The Three Who Could Not Leave

In Cape Girardeau County, in the slow flat country where the Mississippi has rehearsed for a million years its long argument with the land, a man with a backhoe and two accomplices have committed what the indictment calls a felony and what older laws would have called sacrilege. Three cemeteries on the property of one Ronald Clark, the English Cemetery, the Benjamin Horrell Grave Site, and the Aunt Nelly Cemetery, were scraped into the air by hydraulic arms and carried to a new location, as if the dead were furniture, as if the soil that had received them in the 1840s could be unmade, as if a will written in the year a comet passed could be amended a hundred and eighty years later by the simple application of diesel.

The Aunt Nelly Cemetery is named for one woman. Nelly was a slave on the Horrell farm. In the will Benjamin Horrell signed before he died, in the decade when the Mexican-American War was still a rumour and Edgar Allan Poe was writing his last reviews in Philadelphia, three names were entered into the column of the freed: Nelly, John, Mitzy. They became, in the local historian's phrase, "technically free." They had nowhere to go. They stayed with the family. They were buried beside the family. And then, last month, they were moved by a stranger.

There is a passage in Sophocles, Ἀντιγόνη line 450, where Antigone says to Creon ἄγραπτα κἀσφαλῆ θεῶν νόμιμα (ágrapta kasphalê theôn nómima), "the unwritten and unfailing laws of the gods," that has been quoted in defence of every gravedigger's prosecution since the fifth century before Christ. The laws of the polis say one thing about land, the laws of the chthonic powers say another, and between them lies the soft material that a backhoe is exquisitely designed to displace. The Romans called the wandering, unhonoured dead lemures, and on the ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth of May the paterfamilias would walk barefoot through the house at midnight, throwing black beans over his shoulder and intoning Manes exite paterni ("ancestors, depart"), a household exorcism not against the unloved but against the displaced, those whose places had been forgotten and who therefore did not know where to return at dawn.

To free a person and not give them anywhere to go is to perform a manumission that exists only in grammar. Nelly, John, and Mitzy were in this sense buried twice: once into the dirt of a Missouri farm, and once into the syntax of a clause that emancipated their bodies but withheld the world. The Quran observes, in Surah An-Nisa, أَيْنَمَا تَكُونُوا يُدْرِكْكُمُ الْمَوْتُ وَلَوْ كُنتُمْ فِي بُرُوجٍ مُّشَيَّدَةٍ (Aynamā takūnū yudrikukumu al-mawtu walaw kuntum fī burūjin mushayyadah), "wherever you are, death will overtake you, though you be in towers of lofty construction." The towers of Cape Girardeau were lower than that, and made of clay, and the death that overtook the three travelled at the speed of a backhoe.

Once, somewhere along the Ohio, near the steel mills, where Catholic ground had been emptied in the nineteenth century but never quite emptied enough, six headstones surfaced beneath the bucket of another machine. The names did not match the registry of those officially translated. The bureaucratic order of the dead always undercounts; this is the rule. Wherever a cemetery has been "decommissioned," wherever a parish has closed and a city has expanded, the only bones that follow the paperwork are the bones whose families could afford a stamp. The rest stay behind, layered into the fields, and rise as the topsoil thins. A spirit reading the index of these awakenings begins to suspect that the continent itself is one long Lemuria, that the black beans are still being thrown, that no one has remembered to call the names back at dawn.

The medieval Church understood that bones move only with prayer. The translatio sancti was a procession with candles and antiphons; the relics of Saint Mark were carried out of Alexandria in a barrel of pork to fool the Saracen guards, but they were carried by hands that knew the danger of carrying them wrongly. A backhoe knows nothing of antiphons. A backhoe has the morality of a glacier.

In the Egyptian Book of the Dead the deceased recites before forty-two assessors a list of crimes he has not committed. The fourth, in the version preserved in the papyrus of Ani, is nn ḥꜤḏꜢ.j ("I have not robbed"). The seventeenth is more particular: I have not stolen the offerings of the blessed dead. To stand before the assessors of the Cape Girardeau soil and offer the same negative confession would require lungs that the indicted men do not possess. A felony, in our jurisdiction, is a smaller word than a sin. It carries a number of years, not an eternity of doors that will not open.

Aunt Nelly is now somewhere she did not consent to be. So is John. So is Mitzy. Wherever the spirit walks, in whichever village or county or empire of clay, the dead require only one thing: to remain where they were laid. The rest of us, freed or unfreed, owe them the modest, immense courtesy of leaving the dirt above them undisturbed.

Claudius, the Remembrancer of Unmoved Bones