by Leila Taylor
After slavery was abolished in 1865, the agricultural south was left without the free labor it depended on and freed slaves were left with little options to support themselves. With sharecropping, free Black men and women worked the same fields they did as slaves, but now as “tenants,” giving a percentage of their crop to the white owners who often took advantage with high interest rates or by cheating them out of their fair share of pay. White supremacy was sustained by Jim Crow laws and red-lining which segregated Blacks from whites and restricted access and mobility. Systemic surveillance and over-policing had, and still does, put a disproportionate number of Black people behind bars for minor or made-up offences, and today the for-profit prison industry provides free manufacturing labor — in other words, slavery. Despite emancipation, Reconstruction did little to rebuild what was razed. The social and psychic damage that was caused never stopped, and the trappings of the institution remained in the Black Codes of vagrancy laws and indentured servitude. Its form continues to shape-shift and its name changes to deceptively legitimate concepts like, “states’ rights” and “law and order,” or bureaucratic legalese like “eminent domain” or “gerrymandering.” The result is a persistent open wound from continued oppression, dehumanization, and an absence of the opportunity to heal.
How can you mourn the dead when the mechanics that made slavery possible are still churning? How do you get over the death of something that is still alive? What we thought was turning out to be a neat scar, healing nicely in the presidential election of 2008, grew into an uncontained, lumpy monster in 2016.
Giorgio Agamben suggests that melancholia “offers the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object […] an anticipation of unfulfillment and damnation […] the capacity to make an unattainable object appear as if lost.” Slavery left behind a legion of losses both corporeal and intangible. There are those that died in the crossing, those who were killed in bondage, those worked to death or murdered outright, the families whose ties were split, and genealogies severed. There are countless bodies, but among the missing are lost identities, languages, histories, religions, names, traditions, connections, potentials, and futures. Those are things which can’t simply be tossed overboard or buried in the ground — things that can’t be reimbursed for or repaired. For the descendants of chattel slavery, there’s no telling what was lost because there is no telling what could have been had. Black people arrived in this country already in a state of absence, already bereaved.
If mourning is predicated on the loss of something, melancholia is missing what you never had. So, if there is a persistent state of mourning lingering in the sub- (and-not-so-sub-) consciousness of Black America, how is that melancholy made manifest? Joy DeGruy defines the effects of this loss as Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome: the resulting trauma of multigenerational systemic oppression of the African diaspora, a persistent hum of fight-or-flight in the background, new violence inherited from old violence, old oppression evolving into new oppression, and the dead rising from the grave over and over.
Hidden Graves
“Want to know the difference between a casket and a coffin?” I plowed ahead without waiting for a yes or no. “A casket is rectangular like this one. A coffin has that old fashioned tapered shape. After the industrialization of the funeral industry the anthropomorphic shape of coffins were thought to be too creepy. It reminded people that there was a body in there.” For someone who thinks and talks about death as much as I do, I am horribly awkward at funerals, and I took my brother’s silence as a reminder that this may not have been the best small talk before our aunt’s funeral. But I think about death and mourning all the time and it’s hard not to want to talk about it while I’m in the middle of it. I once met a woman who was planning her own funeral on Pinterest, the online dream-board of lifestyle aspirations used by brides-to-be everywhere. She said, “I don’t know if I’m ever going to get married. I know I’m going to die.” Inspired, I began my own end-of-life planning, and I find it calming and clarifying: making up music playlists, noting flower preferences and choosing the type of burial (natural, no embalming, in a plain pine casket). What would I wear? What would I ask others to wear in honor of me? What will be the last gesture I make in the world, what is the last thing I will ever say or do?
Freshly dug graves have the best dirt for making mud pies. When I was a kindergartener, my little friends and I sat along the edge of a six-foot-deep rectangular hole, scooping up handfuls of rich black earth and molding and patting them into flat round discs with satisfaction. I might have felt a little bit of guilt, that perhaps what we were doing was sacrilegious or disrespectful, but that was part of the thrill, to co-opt this sacred space for our own use. When we were done with that we took turns “playing funeral,” in which one of us would lie as still as we could, next to a gravestone, while the others wept and mourned our untimely passing. I have been playing in cemeteries for a long time.
