I visited two cemeteries when I was in St. Louis. One, I knew, was the resting place of several family members, though I could not have made a full and accurate list. The other was a mystery to me during childhood — not far away, but cloaked from the road by a tall embankment and a row of trees. One cemetery was for white folks, it seemed, and one was not. St. Louis, still a deeply segregated city in my childhood, and in many ways still today, was segregated even after death.
At the first large cemetery, with its rolling grassy slopes and mature trees, but fewer than I remembered, I stopped at the office to ask about the location of graves of my grandparents, Marvin and Marjorie Parsons. After just a few minutes, a person came out with papers showing two adjoining plots holding about six graves, and a map guiding me to the location. When I arrived there, there were more people I knew than I had expected. First, Marvin and Marjorie, both born in the 00's more than a century ago. On the same formal low stone was the. name of my great-grandmother, Mary Swank, born in the 1880s. I remember her sitting in a rocking chair in the Parsons kitchen with a wild-haired lapdog named Cha Cha Cha.
Over to the left, the low markers for my aunt Virginia, who I remember fondly and well, and her husband Arturo, who died of cancer not long into their young marriage, and who I did not know. And to the right of the main Parsons stone another for my cousin Michael, who lived only to the age of 14, and whose passing still makes waves for me when I think of it. I remember hard and somber scenes at some of these graves on days of burial.
I'm pretty sure there are other members of the large extended family buried there — my grandparents had about 45 living offspring when they died, and most lived around St. Louis. My cousins could probably help make a list.
The other cemetery, not so far away, turns out to be a large place too, with wide lawns and mature trees, but it's not an active place for burial these days. Much vandalized, it makes for a stark visit. Beautiful stones and broken ones are intermingled, statuettes toppled, markers in the grass as if tossed aside by a giant. One or two of the old style markers with a ceramic disk holding a photo portrait of the lost one, and more marker where that same oval space is present but the portrait has been pried off and discarded. Thin stones almost completely severed from their bases, and thick stones with corners smashed away. Stones made from the fanciest material, stones homemade from cement with letters and numbers etched roughly in before the materials could set. There are names of notable families in the history of the city, such as the educator Vashon and even the family name of the athlete Spinks.
To account for such widespread damage, I picture recurring visits made by racists after dark, looking for something to destroy, people not satisfied with the torments they were able to help inflict when the people there were alive. It's a crude and hateful disrespect, a powerful, relentless poison that must run very deep.