What I learned in a cemetery

When I was growing up an only child in the 1940s, my mother and father moved often, always trying to find a better job. Although they were the hardest workers I have known, the times were hard: tail end of the Great Depression and onset of the Second World War. We were nomads, moving frequently from Pontotoc, Mississippi, where I was born, to Alabama — to Sheffield, Birmingham, Gadsden, Anniston, Dothan, and also to Augusta and Atlanta, Georgia. It was a lonely world for a young boy.

My father was one of eight children on a sharecrop cotton farm south of Ohatchee, Alabama. The work was endless and to make matters worse, he cut his leg while chopping wood and developed what was then an incurable bone disease which nearly took his life. But he never forgot the beauty of the valley stretching from Goose Neck Mountain near the Coosa River to Anniston. For a stretch of time, during my last few years of high school, I had a view to cherish, too, looking from my bedroom window at the top of Anniston’s 10th Street Mountain Road, out to Cheaha Mountain.

For a time, our family moved away from the valley in the 1940s when the U.S. Army bought the land to use as an artillery range. Not all the shells they fired exploded, so there were live “duds” that could detonate if a careless person handled it.

Once a year on Memorial Day weekend, visitors are permitted to drive the circular road there, the only stop allowed at the cemetery where some of my relatives are buried. The journey took longer than I had planned because I was enthralled by inscriptions on marble tombstones and decaying wood memorials. Those who had owned the land, as well as sharecroppers such as my family who worked it, rested in peace side by side. As I read the simple markers and elegant marble testimonies of success, I pondered lives that commanded attention and those that disappeared almost completely.

If there is one component of life that demands attention in our small sliver of the world, it is our capacity both to remember and to forget, to include both in the tapestry of life we create for ourselves. As I read markers that both extolled and trivialized lives, I concluded that cemeteries may be appropriate places to bury grievances as well.

Like many poor families during the Great Depression, my parents left the land and the state searching for something better, which explains both why I was born in Pontotoc, Mississippi, and why I only lived there six months. Then we were like gypsies turned loose on the world. My father was a salesman/storyteller who sold coffee, insurance, roofing, and anything else that people wanted or needed. Gradually, our family was transformed from excessive concern about what people thought about us to what we knew about ourselves.

What has always kept me in Alabama is not its perfection. It is the candor, honesty, and kindness of so many people who disagree with me, yet continue to respect and even love me. And our differences seem trivial when I attend their funerals, or on occasion even deliver a eulogy for them. I will never forget that cemetery near Anniston containing so many messages from distant ancestors reminding me that what we share is more important than our differences.

Wayne Flynt, Ph.D., is a distinguished historian and professor emeritus in the Department of History at Auburn University. His research focuses on Alabama and Southern culture, politics, religion, education, and poverty. Flynt is the author or co-author of 13 books, including the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Poor But Proud and Alabama: A History of a Deep South State. In addition to many other honors, he is an Alabama Humanities Fellow, and served as the founding editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Alabama.