Kimberly L. Wright

A story from the Associated Press yesterday took me down a rabbit hole.

It was about a project to reclaim a graveyard of the formerly enslaved that had been covered up, desecrated and destroyed.

For a while now, I’ve known there’s a small graveyard behind Floor and Decor in that odd, old strip mall in Roswell that used to be the Roswell Mall. At least this graveyard appears to be in pretty good shape despite the oddness of being right behind the shopping center. Among those buried there are the former enslaved such as Warren Johnson, who advocated for Black education.

There’s also an odd little graveyard in the middle of some old shopping center, Sprayberry Crossing, that they’re turning into a mixed-use development down on Sandy Plains Road in East Cobb.

But thanks to The Black Cemetery Network, I now know there’s a desecrated cemetery behind the McDonald’s on Canton Road, next to the Gritter’s Library. Headstones are missing and destroyed. There’s a list of who’s buried there but not any way of knowing exactly where they’re located on the property. But there’s an effort underway, a grant applied for. These people won’t get the tribute they deserve, but there will be hopefully some sort of rectifying of this wrong.

As I’ve gotten older, I find these sorts of facts, hidden beneath the surface, more troubling, even as others seek the silence and erasure for some sort of idealized past that never existed. Maybe it’s that erasure is drawing me to know more about the ghostly echoes of footsteps of the places I traverse. I’ve always enjoyed history. It’s my minor, after all. Perhaps I’m closer to history as an older person because I’m closer to being history myself, though I want no stone, but perhaps I’d like more of a tribute than being dumped in someone’s front yard or forgotten and fading behind a McDonald’s.