He had chaperoned their entire journey from Savannah to the grave. When Lady and Mammy come to the place, Garlic was there. Only the folk at the early service know that-Garlic, his wife, Miss Priss, and me. He got himself in the middle, in death just like in life. Of course, Other wants Mammy buried beside Lady. What she doesn’t know is a long time ago Lady’s grave and Planter’s were changed, looking toward just this day. Mammy be lying down beside Planter. A low wall of flat stones piled one on top of the other, a slave wall, hedges the ghost in, hedges the visitors out. Nothing grows in this shade but names and dates and ghosts. Pink stones, head and feet, red earth, green tree, sprigs, and odd blades of grass. In this mound are carved stones of pink Etowah marble. A blanket of wild grass and wild flowers covers this ground most of the year, protecting, concealing.Ĭloser to the house-you can see it from the porch-is the family burial ground: a rising mound of red earth beneath a tall, limb-spreading tree. A concentration of round fieldstones (some still in stacks) and branches lashed together to create crude crosses mark for still blinking eyes the territory of the enslaved dead.
Out back of where the cabins used to be, over a mile from the house, there is a slave cemetery. Only in the lazy drag of her feet, the slow trifling ramble on any one of so many errands, did she save herself just a little from work-hard-work-long exertion, a slave’s exertion. I wanted an hour she had been at rest on earth, and I couldn’t find one. Just dawn. The time of day when even servants rest. We had our service early in the morning, Garlic, his wife, Miss Priss, and me.
0 kommentar(er)
