Seven miles over the Brooklyn Bridge, through the stone arch gates of Holy Cross Cemetery, I found a forgotten grave.
I went there in July 2017 because I’d heard the story of Marie Smith, a young schoolgirl who was murdered in Asbury Park in 1910. Her killing was a notorious crime that was covered nationally, and the defense of the primary murder suspect was the third case ever handled by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The story sat at a historic intersection of sweeping national forces—religious extremism, class struggle, the infancy of criminal psychology, and Jim Crow racial violence. Yet there was hardly any literature about it.
There existed, however, a record of where the young victim was buried in 1910—Holy Cross Cemetery in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. That seemed like a good place to start learning more.
The grave wasn’t easy to find, even with a map of the plots. It was supposed to be in the western end of the ninety-six-acre cemetery, in an area near an old white chapel. I walked along a row of mismatched headstones, many tilting or leaning with age—but I couldn’t find the number of the plot I was looking for. It just wasn’t there.
I saw a green work truck parked along a walkway and went over. The driver was Fred, the cemetery superintendent. He walked me back to the row of stones and helped me look. About halfway down the row we stopped at a short gray slab with the name O’Brien on it. A few feet to the left was the headstone marked Antoinette Calvello, who passed in 1905. In between the stones, in a space of just two feet across, several clumps of overgrown ryegrass weeds sprouted three feet high. Fred looked at the drooping weeds for a minute before he could be sure.
“That must be it, then,” he said, pointing.
“No headstone?”
“No, sir.”
I crouched down and pulled the weeds apart. There was a small dirt clearing, the size of a shoe box, where no grass or weeds grew—a spot where a small marker or headstone might go.
But there was nothing there. Just rocks and dirt. All there was in the world to mark that someone’s bones lay below. And not just someone—two someones. Young Marie Smith, and her brother John, who died of accidental poisoning at eighteen months. Each in their own box, stacked vertically. Buried more than a century ago.
Buried, and now lost beneath the weeds. As close to forgotten as you can get, without having nothing or nowhere at all.
That bare plot of earth is where this book began.
A few weeks after the book was finished, in the summer of 2019, I went back to Holy Cross.
This time, it was easy to find Marie’s spot. I knelt beside it and pulled up some weeds and dug up three inches of dirt. Then I lay a small bronze-plated marker in the empty space and secured it there. It was a simple marker, the size of a brick, and it was engraved with two names.
John Smith, the beloved son, and his sister, Marie Smith.
The inscription below the girl’s name reads:
Marie was the flower.
—Alex Tresniowski, 2019