Grave Ornaments

On a whim I visited St. Louis Cemetery Nº 1 on the first day of a brief trip to New Orleans. I had read a little about this cemetery: how it was damaged by Hurricane Katrina, how its dead are housed in mausoleum-style tombs, since the area sits below sea level and the ground is unfit for interment (others told me this is more a tradition than a water-table issue). Basin Street was dotted with signs for “Graveyard Tours,” variously historic and haunted, but on this freezing mid-January day, unseasonably cold for the Gulf Coast, the graveyard was nearly empty. St. Louis occupies a city block. But it is enclosed so that from the outside you have no sense of what lies within. Inside it’s like a small village. We walked down the lanes. My ten-year- old son, Jonah, said, “This isn’t a death-y place!” and I agreed. On many of the monuments were colorful or edible offerings to the dead–Mardi Gras beads, apples, hotel room keys, half-eaten hamburgers, coupons. Still little lives.

The next day I set out to find Greenwood Cemetery, a streetcar ride away, imagining a place like St. Louis, only larger. But apart from a magnificent statue of a twelve-point buck that marked the entrance, Greenwood Cemetery was unremarkable. With its grassy wide lanes, stately tombs, and overall tidiness, Greenwood was like the Upper East Side of graveyards. A few potted plants had blown over in the wind, but there were no offerings left on the graves.

That night, a tip from a bartender put me on the trail of Holt Cemetery, the pauper’s graveyard, where my daughter Eve and I headed the next morning. We took the same streetcar to Greenwood—Cemetery Line—as I had the previous day, but walked farther from the last stop. My first impression was of a community garden. A few cars were leaving when we arrived, and gravediggers were busy mounding up the earth on a fresh grave. They balanced some ribboned flowers atop the soil, and then Eve and I were alone in the garden of the dead. We looked from grave to grave entranced. Teddy bears, Bibles in zip-lock bags, clothing, leftover Styrofoam hearts from long-decayed bouquets—not offerings such as those for legendary figures, like the “Voodoo Queen” Marie Laveau in St. Louis, but piercingly individual adornments. On one mound, unmarked but for a scattering of faded artificial flowers, we saw bones in the dirt—first a patella, then a mandible, and others less identifiable.

Graveyards are a subject I have talked many photography students out of shooting over the years, too easy an emblem of melancholy. Here, though, the graveyards seemed to me to be about the living: about the porous skin of dirt that divides us from the dead; about the specificity of time, place, and class; about forgetting as much as about remembering.