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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
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And we're coming to you live from the Stanford campus.
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For those of you just joining us,
we're sticking with the theme of the day on this Mardi Gras.
Mr. Bird, who hosts the great bird of Paradise Blue Show on Saturday mornings on KZSU,
has been at it since noon today.
A five-hour musical and informational Gulf Coast Marathon,
with live call-ins from the entire Gulf Coast region,
including special legendary guest DJs and all that great Gulf Coast music.
I'm here to wind it all down in the next hour,
with some quiet reflection.
I have a guest with me in the studio,
Marilyn Yallam, and we're going to talk with her today
about the cemeteries of America,
including the cemeteries of New Orleans,
and what's happened to them in the wake of Katrina.
So please, say tuned.
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Katrina was a revelation of many things,
most of them not very uplifting, in fact downright depressing,
especially when it comes to the social fabric
and current leaders of this nation of ours,
which it's been said, was conceived in liberty
and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
But let's take a step back from the social and political aspects of the disaster,
and look at the hurricane from a broader, call it, elemental perspective.
Katrina reminded us of something very basic,
that we are not aquatic creatures.
Is that bird I hear out there going, "What?"
Well, it's true, and every now and then we need to be reminded of it,
we are not aquatic creatures.
We are terrestrial through and through.
A foot or two of water on the ground we stand on
is enough to make life unlivable for us.
The sea is a beautiful thing as long as it doesn't overflow its basin
and start rushing through our legs.
Rain is a blessing, unless it pours for 40 days and 40 nights.
A relatively dry earth is the foundation of almost everything
that makes human life possible.
Our diets, our homes, our institutions,
our books, records, archives and memorials.
We sometimes forget that the sea is at bottom a terrifying element,
and that in an instant it can completely obliterate our life worlds.
That's why so many end of the world scenarios envision the sea rising up
and reabsorbing the earth into its primordial matrix.
Swinburn describes such an apocalyptic scenario at the end of his poem
A forsaken garden.
Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till the terrace and meadow, the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble,
The fields that lessen the rocks that shrink.
Here now in his triumph were all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slaming on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.
Almost all ancient mythologies had their flood stories,
As if to remind people of how precarious is the foothold we have on this earth of ours.
Nowadays it takes events like Katrina, or the tsunami,
To give us intimations of what we so easily forget,
That the surface of our planet is mostly water,
And that in the elemental scheme of things,
It's only the natural restraint of the sea that lets us do our thing on land.
The sea defies humanisation.
No one knew this better than Joseph Conrad,
Who was a sea man before he became a writer.
The amazing wonder of the deep wrote Conrad,
Is its unfathomable cruelty.
In one of his books Conrad describes the moment when a ship that had been battered and disabled by a storm,
Finally sinks into this unfathomable cruelty on a perfectly calm day on the Pacific Ocean.
Quoting Conrad,
Far away where the brig had been,
An angry white stain, undulating on the surface of steely grey waters,
Shot with gleams of green,
Diminished swiftly without a hiss,
Like a patch of pure snow melting in the sun.
The cruelty of the sea is its passion for erasure.
It leaves no traces on its surface.
There are no grave stones on the sea.
Human history and memory depend on inscription,
But the sea is uninscribable.
It closes over its victims,
And presents an appearance of eternal presence to the human eye,
Which is why we find it so beautiful.
But we should always remember that it is a terrible beauty.
As the Austrian poet Rainer Wilke put it,
Beauty is but the beginning of terror,
Which we can just barely endure.
What we admire about it so is that it calmly distains to destroy us.
Human have a natural need to preserve the trace of the sea.
Hence the anguish of those whose loved ones died at sea.
In Moby Dick,
Eeshmile speaking of the widows of the whalemen who never made it home,
Says,
"Oh ye whose dead,
Librarian beneath the green grass,
Who standing among flowers can say,
Here,
Here lies my beloved,
Ye know not the desolation that broods and hearts like these."
The same could be said for the desolation of those who lost loved ones in the Katrina flood,
Or the tsunami,
And whose bodies were never found,
Or could not be identified.
It's thanks to the earth,
The most solid and memory friendly of the four else,
And the most solid and memory friendly of the four else,
That were able to preserve connections with the past,
And mark the place of the dead.
