Tomorrow, Today - Restoration Cemeteries; Rediscovering our Communities with Dr. Scott Cave

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

Tune into this episode of Tomorrow, Today, where we discuss the role of cemeteries in our community identity and our fight against invasive species. Why are cemeteries so important in understanding our local ecology, and why should we learn to reclaim our local cemetery? Check out Citizens Cemetery on Instagram at @CtznsCemetery

Welcome back to Tomorrow Today, where we talk about today, but tomorrow. I'm Nashlin, as always joined by Andy of the Poor Pearls Almanac. Today. Today, tomorrow. Also, we had this discussion, I think actually last episode, that I'm always Andy of the Porpo's Almanac. Not just Andy. Can I just be Andy of Tomorrow today? Welcome to Tomorrow today with your hosts of Tomorrow today.

I'm Andy of Tomorrow, your Nash of Today. The nash of today, the Andy of tomorrow. The fill of the ossify, first off. First off of seat. Off a fee? No. First off of fee. That was the joke that only Disney kids will get.

Okay. Fill of the future. Yes. Anyways. Yes. Are we talking about the future today? No. But we are.

Well. That's what we do. Oh, yeah. Okay, but kind of. What does that mean? The mystery. If I tell you now, it's not going to be mysterious anymore. I mean, I'm getting bored.

Oh, sorry. I had the absolute pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Scott Cave, who is currently doing cemetery stuff. A doctor. A doctor doing cemetery stuff, which is, you know, we're back in the death nash. Welcome. Yeah, pathways. The bed's still warm. Yeah, so we had a cool chat about cemetery. So let me ask you a question. What is your favorite cemetery? Mount Auburn in Cambridge. Why? Well, okay, I know why, but like why. If you know why, then why are you asking me? Tell the people why. Tell the people. Because it's also an arborita. It's one of the oldest arboretums in, I think, North America.

Yeah. And it's got some really cool, old, awesome specimens. Nothing, like, wildly crazy, but it's fun. It's a good place for kids to see, and people in general, to see, like, the sheer diversity of plants. And one of the things that's really nice about it compared to, like, a lot of plant things, is that there's a good enough amount of native plants that we can, like, really take in, like, look at all this cool stuff from around the world, but also look at all this cool stuff that is from here.

And also, I guess, like, there's a bunch of famous dead people there. So there's that. Take them relief. Wow. Okay, so I think it's interesting that that's your answer, because we obviously know why you go there because it has nothing to do with dead people or cemeteries or graves. Like, you're there for the arboretumness of it all.

Yes. Yes. But it's funny to me that you had an answer for what's your favorite cemetery because I feel like a lot of people don't. Yeah. Normal people. Normal people. But however, something that I think is really important, and I know we've talked about, we're actually talking about it before we recorded today, not like right before.

Tomorrow today. Before tomorrow today. Before, after yesterday, though, so today. Yes. I was talking to you about the fact that there's a cemetery nearby where there's striped maple, and it's one of the only spots, like within like 30 miles that it's been identified in this part of the country, even though it used to be really common. and that is something about cemeteries that's really cool is that they're this place that because there wasn't any development, there's still a lot of old species that can kind of give us glimpses

of what the landscape looked like before suburbanization. And you're not going to believe this. We talked about that in my interview. Oh, man. Here we go. Yeah. Here we go. I'm just saying we did. Because one of the cool things about cemeteries all over the United States is that they are sort of protected ecologically from a lot of the destruction that we persist on everything else.

So specifically, paupas, which I know are also, you're a big fan of. Yeah. Yeah. Papa and Mama. Okay. That was my good joke. Okay. You didn't like it?

No, I didn't. Okay. Well then. Yeah, paupas are not native here, but he's in D. Virginia. Virginia. Yeah, somewhere down there, so that that is the range. Yes.

I guess for you, as somebody that wasn't going in as a plant person, what were some of the takeaways for, or some of the thoughts around my side of things for a change that you thought were really interesting. What did I think about plants? Okay, so in truth, cemeteries actually have a long history with gardens, plants, arboretums, but it really happens after the United States Civil War that that really...

I don't, I'm sorry. I'm boring everyone now. It really happens after the United States Civil War that we move into this very romanticized idea of what death should look like. Because prior to that, cemeteries, graveyards were cultural centers. So they weren't just where you buried your loved ones or people you didn't like. It was also where animals grazed. Your meeting houses were normally there. So the dead were really a center of town, whereas today we sort of shove them on the outskirts of town.

