To get to the cemeteries at Evergreen, you can take the bus, from downtown. Board at 7th and Marshall, pay $1.50, ride about 20 stops, until you get to Nine Mile and Echo. And then you disembark where there is no sidewalk. You walk along empty roads, traversing an overpass, past a few houses, and into a forest, thick with trees and ivy and gravestones. It is there that you find the final resting place for thousands of members of Richmond’s African American community.
One thing that strikes me as I walk into the Evergreen cemetery is how alive it is, at two o'clock on a sunny Monday afternoon. True to its name, the verdant landscape stirs with birds and bugs and woodland creatures and a soft, summery breeze. And there's something to be said about the way the light filters through the old trees, finally green with new leaves. It looks like the setting of a poem.
This section is beautiful, but I know that this is the beauty of a wild place, a jungle, a forest, some untouched wilderness. There are no other living humans to be seen. It is beautiful, with those grand trees, until you step closer and see the cracked and chipped stones, the grave markers toppled over, the earth rearranged, the weeds and ivy erasing these people's lives. A cemetery is not supposed to look like this. These people were not supposed to be forgotten.
But sometimes, Evergreen Cemetery is just ugly. Beneath the beautiful trees, there are huge dumpsters and clumps of weeds, piles of trash, broken markers, all set against the sounds of the highway. Cars and trucks whip past the cemetery on all sides, stirring up dirty breezes and disrupting the tranquility of the graves. This place is not just forgotten by progress; it is ignored.
Evergreen Cemetery was established in 1897 as a place where African American Richmonders could be buried, though some of the bodies within predate the Civil War. It’s currently held privately, by a corporation that cannot afford to keep up with the landscaping. So it languishes. The state of Evergreen Cemetery is appalling, particularly when juxtaposed with Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond’s famous, immaculate burial ground for thousands of Confederate dead. Professor Doug Winiarski, of the University of Richmond Religious Studies department, explained a couple of reasons why the cemeteries at Evergreen are in such terrible condition. For starters, Evergreen is not on the tourist agenda in the same way as Hollywood Cemetery. It doesn’t carry that same “religion of the lost cause” that brings thousands of visitors to Hollywood and its monuments to the “rebels.” At Hollywood, on a gloomy January morning, I watched men in a van place tiny Confederate flags at every immaculate rebel grave. And at Evergreen, on a beautiful, summery afternoon, I walk past the damaged markers alone. All Evergreen has to offer, humbly, are the stories of human beings who affected this city and the world in ways great and small. People like John Mitchell, Jr, the “fighting editor” of the Richmond Planet starting in 1884, known for his articles crusading against lynching, who championed the rights of African Americans despite threats to his own life. John Mitchell, Jr, whose grave was so “repeatedly desecrated,” according to Winiarski, that it had to be replaced with a simple stone slab.
Evergreen Cemetery is surprising. Its beauty, its devastation, its history, the wide variety of life that begs to be photographed, filmed, memorialized. Every grave; the style of the marker, the plants around it, the condition of the headstone, the words carved into it speak of greater stories, of things that pull at my heart, things that I want others to see, somehow. But I only have 20 minutes of battery on my camera, and I will never be able to do this place justice. Only firsthand experience could do that.
I want to wonder; how did this cemetery get this way? Who did this? But I think I already know the answer. Humans will build temples and churches and skyscrapers and grand tombs for those we want to remember, for those we value. And for every Confederate flag neatly marked at a sharp grave in Hollywood Cemetery, there is another gravesite, its headstone overturned, overgrown, lying forgotten in Evergreen. For those that we have determined do not deserve any more than this, in life and in death.
When you get off the bus at Nine Mile and Echo, there is no sidewalk, no markings or signs directing towards Evergreen Cemetery. You just have to know it's there. And I didn’t know, as I walked over a busy highway and around blind curves. But on the way back, I am heavy with knowledge, with the burden of what humans have let happen to other humans. Today, at least, Evergreen Cemetery will not be forgotten.
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