Author digs up legacy of slavery and racism in an East Texas town
IN her search for hidden details of her own family’s history, China Galland stumbles onto an overgrown burial ground for slaves and gets to know the descendants who have been locked out of Love Cemetery.She soon finds herself joining the small, sturdy group — known as the “Keepers of Love” — as they work to rescue and re-consecrate the cemetery, where gravestones have been knocked over and cracked into pieces by vandals and storms, and lost under thick tangles of wisteria and weeds.
In a first person account, Galland chronicles the work of a loose-knit fraternity of descendants, Boy Scouts, local residents and clergy as they unearth the sacred ground beneath the brush and brambles, and records her own journey of realisation as she comes to understand that slavery and its legacy of racism are the open secrets of her East Texas hometown.
“If racism lived anywhere it was inside of us, sometimes consciously, often unconsciously. . . . Like the wisteria at the cemetery, perhaps we’d never be rid of it. Our only hope might be to keep attending to it, trimming it here, uprooting it there, cutting it back, cutting it back, contending with it.”
The story Galland tells — and the lessons she learns — are important ones and relevant. But too often, she comes across as hopelessly naive about race, and the scars that slavery has left in American society. Galland, who is white, was a teenager in the 1960s, at the peak of the Civil Rights movement. Yet she seems shocked to realise that an African-American contemporary, growing up in segregated Texas, had a completely different childhood experience than her own privileged white upbringing. Galland’s seeming lack of awareness often gets in the way of the real story — the story of Love Cemetery and the people buried there.
Galland gives the reader tempting titbits about Della Love, the woman who bequeathed land to the Love Colored Burial Association, and Love’s father, a freed black man born in 1829, who purchased 300 acres of land. She mentions the thriving community of black farmers who worked land after the Civil War and into the early 1960s.
But Galland leaves the reader wanting to know so much more about that community and their descendants, about the true Keepers of Love.
