We were just kids. Teenagers. I can honestly say we didn’t know any better. But maybe we should have.
It was Halloween night. I was 17 and throwing a party. My friends and I were going to sleep in the barn for the night—eat pizza, hang out—and just enjoy the certain creepiness that can come with a slave plantation on an average day but is especially heightened by hormones and Halloween.
We started the evening in the barn. Most of the guys went out to get pizza. All of the girls and one of the boyfriends stayed behind. We were hanging out in the barn when Leigh Ann and Amy noticed a sound like a baseball rolling across the floor. We could hear it but not see it, whatever it was.
We looked around for an animal moving in the shadows or a branch scraping against a window. Nothing. “It’s something under the floor,” someone said. “It’s a skull rolling around under the floor.” The hysteria was mounting.
For a few minutes, I thought maybe there was something moving around in a space between the floor and the ceiling below. But then I remembered that there were only the heart pine boards that formed the floor and the ceiling of the stable-turned-root-cellar below. I knew better than to think something could be rolling against the floor from underneath, but I was caught up in the thrill of it, a willing scaredy-cat.
We ran to one side of the room, and the sound continued to move, sliding back and forth beneath the floor, a small terror we could not name. Then back across the room we went. Ten or fifteen minutes of this, and we were so scared that tears were coming.
Then, it stopped. We waited, barely breathing, and it didn’t return. Relief. Deep breaths and nervous giggles.
Just then, the guys returned with the pizza, and we told them about the skull, laughing it off even as our heartbeats slowed. They decided—out of bravery, machismo, or just some sense of curiosity—to go to the cellar and check things out. Nothing. Just the sheets of black plastic over the saplings waiting to be planted in the tree nursery outside. We sat down and slapped open the pizza boxes.
As we took our first bites, the tapping started. Loud against the barn door by the field. This was impossible—the door’s threshold opened about 10 feet over the ground. Someone would have to be floating there to knock on it.
No more skulls. Now, we had vampires to contend with.
Chad walked quietly toward the door, perhaps heartened by the presence of more testosterone in the room, retreating a few steps for every 10 or so he gained. Eventually, he slammed it open with a flat palm . . . and screamed. I think he leapt the entire distance of the barn back to us.
“There’s a man there. A man. With a pitchfork,” he said, his breath coming in gasps.
I heard the word “man” and said, “Dad!” I went over to look down out the door. There he was, a shovel handle at door level, grinning.
He came in, laughed with us awhile, and went on home, his Halloween job done.
We were already amped up by the time we went to the slave graveyard later. I don’t say that as an excuse, just an explanation.
Once our heartbeats slowed, we returned to our pizza and talked about the things that made up our teenage days—band competitions and track meets, teacher flaws. About 11:30, we piled into two cars and drove up the road, past my house and to the graveyard. This was a planned part of the night, something I had offered as enticement to my friends. Midnight in the slave cemetery. On Halloween.
Jay parked his 1970s BMW 2002, and I pulled the Toyota right up next to him, just outside the short, slate wall. We got out, leaving the doors of the cars open so that we could see by the interior lights.
I either didn’t think to bring flashlights or purposely left them to heighten the spooky factor. It’s mighty dark in the country, can’t-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face dark when there’s not a moon. Creepier on Halloween for sure.
All in a bunch, my friends crossed the 20 or so feet to the cemetery, stepped onto the disintegrating wall, and dispersed.
I lingered back by the cars. I’m not sure why I did that except that the graveyard was familiar to me. Nothing new. Just a place up the road from my house.
I have this recollection that Jay was on the other side of the cemetery, a space that then seemed like acres away but really was probably about 200 feet across from me. I heard him yell.
Then Jodi, just a few feet away, screamed. “Someone grabbed me.” Her high-pitched voice reached me. I could hear the roaring crackle of leaves and breath as everyone swarmed back toward the light.
For a few moments, we stood there trying to figure out what happened. Someone accused Chad of playing a trick. Jodi thought maybe Jay grabbed her arm. Oddly, no one suggested that my dad and I had rigged up another scare. We never did figure out what exactly happened, but I can say it wasn’t Dad or me.
Quickly, we loaded the cars and went back to the barn. People were shaken. Leigh Ann sat close to Jay and comforted him. Chad held Jodi. Everyone was scared, and I don’t think most of us slept that night. They were frightened; I was puzzled.
I still am. I don’t know what my friends felt, heard, or saw. Right now, I can’t even remember what Jay said had made him shout. I know they were genuinely scared, but maybe it was just the fright of the evening, fed by Dad’s antics earlier, the exaggeration so easily achieved on a dark night. Or maybe something (someone?) reached out to them. If I were Primus or Letty or Hannah, I might have resented the use of my final resting place as a Halloween gimmick and decided to have a little fun of my own. I don’t know what I think of that idea. I’m not even sure what I think of ghosts. I won’t discount them, though.
What I do know is that now—20 years later—I go to that graveyard to find peace. I don’t feel scared or nervous there. Sometimes sad, sometimes just quiet as I walk across the wavy ground, where—as best I can tell—at least 100 people are buried. Sometimes I go there and cut away saplings, trying to make it look more like a place that is cared for—since I do care for it a great deal—and less like a place where kids go to play on Halloween.
I’m ashamed of my choice to take my friends there that night. Not deeply ashamed—I give myself the grace of youth in my memory—but saddened that I did not see this as a place where people were buried, people who did not have a choice about their burial location, people whose graves go, largely, unmarked and unclaimed. I’m sad that I didn’t take my friends there to meet these people.
I wish I had taken them to Primus’s stone and said, “This is where Primus lies.” That we didn’t walk over to Ben Creasy’s headstone and say, “Ben was a carpenter. His great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren go to school with us.” That we didn’t kneel beside Jesse Nicholas’s stone—the stone of a skilled mason—and say, “Jesse’s mom was the nurse for The General’s kids. She is the only enslaved person buried in the family cemetery. I wonder how he felt to know he wouldn’t be buried near her.”
I don’t know what my friends would have said to those things . . . teenage-glazed “uh-huhs,” I expect. We were just kids, so caught in the drama of our own stories that it was hard to hear the people we knew, much less people who had been dead 150 years.
Still, I’m sorry I didn’t say those things then. But now, these are the stories I tell when I take people, like my friend Joe Creasy, to see the stones. “Ben was a carpenter. He was your great-great-great-great-grandfather.”
Then, I walk away and whisper to Primus a while.