"The graves are
slightly rounded or squared, setting them apart from the others because that is
all the memory that sharecroppers could afford in Reconstruction Appalachia. No
words or dates speak from the stones about people who once lived and worked and
loved, and no flowers are there to prove that someone loved them back. So the woods
took them in, blanketed them with leaves, and protected them with a fortress of
briars and fallen limbs braided by wind. Underneath the graveyard ivy, the dead
leaves, and a hundred years of soil there are bones angled into moist ground
where they settled like a long, tired breath after the wooden coffins returned
to the earth.
Family lore could
not explain why the rocks were there, but older folks were sure that they
belonged to freed slaves who had once worked the cornfields down below, just
seven among the hundreds of enslaved people who once lived here. I have often
wondered if their story was conjured, like the ghosts my great-grandparents
described as we sat on the porch in the summer’s gloaming, fireflies pulsing
around us. Was the story a way to anchor tales to family property that we would
someday inherit, lest we ever think of selling?
The rocks hunkered
in the shadows of low hanging branches several decades after I saw them as a
little girl. And in all that time, I never thought to ask questions of the one
living person who knew the most about them."
