Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves

287 Pages·2008·3.85 MB·English

by  China Galland

LOVE
CEMETERY
UNBURYING

THE SECRET HISTORY

OF SLAVES

���

CHINA GALLAND
To my husband, Corey Fischer
Photo of ”Keepers of Love ” here
“The Keepers of Love.” Nuthel Britton (left) and Dorris Vittatoe (right) in
front of Ohio Taylor headstone. Oil on canvas by Janet McKenzie.

�Con�te�nts

Prologue 1
ONE Getting into Love Cemetery 9
TWO How We Got to Love 27
THREE The First Cleanup of Love Cemetery 49
FOUR Borderlands, Badlands,
and the Neutral Ground 69
FIVE “Guide Me Over” 105
SIX The Reconsecration of Love Cemetery 135
SEVEN “You Got to Stay on Board” 151
EIGHT Shiloh 187
NINE Underneath the Surface 205
Funeral Home Records of Burials 231
Love Cemetery Burial Map and List 232
Epilogue 235
Acknowledgments 243
Notes 249
Bibliography 261
Resources 265
Credits 275
About the Author
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
�Pro�log�ue

To find a common future together, we must reconstruct our
common past.
—Manning Marable,
The Great Wells of
Democracy
People said that Mrs. Newton kept Negroes in her attic, that
her abandoned house was haunted. Those were rumors cir-
culating in Highland Park in the mid-1950s, in the days before
it became such an exclusively wealthy white township of com-
fortable homes inside the city of Dallas. I was about ten when I
first heard whispers of Cosette Faust Newton’s story. My return
as an adult, to research her story for an article, set me off on a
path that eventually led me to the story of Love Cemetery, a
small, rural, African American burial ground in East Texas.
Cosette named her house the “Miramar,” after her street, a
few blocks from my grandparents’ home in Highland Park. The
front yard of the Miramar was surrounded by a barbed-wire-
topped chain-link fence. Heavy jail-bar doors and barred win-
dows hung throughout the house, inside and out, and were
clearly visible from the street. The rest of the block was filled
2 Prologue
with large, well-landscaped homes.1 Instead of a neatly trimmed
lawn like her neighbors’, Cosette had scattered thirteen open
red-and-white metal umbrellas, anchored in concrete blocks,
around the front yard. As a finishing touch, she had hand-let-
tered a sign stuck in the front yard that read: “For Sale to Ne-
groes Only.”
When I was sixteen, I finally worked up the nerve to try to sneak
in and up to the third-floor attic, where she supposedly kept Ne-
groes imprisoned, to see if there were still any chains there. Just
as my girlfriend, my accomplice of the moment, and I started up
the third-floor stairs, we heard footsteps. We froze, convinced
that the house was really haunted. But when we turned around,
we saw two uniformed Highland Park police officers. We were
arrested and taken down to the station and booked on charges of
trespassing. My mother came and bailed us out. Cosette pressed
charges. We made our court appearance and escaped punish-
ment by swearing that we would never again go in the Miramar.
I kept the promise I’d made to the judge that late summer day
in Dallas and forgot about the Miramar until I was an adult, a
writer living across the country. Then, one night, a poem I was
reading, called “Abandoned Places,” brought that house back to
me—that battered, abandoned, bizarre place out of my child-
hood.2 I went back to investigate, discovered the other side of
the story, and wrote about it.3
It wasn’t a ghost story; Cosette, a Ph.D., M.D., and a former
Dean of Women at Southern Methodist University with half a
dozen more degrees, had kept a prisoner in her attic. In a front-
page story in the Dallas Morning News of July 30, 1938, was a
photograph of Cosette and her African American gardener,