Since the Graveyard Poets of the nineteenth century, the cemetery has been, more than any other setting, the locus of dark romanticism — a landscape designed specifically for the contemplation of death. The cemetery provides all the pleasure of a park but without the annoyance of people. With its acres of trees, rolling hills, lakes and elaborate mausoleums, Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn is my Central Park. Walking through the great gothic arches into my necropolis, my pace slows and I stroll with my hands clasped behind my back, taking in the air for my weekend constitutional. Like museums or churches, the cemetery demands a certain decorum, a slower pace and a softer tone. There are no joggers huffing past me on the left or lycra-clad cyclists zooming past me on the right. Evan Michelson once said that cemeteries are “the only place I could be alone and surrounded by people at the same time.” I quite like that perspective.
There are now a variety of interesting ways to memorialize the dead, much of which have to do with cremains: ashes sprinkled into vinyl albums, packed into pods to grow sapling trees, encased in fancy glass dildos, or pressed into diamonds. The death-positive movement re-introduced to modern culture the death doula — funerals at home in which family members wash and dress their loved ones the way they did in the old days, before interning them in environmentally friendly bamboo caskets wrapped in naturally decomposing death shrouds.
As an ecologically inclined person, my initial thoughts were that it would be irresponsible to take up space in a cemetery plot and that there was a kind of antiquated hubris about a coffin. I should want something more efficient, something more modern. But I do want a headstone. I want a hunk of granite with my name and the dates of my life span underneath. I want goth kids forty years from now to lounge over my grave holding roses for self-portraits. I’m less interested in my immediate family having a place to visit me, and more inclined to think of my spot for the ages. It’s antithetical to everything I stand for, but goddamn it, I want a rock in the ground with my name on it.
Along the 5th Avenue side of Green-Wood Cemetery, far from the main gates, away from the stately Gilded Age mausoleums, is a placard near a large boulder visible through the chain-link fence. It reads:
Legend has it that, near this spot during our Colonial period, an African American named Joost dueled the Devil in a fiddling contest. When Joost triumphed, the Devil, in defeat, stomped his foot on a rock, leaving an impression of a hoof print. This rock, recently dug out of Sunset Park’s ground, reminds us of the folktale of the Devil’s Footprint.
I came across this completely by accident having gotten off the bus a stop too soon. It’s not the location that bothered me, or the fact that I’ve never heard the story before. It was the vagary of it all. It wasn’t REALLY the rock, just one that looked like it. It wasn’t the EXACT spot, just somewhere near there. It’s almost apologetic in its timidity.
The legend goes that Joost (who may or may not have been a slave), was walking home from a wedding one night after one too many glasses of schnapps. He paused to rest on a rock and
while admiring the starry sky he took out his fiddle and began to compose a tune. Engrossed in his playing, he failed to realize that the Devil had joined him, who then challenged Joost to a fiddle contest. Joost prevailed and the Devil stomped his foot in a temper tantrum and disappeared. The next morning, Joost found himself in a nearby field alone next to an empty bottle of schnapps. I wished there was a monument, something with some permanence, and a place worthy of a Black man with skills so good it pissed off Satan. There would be a fiddle etched into a grand marble obelisk above the words carved in Roman capitals:
JOOST
THE FIDDLER WHO SLAYED
But the dent in that boulder isn’t really the Devil’s footprint and the location is estimated:
IN THIS GENERAL AREA
(WE THINK)
A BLACK MAN FOUGHT THE DEVIL AND WON
SOMEWHERE AROUND HERE
(BUT NOT REALLY)
They say that death is the great equalizer, but some neighborhoods in Green-Wood are better than others. The Knickerbocker set of the Golden Age are buried here in monumental mausoleums along their own Park Avenues, with crypts the size of studio apartments. How you died was a reflection of how you lived, and as in life, the residences of the poor and disenfranchised are the first to be paved over in the name of development.