So cemeteries used to sort of be this cultural center hub. of life, but now they're sort of shoved out to the suburbs, really. So one of the nice things about having these garden cemeteries is they are protected ecologically, but that's only when they make it on like a historical register or there's a reason for them also to be an arboretum. So what I actually talked about with Dr. Scott Cave was cemeteries that don't get protected, that they don't get taken care of, that the ecology actually threatens to ruin some of the stones or the populace actually ruins the ecology. So he's working on this project Citizen Cemetery, where he's been actually going back in and trying to help the cemetery reclaim some of its origins. So cleaning the stones,

making sure that invasive species don't destroy all of the things that are there. I mean, it's actually really, really fascinating work. And I recommend anybody who lives near a historic cemetery or a non-historic one, really, who notices that nobody's taken care of it, to reach out to your town, your community, and see what you can do to help bring it back because those are important. Most towns have like a conservation committee or there, I don't know what it's called, but some form of like preservation historic, like historic preservation committee. And I think there's a specific term for cemeteries. I don't know what it is off the top of my head.

But there's a lot of resources out there for people that are just, they probably won't do the work, but they'll be like, yay, go do it. Yeah. We value that too. But one thing I do want to point out that you brought up casually is that cemeteries were used for grazing. Because if you've ever seen a cemetery being grazed, it's like a cool thing because it's like, you'll see like sheep like sleeping on a gravestone and like on a slab. And they're just like chilling, live in their best life. Just, you know, being sheep, not knowing they're walking on a bunch of dead bodies.

Or not caring. Or not caring. They will eat you if they can. I've looked into the eyes of sheep. I've looked into the eyes of you looking into the eyes of sheep that wanted to eat you. Yeah, it was a real black fill up experience. Black Phyllis, first off. Sorry, yes.

Okay, so do you have any new, like, after this interview, do you going into a cemetery, doing the things you do? That makes it sound weird, but okay? Are you going to pay more attention to the college? Do you have any new perspective on what you see when you walk into an old cemetery? I'm actually, you know, I live in colonial New England, and I'm actually, curious to see how much of, like I've never really thought about a changing ecology when I walk into a graveyard, right? Because that's not what I'm there for. But I do think this conversation made me think about what it might have looked like when the cemeteries were new versus what they

look like now and how much of the stone destruction is actually because of invasive species. I mean, typically New England gravestones are slate, so they're destroyed anyway because it's not a super, it's not a material that has a ton of longevity. And it does it is very porous and very brittle, so they do get destroyed just by moss, by sun, existence, existence, teenagers, just in general. Getting looked at funny. You know, having a dead body underneath it, being haunted. Real ugly people, just they go down.

The sun. We could go on, really. There's a lot of problems with Slate. This is starting to feel some Slate hating group right now. Slate Haters United. But like thinking about... Find them on Facebook. Okay.

But thinking about what it might have. looked like or what the original intent of a space might have been. You know, if they're not family plots, thinking about what it could have been, what it might have been, like it thinking about Mount Auburn, you know, that has a real dedicated purpose. And so a lot of those trees are protected and it's a very different experience than a lot of the cemeteries that sort of just pepper the northeast, I think. Yeah, and I think it also is a reminder of like the terminology of the concept of graveyards, as long as they exist as they do as this permanent thing on a planet with finite resources where people are perpetually dying. I mean, climate change is going to

make that argument kind of meaningless, but still, like, in a philosophical exercise, it does raise some really interesting points about what the purpose is and how realistic the way we do it today is. Right. And if in that context, our graveyards are very much like an artifact in time, because we can't continue to create cemeteries in spaces like we did in the past because our cities are designed differently. Our rural spaces are more disconnected from our cities. Population densities, finite land, land costs, resources for developing and treating graveyards the way we have in the past. You know, if you go to a modern graveyard, it is flat. If you go to Plymouth Burial, it's like a weird cliff, basically. There's a graveyard.

about 10 miles northwest of Plymouth Graveyard that's basically on the beach. Like that is not something you would do today because that land is way too valuable. You know, it is one of those things where you start to think about, you know, how we've buried our dead across history. And of course, we don't always know how common people got buried or if we do, it's just, you know, kind of a bummer. Wow. Hey, Ruth.

What's up? What's up, Ruth? Miss you. But, you know, you think about the pyramids, and those are so obviously visible on a landscape. They're obviously, you know, set in a specific time. We have a lot of... Pyramids were the first pickup trucks. What does that mean?

You know what that means. I don't. It's all about that energy. Yes. Okay. So, okay, fine, small dick energy, we got it. Do you disagree? No.

