthel and Wanda Gale. They seemed untouched by whatever was happening, I was relieved to find.

Photo of Potluck supper here.

Potluck supper (left to right):Albert Johnson, Doris Vittatoe, James Brown, China Galland, Wanda Gale Britton Jackson (at the head of the table), Nuthel Britton, Willie Mae Brown, Mary Wallace, and Walter Edwards.

 

As the afternoon wore on, I felt increasingly uncomfortable with R.D. and Albert, with whom I had enjoyed such warmth. I didn’t know whether it was real or my own imaginings, brought on by sadness and discomfort with Doris.

When we got back to Philip’s house in the late afternoon, I went upstairs to shower and realized that behind my sadness and confusion, I was furious. I had a headache and I was exhausted. I had poison ivy. I felt like Doris had closed her heart, shut me out, and I didn’t know why.

I wanted to forget about Love Cemetery. I wanted to give up, pack my bags, and leave that night. Forget about race and reconciliation—it was all too complicated. If, as Doris had said, she didn’t need me, what was I knocking myself out for? I sat on the edge of the bed, then got up and paced. I had my own family. I wanted to go home.

I picked up the phone and called to tell my husband, Corey, that I was coming. He listened patiently as I told him what had happened and then said, “You can’t just walk away from this, not when you’re so upset.” He could hear my exhaustion. His gentle voice cut through my agitation. “You know this. You need some sleep. Sleep on it, China, and listen—” he paused, “remember Sam Adkins? Remember what he told Mabel when she was furious?” This was why I loved this man, why I had called him. “You’ve got to choose love when there’s reason to hate, right?” Corey said.

“Choose love, China. I don’t know what that looks like in this situation. I can’t tell you what to do. Just don’t do anything tonight.” How could I? His voice was already lulling me to sleep. I could hardly keep my eyes open. “Think about Mabel and Sam,” he said, “and go to sleep. You’ll know what to do in the morning.”