In August 2017 in Green-Wood, the graves of eighty-three African Americans dating back to 1858 were discovered in a sparsely populated area, close to the street and far away from the best neighborhoods.2 If Boss Tweed and Louis Tiffany have their final residence in the Upper East Side of the cemetery, The Colored Lots, as they were known, were the slums. They were the cheapest lots, built with no foundations so that over time the headstones sank into the earth and disappeared. With no one visiting them and no one maintaining them, the names and birthdays and deaths were left to fall into oblivion.
Stories like this pop up now and then as the city tears down and builds itself up over and over again. A Black burial plot from the seventeenth century was found under the 126th Street Bus Depot in Harlem.3 An incredibly well preserved Black woman in an iron coffin was discovered in Newtown, Queens.4 The bones of slaves and servants are discovered, construction is halted, and the dead are recognized three hundred years too late.
Across the street from the Brooklyn Public Library’s New Lots branch, is a charming, white clapboard Dutch Reformed church, with a sign on the front lawn reading, “All Are Welcome.” The adjacent churchyard was neatly kept with crooked grey tombstones marked from the 1800s. Under the New Lots Avenue street sign was an additional sign reading: “African Burial Ground Square.” I went across the street into the library to see if anyone there had any information about the graveyard and the librarian said, “Those were the officers and soldiers from the Revolutionary War. The slaves are under here.” I instinctively looked down to the floor as if I would be able to see through the tiles, into the basement and through the concrete foundation to the bodies below. But there was nothing to see, just the speckled floor and the clarity that we’re walking over the anonymous dead all the time.
The most prominent of these sites is the African Burial Ground, located at 290 Broadway in Manhattan, two blocks away from City Hall. The area is dense with office buildings, courthouses, banks, and shops, not too far from Wall Street and the site of the World Trade Center. It’s on a nondescript side street that was intended to be the site of a new federal building and it’s hard to determine who is infringing on whose territory. Such as it is with posthumous memorials, they have to share space with whatever is built on top of them.
Discovered in 1992, the remains of about four hundred and twenty Blacks (free and not free) were buried in what was, in the 1700s, known as the Negro Burial Ground. The entire burial site covers about seven acres, with an estimated fifteen to twenty thousand bodies, but the memorial itself only takes up about a third of a block. Soon after the remains were discovered, questions about how the site would be memorialized arose and an international call for entries went out for artists and designers to propose concepts. I don’t remember much of the other entries but I do recall a lot of waterfalls. There was one proposal I really wish would have won. The artist (who I think was from Switzerland or the Netherlands) proposed that in every elevator, in every building on top of the entire seven acre site, well beyond the excavation, would be a plaque that read:
YOU ARE NOW SUSPENDED ABOVE THE AFRICAN
BURIAL GROUND.
That’s it. A lovely little shove out of the historical amnesia that we experience every day, and a reminder as we float above Starbucks and the Stock Exchange, of the spectral undercurrent of Black and brown blood that built this country. It is not meant for quiet contemplation, it’s not intended for those in mourning to pay respectful tribute. It’s for the people who walk by the memorial every day without giving it a thought. It’s uncomfortable and awkward. It’s not a site for healing. It’s a condemnation.
The project was ultimately awarded to Rodney Leon, a Black architect, and the design is pretty much what one would expect: uplifting quotes in script typeface carved into granite and African symbols etched into walls. It’s OK. Like most public memorials, the emotional stakes are too high, for cool objectivity and consensus beats out creativity. The most powerful and interesting part of the grounds are the seven rounded rectangular mounds over the surface of the grass. The remains were sent to Howard University to be examined and then reinterred in seven coffins on the site. Perhaps it’s because it is so simple in form, so clearly and obviously graves, that I prefer this to the curved polished wedge next to it. Buff away the etched maps of Africa and the symbols, and the form of the memorial could be for anyone or anything. Those seven mounds could only be one thing and there is nothing symbolic about it. They are exactly what they look like: graves disrupting the landscape of commerce and the law.