But so this is my big takeaway from this, right? So we used to have these big pyramids. and only the really cool people who were leaders and rich people got to have those, right? But they're very physically on the landscape. They tell us a lot about death and dying. I think cemeteries are going to be that for this time period, really. You know, we've developed these spaces. They feel very temporal to us, but we're not going to have the space to continue doing this for people.

Right? So these are going to be historic monuments in a lot of ways, if they're not already. And the longer humanity goes on, the more likely it is that we're granted. Mama's buried is going to become a historic site. If humans live long enough for that. You just literally took what I said but made it sound better. Well, that's what I'm here for, really. Okay.

But, you know, my point is... Dr. Ph.D., here to steal your thoughts and put a citation on it. Well, isn't that what all academia is, really? Say your sources. Say your sources. To steal from the betters. But thinking along the lines of the progression of that, you know what I mean? Now Americans are very much in this, we cream it.

are dead. That's become very, very popular lately in the last hundred years or so. And those numbers increase every year because more of us die every year because there are more of us. And so we're using cemeteries in modern times less. So the historic spaces are even more important because they're how we remember how we used to treat death, how we are treating death now, it gives us a nice comparison and thinking about deathways as a sort of transient piece while having a very, very tangible marker on the landscape. I'm just trying to imagine like 300 years from now of cremation is still

like a major thing. And like our great, great, great, great, great, grandkids have like 180 urns. Just lining them up. This is my great, great, great, great grandfather and this might be my great, great, great grandmother. I'm not 100% sure. I might just

put her in the ocean. I don't know. I honestly hope. She loved the beach, I think. I checked her Instagram. Loved it. Beaches are just actually cremated people. We've run out of sand because flooding. And they're just people know. The softest sand you've ever had.

It loves you. It loves you. You can almost feel it. You can feel the homemade cookies. Just waiting. Right between your toes. Having sex in the dunes has never felt so fun. Has never felt so incestual.

You know, orgies if you're not related to them. Yeah, there's a lot of, that's a big orgy. That's true. Statistically speaking. But isn't everywhere a gravesite from something right now, you know. On a high enough scale, aren't we all having an orgy? Yes, with crabs and things, you know.

I mean microbes and... Yeah, yeast in the air. We're all just... We're all just fucking all the time. Which brings us back to cemeteries. Which brings to the dead. Yes. Don't have sex of the dead.

That's our takeaway from this. Or do. Just not their current bodies. Like wait until they get cremated. Have sex with their spirit. Mix them with some cream and then mate with it. Oh, God. You're welcome. I'm here all week.

You can't have your ashes put into a dildo. Into a lube? Oh, I don't know but a lube. Well, I would have put the dildo that sprays lube. With the nut sack you're talking about. The one that you can squeeze and it shoots out. See, I don't know. You've never heard of this?

This is a real academic podcast. We really try here. Answer all your questions. All of them. We're committed to making podcasts worse all the time. Anyways, let's wrap this up. Yes. So listen to this conversation since it's fantastic and then use that to either get involved in your local ecology teamwork game, like a Captain Planet type shit, or...

Captain Dead Planet. Captain Dead Planet, I like it. It's catchy. Or Google about how to clean gravestones. Google it. Please, don't just go there with a toothbrush. Anyway, Dr. Scott Cave. So I'm joined today with the fabulous Dr. Scott Cave, a historian, a stay-at-home dad, and a gorilla gardener who's working on caring for Citizen Cemetery in Bristol, Virginia, and,

bringing well-deserved attention to the city's eroded black history. Scott, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. I really want to talk to you about this whole project and how you got here and what you were studying before. But before I get into that, I really want to talk to you about gravestones. Most of the people that listen to the show know that I have a degree in gravestone iconography. I'm obsessed with gravestones. I can talk about them for the rest of my life. But I want to hear you talk about them and specifically what drove you to working with them and why you like them. kind of fell into this project and it totally asked backwards way.

I was looking for a place to take my kid and also like look for rare plants because I kind of got into botany in the last few months. And so like the graves, the headstones are in really bad shape and it did like bum me out and remind me to do the project. But like I don't know if that quite answers

your question. No, it does. So I got into them very, very academically, but I know that for most people who even study death peripherally, like as an academic or as just like a casual observer of things. Nobody studies gravestones or cleans gravestones because for the study of death or history, they don't really matter. And it's frustrating to hear people say that they don't matter because of how much they actually give us historically. Right. I have been interested in

death and how it makes people appear in the archive since I started doing my PhD work. I work on the 16th century in my academic research, so everyone is extremely dead. But one of the great things about death is it causes people who don't normally appear in the archive to show up. And so I think the greatest example of that is like, so intellectually we know that the Portuguese were sailing to South Asia. And intellectually, we know that like Portugal and Spain are next to each other. and intellectually we know that like sailors from Portugal would get jobs on Spanish ships but I found this document when I was working on my dissertation about a guy from India who died in Santo Domingo and the crown was like oh this guy has had a lot of money on him

we have to get it back to his widow in Lisbon and so like it was this It was this view into this world of like Indian people living in Europe and becoming sailors in the Caribbean and all just because this guy died in the wrong town and the crown tried to find his widow. When people die, the government wants to take notice of it. The church or the government wants to take notice of it. Like their parishioner has passed away. They need to record the location of the grave. They need to find the survivors. And that means that, like, very common people appear in the record in a way that they just would not otherwise.

I think we actually had similar paths to gravestones, which I guess I didn't really expect because I feel like I've always been really, really drawn to them. And my way in is sort of from the gravestones then to the history. But it is this one tangible moment where somebody that didn't leave a life of record by sheer coincidence. I think a lot of the times have extant gravestones that provide for historians and archaeologists and anthropologists today a look at a very stagnant point in history. And I talk about this all the time because I'm really, really passionate about it. But the thing about gravestones is that they are placed in situ. So at the moment that they most often, that they are created, they're put in the ground and they tend to stay there. That's not true across all, you know, all races, backgrounds. parts of the world. But for the most part, when we're talking about graves, not today, but when we're

talking about graves and cemeteries, they are in one place for a long time. So it can tell us a lot about art at the time. It can tell us a lot about belief systems. It can tell us a lot about how cultures were cross-interaction, cross-interacting. So times where we have wars, when we have famines, when we have colonialism, those things impact what we see on the ground. And so I think having those little pieces of somebody that wasn't totally relevant to a major historical narrative is really, really interesting because a lot of us don't matter to a major historical narrative. And so it is getting sort of this history of the every man, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah.

For a lot of people, it's, I mean, like think about Roman history. Very few written texts from Rome actually exist. But there are thousands of headstones all across Europe. it's called epigraphy in the business. Epigraphy is a major form of evidence for the study like Rome and the Maya and a lot of, I don't think there are any Maya tombstones. But they did a lot of, you know, ritual killings that happened at very historic sites that don't provide to us the same lens that gravestones do. But having those skeletal remains tell us about some of those ceremonies, which in turn sort of give us that look in a different way.

Yeah. So I think it's incredibly fascinating, and I'm so psych to be talking to somebody that actually sort of had the same thought process behind gravestones in a way that didn't come to them solely for the sake of coming to them. Yeah. Which is fascinating. Because I think, you know, we tend to say the people that are interested in death or do work in death tend to be morbid.

I understand that I'm wearing a hat. This is death right now. You know, it is the study of the living. They're just not living anymore. Yeah. It is sort of a story in a different way. It's, it's history, like, it's storytelling in a different way. You've already mentioned that you, you didn't start as a historian of Black early America. Oh, yeah, I just wanted to add, like, to tag on to that story about the guy from India. Whenever I'm in a situation where I'm holding a 500-year-old piece of paper, you have to think that, like, someone had to write the original piece of paper. It had to be tucked in a folder. It had to be. art, like, it had to be preserved multiple, multiple times and not thrown away. And, like, when I came across the cemetery, I was like, I have to, this is my little piece of paper with the Indian sailor on it. Like, I have to, I have to protect these little, little stones. Yeah, and in the same way, you wonder, I think, about all the things that didn't make it to us. You know, all the pieces of some of those stories that don't make it all the way down or things that we'll never, ever know about because they're simply gone.

And I think it's got a challenging and interesting history of itself, how things get saved, how things get lost. Unfortunately, I think a lot of it is wrapped up in capitalism and colonialism, but we have to be grateful for the things that have arrived into our modern times. that help us tell stories of people whose stories would not get to be told, which we'll talk about in a couple minutes, actually. So you mentioned in your work that you didn't start as a historian of Black Early America. You actually didn't even start at the U.S. at all, as you mentioned. So can you talk about how your PhD study and in particular the story that sort of led you to build a bridge between these two pieces? Before I even started grad school, I took this class called Paleography. and paleography is the study of how to read

like the old squiggly handwriting people in the past. And so people in 16th century Spain, if you show that people they're handwriting, people often think it's like Arabic or something. It really just does not look like your grandma's cursive. But I was good at it. And in the second semester of the course, I was assigned this journal by this priest. It's kind of an interesting