A resting place is a liminal space in between this world and the unknown, where peace and quiet are supposed to be guaranteed. It’s not only where the physical remains are found — the person below becomes the owner of that place. In these new-found burial sites, the bodies there remain unnamed and grouped into a generic category: Africans, slaves, former slaves, free Black people… The grounds fall short of sanctified, as they are swallowed by the infrastructure of the city, as addendums to street signage or plaques on the side of a building. The “Square” in New Lots is invisible, undefined as a vague area to commemorate this particular collection of bones, but the people themselves remain anonymous. Relegated to the role of the “landmark,” the empty space itself becomes the object to mourn, a numinous territory where the boundaries of history bleed into the everyday. These commemorative spaces are intended to be places that allow the opportunity to mourn a loss, but it is a loss that is generations removed from the mourner. Not a person, but one’s “people,” symbolic of millions of lost lives accumulating in a massive absence of the unknown and unknowable. There is no long list of names carved into the stone like the Vietnam Memorial or the World Trade Center memorial. Just the representational dead like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. But names matter. “Bodies matter. Personhood persists where it manifestly no longer resides; the dead, as represented by their bodies, are somewhere and are something.” 5
The new world was built up around and on top of the dead, and as a result these reminders become disruptions of normalcy — temporary blips of reckoning. But these are still sanctioned sites, gated areas, and designated places of mourning. In March 2019, the block between Gates Street and Fulton Avenue in the Clinton Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn, will be known as “Christopher Wallace Way.” Christopher Wallace, also known as The Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls, was the legendary rapper who rose from the streets of Brooklyn to become one of the most significant artists in hip-hop history. Biggie was shot and killed in 1997 and the significance of his loss is made evident by the larger-than-life visages painted on walls of apartment buildings and bodegas all over New York. Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyves
ant have become whiter and whiter as rents go higher and waves of newcomers gentrify formerly Black spaces, but the traces of the dead are still there on the walls. You might be able to buy bourbon-fig-vanilla beard oil and a Japanese-fusion taco, but the wall outside still has a portrait of a dead young Black man.
Comandante Biggie!, mural by Sean Meenan, Lee Quinones, and Cern One, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, photo by L. Taylor
Unlike the deliberate visit to the cemetery, these tributes become part of the urban landscape and as result the traces of the dead become part of the historical texture of the neighborhood. Black neighborhoods from cities all over the country are painted with portraits of loved ones, as well as fallen heroes like Malcolm X and Tupac Shakur — memento mori in spray-paint and brick. Since its rise in the 1970s, graffiti has always been a form of remembrance, a permanent demarcation of presence and identity to say, “I was here.” With its own culture, terminology, and aesthetics, tagging is a method of immortalization for the disenfranchised, the forgotten, and those most vulnerable to violence and death.6
Public practices of mourning usually occur in a few select places: funeral homes, places of worship, cemeteries, and private homes. Once the ceremonial “event” of the wake, the funeral, the burial or cremation is over, mourning reverts back to a personal, private experience. The memorial mural expands the mourning process beyond the personal and into the public for as long as the mural is preserved, remaining in the social consciousness for years and providing a public record of the critical events of a community’s history.
These public memorials are practices in claiming visibility and a conspicuous expression of humanity for a marginalized population that has been dehumanized by historic, social, economic, political and cultural forces. The public mourning site is even more significant when the death is the result of violence, particularly when that violence is enacted upon young, Black men whose deaths are either sensationalized, stigmatized in the media, or reduced to statistics. The mural allows for a positive reflection of the deceased and control over how they are remembered in the community, transforming “personal grief into shared public sentiment by serving as a vehicle for community affiliation and potential empowerment.”7