guy in his own right. But he discered. describes he's a Dominican, he's friends with Bartolome de los Casas, who's like kind of a big figure in this in 16th century Spain, but basically he believes that parts of North America can be brought into the Spanish Empire peacefully by just preaching at people until they decide to join the Spanish Empire of their own free will. And so he gets on a boat and he goes to Tampa or in Byron's, like Pinellas County, which is the area I'm from originally. And he meets indigenous people and he always every single time, he goes, oh, you know, I spoke to so-and-so. And we talked about, you know, how they're eager to receive the word. And I realized, like, well, this guy can't,

he's not talking to these people, right? Like, he does not speak Tokabaga, and they don't speak Spanish. There's just no way that there could be a linguistic bridge between those two. And in one little aside, one or two little asides in his journal he says, oh, you know, I said this through Maulena. And Maulena was, all he says is she's like a woman from the area. And as I dug, I kept pulling on that thread because I was just like, well, this seems like an amazing story. Like how did you find this person? How did she come to speak Spanish? You know, how did she learn Spanish and get back. And the story is that she was kidnapped by Hernando de Soto in 1539.

Like a lot of indigenous women were by Hernando de Soto and a funky stores in general. Hernando de Soto sent Madelena and a few other indigenous slaves to work for his wife in Havana. His wife learned that her husband died, so she moved back to Spain. He was illegal to bring indigenous slaves to Spain. There was a lawsuit about it. So I was able to find out when she entered Spain. And the king said, well, normally we would return indigenous people to where they're from, but we don't own Florida yet. And so we'll just keep her handy.

She can learn Spanish and be an interpreter when we go back. And so like 10 years later, this friar, Luis Concert, is in civilization. And he's like, I need someone who speaks Tokabaga or like one of those coastal Florida Indian languages. And he asked around all the pilots and like official bureaucracy of the Spanish Empire is like, well, there's one person. She's in Havana. I don't know how she got back to Havana. And he's like, I will never, ever take a woman. As God is my witness.

Women cannot be my interpreters. And then six months later in his journal, and he's like, so me and Model Lano went to, went to Florida. She's my translator. She's great. So that's a long way of saying that, like, A, I became really interested in how indigenous people in European communicated in these, like, cultural encounter moments. And I also became sort of obsessed with, like, the ways that people end up showing up in history. So fast forward a few years. And I've gotten into botany and I have like a little toddler.

and ellips to run around. I see botanists talking about this weird family of ferns that almost always grows in cemeteries. It's the Ophioglossaceae. And it's like November and I'm like, one of the botany is about to get terrible. So I go to citizen cemetery because I've seen it on a map and I'm like, oh no. Like I found an archive and it's covered in invasive bushes and the headstones are all tipped over and like someone's got to look after this place. Like, that in 500 years, someone's going to want to write about this stuff. Or, you know, people want their relative craps to be looked after in the here and now. And so someone has to look at this place.

They're not a directly connected story, but like, I think thematically, they really, they really felt the same to me. Well, that's beautiful. I want to talk about the Citizen Cemetery Project. But before we do, I want to ask you a different question because I think it's related to our friend, Meganelena. So this is a question that I think historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, all have a different but similar answer to. So when you're studying cultures and populations whose voices have been eroded

or whose agency doesn't flow through the historical narrative, how do you approach sort of giving back those voices? The metaphor I use in the piece and the thing I keep coming back to is like, if you can't write about someone, you can always try to write around them. And so for Modalena, I was actually able to do that because Spaniards kept crashing into Tampa basically by accident. You know, that little, the little peninsula, if you look at a map of Tampa, it's Pinellas County, a little, I'm not going to use a dick joke.

You can use a dick joke. I was going to say, it's hard to miss the penis of the United States. Yes, it's a little growth on the, on the dong of the United States. And it sort of acts as it like ropes every passing Spanish ship into harbor. And so like, get if it's like seven or eight people or seven or eight Spanish expeditions end up passing through like the Tampa Bay television market, basically in short succession. So we have all these Spanish sources describing the same area basically every five years. And so that was how I sort of told the story of the Tokabaga.

Because we know almost nothing about them. They were all kidnapped and sold in slavery by South Carolinians in the 18th century. I mean, I don't doubt there are people descended from the Tokabaga, like, around, but there aren't people who call themselves that, to my knowledge. And so I had a little bit of information about all their neighbors, their funerary rituals. I found this one document. And also, we had a lot of archaeology that was done in safety harbor culture, sites north of there. So people who are culturally related, even if it wasn't the same town.

So yeah, so that's how I wrote around her in situ in Florida. And then she sort of travels in the wake of all these famous people, like 16th century famous people. Hernandez Sito, Isabel de Vobadilla, the woman who owned her was the only female governor of Cuba. Luis Concert is a like semi-famous martyr of Spanish colonization efforts. And so all their papers were preserved, and I could write about the people who owned her or controlled her labor all through that journey through the European world. Then I end with Concert's Journal, and she steps out of the documentary record. But in the same way, like, I can't tell you very much individually about most of the people I find in the cemetery. And there was probably more to find, like, in the actual archive, I can, in the same way, like, I can write.

about the world around them. Yeah, that's fascinating. So let's get to the crux here. So can you tell us about your Citizen Cemetery Project? So how you got involved, how you married sort of this preservation, motivation, and botany, and how you work in that graveyard? Like I said, yeah, I went there looking for plants one day, and I found all the headstones tipped over. I also found a stand of pawpaws, which I think the pawpaw is like the secret. metaphor of the project. So pawpaws used to be dispersed by like mammoths and giant ground sloths.

They have big old seeds that can't really pass through any modern mammal. And so if you see pawpaws growing somewhere, it means that humans were like, I want a very tasty tropical fruit in a couple summers. And so I'm going to plant pawpaws in this spot. And so when I saw those pawpaw trees, I realized like, oh, people have been taking care of this place. People have been stewarding this environment for a long time, it's my turn to probably do so. And so to give sort of an idea of what the cemetery looks like, where I park, like, it more or less looks like a cemetery. The headstones are kind of mossy, but the further you go in, it's like a jungle of invasive moscanthus grass. There's huge tulip trees, but they're all covered in this

invasive vine called Winter Creeper. And then there's Privet that gets, Privet is another Asian an invasive plant that's like actually pushing gravestones over, like enveloping different family plots. And so when I have time, when my wife can watch my kid or when my kid's feeling a little cooperative, I just go in and I pull vines off of the big old trees and I pull dead branches off of the family plot fences and I cut down the privet and I poison it so it doesn't come back. One thing that you'll probably know more about than me is like, sanitaries have always been basically parks, like parks full of dead people.

They have always been green spaces in the center of cities. And so Bristol is not a huge town, but like the environment around it has a lot of invasive species. So that's one part. The other part is like people already use this space to walk their dogs and to go on walks on sunny days because it's a circular path through a green space. And so, like, if we can restore the space to, like, visual health, like, people feel more welcome there. But also, like, it's four acres in the middle of the city that could be supporting birds and bugs and, you know, critters of all kinds.

So I'm trying to think about, like, how to make it a space where we can, like, preserve history, where people feel comfortable being and, like, possibly help take care of this space. So I wanted to be a functioning. space. I want it to be a functioning social space for people to use and feel comfortable in and possibly help me fix up. And I want it to be a functional historical space where the headstones are preserved and that record of the past is looked after. I want to go back to your point just a little bit about the functional use of cemeteries because they have a very powerful past on the early colonial American landscape, at least in the northeast where my research is based.

Originally, they were not necessarily correlated to religion. So they were a very multifunction center of town green space. So oftentimes there were burials there. There was a meeting house there. And there were also animal grazing points. So it really was sort of the combination of what you're looking for today at this social, ecological space that also housed people who used to be a part of our community. in part because of the big movement of Momentumori at the time, you know, as you are now, I once was, as I am, you someday will be.

Remembering that that piece is important to communities because as your community members are dying, you have to be able to replace them or your community falls apart. So remembering, I think, that there's a mortality of your own community, as well as using the space in a way that isn't just how we use them, I think, in modernity, which is sort of just like, you know, grandma goes on the outskirts of town and know everybody visits her on her birthday. Sort of off sides here. Citizen Cemetery is, is it exclusive black cemetery in Virginia? Or is it? Yeah. Was it used by everybody?

Yeah. I don't have a perfect picture of like the delineation of who got buried where. But basically, as far as I can tell, if you were African American, so Bristol is divided between Tennessee and Virginia. And so as far as I can tell, if you were on the Virginia side, which is also where most of the African American people lived, and you died, you were buried in Citizen Cemetery after about the year 1890. And the last burial is from 2011. So actually, it was an active cemetery until pretty recently. Wow.

That is really recent for cemeteries. Wow. Yeah. I didn't expect it to go to that soon. So did they officially close because they're a historic site or did they just run out of room? So this is the part where I'm going to sound like a car. crazy person. Literally, I'm going to be like the yarn chart meme guy. Go for it. Okay. So Citizen Cemetery is owned by Citizen Cemetery, LLC, a corporation with no

officers that no one has heard from in a very long time, but is still the legal owner. As far as I can tell, active maintenance of the cemetery probably ceased around the 1990s. And I know this because I found a giant vine climbing up a tree, like the kind of vine that you would knock off if it was growing on purpose. And I counted the rings on the vine and it was 30 years old. So how were they still doing burials in 2011? Was it like guerrilla burying? That's what I can't figure out.

Because like, so every few years, this is the other thing that's also going to make me sound crazy, is like every few years the local newspaper is like, someone's finally fixing up old citizen cemetery. And like they start a Facebook group over it and they have one cleanup day where they pile up some brush and like put new flags by all the veterans. And then they're like, our work here is done. Yep. In every single article, like going back almost to 2011, they're like, no one knows who owns this place. The city has no clue. It's like, so did you just like, this is some Scooby-Doo? Did you just bring Uncle Dave and a rock out there and your headstone out

there and just be like, well, we own the plot. No one's going to stop us. Even if you don't, who's going to stop you? Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Not the parent company. Yeah. Let's cut funeral costs by gorilla burying our relatives. Right. So, and while it is divided into like family plots, so I think like people should feel very comfortable, you know, if Uncle Steve Jenkins dies, you could put them in the Jenkins plot. I think that's fine. You have dibs. But yeah, so that's why I call myself like a gorilla gardener because it's like, well, nobody owns this.

Nobody takes care of it. But like the city doesn't own it. So I do. I'm the sheriff. of this in cemetery now. I'm the captain now. Of plants and the dead. Yeah, yeah. I'm the captain now to quote the name.

Yeah. You sent over an article about another black cemetery in Virginia that was recently moved from Microsoft. Yeah, yeah. My wife found that on like Apple News, like a couple of weeks after I started working on the project. Absolutely devastating. It was a horrible read, but also, you know,

it was horrible because I think this is half, the future unfortunately looks for a lot of cemeteries that are in in cities or near cities that just need new industry. So I worry about a lot of the other sites around. Yeah, I mean, black cemeteries are at such a disadvantage. So a lot of the headstones are not as ornate, as obvious as like a very nice 19th century New England graveyard. Like a lot of the stones are concrete or in some cases, like if you were really truly poor, like you'd get a piece of quartz or like a yucca plant and you'd just plant it on top of your loved one. And like those markers are like yuccas are perennial. They come back from rhizomes. Like you can still see basically where that

yucca was planted a hundred years ago. But like if someone doesn't want to see a cemetery, they're just going to be like, well, it doesn't look like anything to me. Right. And so yeah, Like, I think the lot, like, there is a lot to be concerned about, like, with the long-term preservation of the space. And I wouldn't say it's a huge community, but, like, I know of at least five different Instagram, Southern Black cemetery fixer upper projects. Fixer uppers. And in every case, like, I think the ones in Richmond are owned by the city. But, like, in other cases, like, it's always the same situation.

Like, no one clearly owns this. There's no, like, clear chain of custody. It's just I recognize that this sucks and, like, the space needs to be maintained. And I can say just, you know, from my experience, it even is a problem, I think, for cemeteries everywhere, but particularly for communities who aren't part of the major historical narrative that those are threatened. You know, burial hill in Plymouth is one of the first burying grounds of, colonial white America. And they didn't get on the National Historical Register, I think, until the 1970s.

I might be wrong on that, but I think it's in recent memory. Thinking about that and think about how important that cemetery has become to understanding American ideology versus everything that you know is buried underneath that. You know, the Wampanag tribe has lived here for tens of thousands of years. And we buried, you know, a handful of white people on top of them. and called it a national historical site. And I think that that can be true, but it has to also be hand in hand with remembering the communities that we've erased to put that there,

that we've buried on top of, or that we've completely forgotten because their burials weren't like ours or they were in the way of ours. So in the same way that I worry about corporations, literally building on top of and just moving bodies out of the way, we have to also remember the people that don't have those sites and that they're still a part of the narrative that we're creating as humans,

even if they don't have this tangible evidence, and we don't ever know that they existed. We understand that they, as a community, existed and we erased them. Yeah, to talk about Tampa and in that area for a little bit. There's no rocks in Florida. Like, there's no good source of gravel or, like, building material, because the soil is just sand. It's just old beaches, basically.

the whole peninsula. Indigenous burial sites tended to be on shell mittens, which are big mountains made of oyster shells. A lot of those burial grounds were turned into gravel or concrete aggregate to build cities in late 19th and early 20th century, Florida. Like we literally basically like mulched the graveyards. People!

Yes. Oh my God, I'm laughing, but it's horrible. Yeah. Is Florida haunted? Is that why there's so many issues down there? Yeah, I mean, you know, you get the, you have two whole layers of indigenous genocide between the South Carolina aliens and then the Seminole Wars, and then you mulch any record of that existing, to drive your car over it, you're doing environmental crimes, you know, Walt Disney is doing his black magic outside of Orlando. Yeah. I was going to say, are there no crimes that? Florida man has not perpetuated.

I mean, Disney sued a bunch of Haitian tomato workers for painting a mini mouse on their daycare down in the Everglades. So it's just bad vibes all the way down. Yeah, it is. It really is. Maybe that's why it's sinking into the sea. Yeah. The bad vibes are too heavy.

Yeah. Oh, my goodness. So just to get us thinking about the end game here, okay, let's talk perfect worlds. Yeah. How does the future of managed cemeteries, look to you, and if there's a way for people to get involved in their local cemeteries, protecting those sites, how would you recommend they start? So for the future of

cemeteries, this is where I think the environmental part comes in, is that the main problem, the main danger to most cemeteries is that the plants in them grow up over the graves and knock them down, especially ones in urban areas like you're going to have privet and tree of heaven and ivy. People love putting ivy in cemeteries because apparently they can't think forward in time at all and think about how the ivy. It's spooky. Yes, it is spooky.

Ground covers are inherently spooky. Maybe there's a metaphor about how like the earth will come for us all and swallow us. But Momentumori, here's some ivy. Yep. If you can get the invasives out and landscape it in a way where like people can maintain it, cut down dead branches and mow the grass where there needs to be grass. Then basically, like, a couple people can take care of a cemetery forever. You'll need either volunteers or professionals to take care of their headstones,

but, like, the space itself will just keep going. It just requires, like, someone has to be the guy or the woman or the non-binary person to just agree that they are in charge of the cemetery. And hopefully you can, like, a lot of the other cemeteries, where of our charitable partnerships or are owned by the city. But there has to be a structure. Someone has to be the sheriff of or the captain of the cemetery for it to continue to be looked after. If you live in the South, especially like the East Coast of the South, there probably is some kind

of preservation group working in your local cemetery, often an African American cemetery. And you can join them. But the other thing I'd say is look on Google Maps. Like, this is how I found the cemetery. Little green things that aren't parks dotted all over your city. I recently found out that our city had a Jewish cemetery, which means it had a synagogue, which, like, I don't think of synagogues even existing in Appalachia. And it turns out that that synagogue cemetery is very well looked after, thankfully.

But, like, look at your maps app and see what's in green and see if it's being taken care of. Just to echo that, you know, do your due diligence. And if you don't know how to glean a grave, look into it. There are some great resources out there. Ask your local historical society, see if anybody knows how to do it and they could show you, or if they can point you in the direction of some written article or website that shows you how, please don't just go in with the toothbrush and go at it because that's how you can ruin artwork. Right.

Look into it because there are some beautiful, small, even family cemeteries, peppered throughout colonial New England, the colonial south, that really, I think, have gotten lost. There's a great account, actually, that I started following a long time before. I started this project. It's called San Fernando 2, I think. And it's a historical Latino cemetery in San Antonio. And he talks about how to clean graves and sort of like what his process is. And so that's a great resource. There's also Epic Preservation, E-P-O-C-H.

on Instagram. Yeah, they're up here, I think. Yeah, but yeah, like the history intensive part of Massachusetts is where they operate. Yeah, I think they might be north of Boston slightly, but that's where a lot of the activity is, and that's where a lot of the protections have happened. It's less so to the city's south and west. Yeah. So yeah, so check out some of those resources. Find your local cemeteries that are missing. Thank you so much for coming on, Dr. Cave. And where can people find you if they're looking for more of you? Uh, right now, I'm trying to keep it off of Facebook. No, that's a joke.

Although it isn't not a joke. As an aside, I am actually trying to keep it off of Facebook so we don't do the like, Yay, we fixed it. We put some flags out. Yeah. And we wouldn't want to invite, you know, like metaverse cemeteries either, like looking at you, Mark Zuckerberg. Please don't invent those.

Oh, Jesus. It's like, it looks like we bowling, but it's a cemetery and you wear a helmet for it. Come walk your dog in the metaphysical space of the dead. Yeah. He doesn't need the ideas. Yeah, the main place where I document the project, talk about the history behind the graves, and also a little bit of local ecology, is Citizen Cemetery on Instagram. That's C-T-Z-N-S cemetery.

Thank you so much for coming on. It's been an absolute pleasure.