This is a fundamental human need.
Commemoration of the dead presupposes an earth in which to lay our dead,
And on which to mark their disappearance from life.
My guest today has been deeply engaged in these questions of commemoration,
Grave marking, and cemeteries.
And she's here to share her thoughts about them with us on this very early day.
Mary's
Special Marty Grohl, Maryland, welcome to our program.
Hello, glad to be here.
Maryland Yalom is a senior scholar at Stanford's Institute for Women and Gender,
Which he directed for many years,
And she's authored several important widely read books, including Blood Sisters,
The History of the Breast, and the Chest Queen.
She's currently finishing an illustrated book in collaboration with her son,
Read Yalom, on cemeteries in America.
Which includes a fascinating chapter on the cemeteries of New Orleans,
Which we'll be asking her about a bit later in the program.
But before we discuss the American cemeteries, you write about in your new book, Maryland,
Let me ask you whether you agree with me that commemoration of the dead,
As well as the marking of the place of the dead is a fundamental human need.
Certainly seems to be a fundamental human need.
If you look at all civilizations over time,
Like religion, it seems to be inbuilt into the human psyche.
We need to remember our ancestors,
Apparently for several reasons, first of all, because we identify with them,
And we hope that others will remember us.
And also perhaps because we fear the dead, many, many civilizations,
Playcate the dead, perhaps more out of fear for dead spirits than for simple reverence.
I don't know. What do you think about that?
I think you're right that there's not a culture in the world known to me,
That was indifferent about the dead,
Or was indifferent about the ritualized disposal of the remains of the dead.
And I think you're also right to remind us that in many of these cultures,
It was fear of the potential vengeance that the dead could take on their descendants,
If they felt neglected.
So you have all these rituals around grave sites, like feeding the dead,
And funeral repass, and giving them sustenance,
And things that will actually take on a whole kind of afterlife,
And things like the two San New Orleans that we're going to talk about a little bit.
So yeah.
Living here in California, at certain times of the year,
It's obligatory for descendants say of the Chinese community,
To turn out at the graveyard,
And they have what they consider funeral packets that they buy,
In Chinatown, in San Francisco, or in Honolulu, in Hawaii,
Where you burn paper money, and you have special food for the dead,
And a whole series of rituals that puts you in touch with your ancestors.
Even if you don't literally believe that spirits return,
People do this, they continue to do this,
To preserve not only the ritual and the memory of the ancestors,
But to create a sense of solidarity among themselves, and with their children.
Isn't that extraordinary that even today people will visit the grave site of loved ones?
And we know that originally, in burial of the dead,
People believe literally that the dead continue to have some kind of subsistence under the ground,
And therefore they need nourishment, they need to be buried with their favorite objects,
Sometimes with their servants and with their kings.
And we no longer believe that the dead can carry on an active afterlife of the grave site,
And yet the grave site still has a particular charisma,
Even for us today.
Yes it does, and I loved the long, not a log that you had at the beginning of this hour,
Because it points out that people return to the grave of their loved ones,
That it means something to know where your mother, your father, your husband was buried,
And the loss of that particular site of burial can be an enormous psychic loss for any individual.
I remember the thinking at the time that the dead were carried up,
Or the remains of the dead were carried up from ground zero,
That at a certain moment the firemen would stop,
And they would take off their hats,
And they would start the ritualization process that would continue from that site,
Which now will be a hallowed site, because we know that people died there.
Well, I don't know what the particular charisma is about the burial site,
Or even the dead body, because you also talk about the corpse in your book,
And the way that one cannot be indifferent to this object,
Because the corpse is such a strange thing that on the one hand,
It seems to contain the person who has died,
It's the perfect image of the person who has passed away,
And yet that person is not there, it's absent from the corpse,
And therefore perhaps it's the uncanniness of the corpse that requires us to find all these
ceremonial ways to accompany that transition from life into some kind of afterlife,
However, one may conceive that.
Well, the ways we've conceptualized burial and a possible afterlife have certainly changed over 400 years of American history.
If you think about the beginnings in Boston, among the Puritans,
Their graveyards were very grim somber places,
Where a person was buried without great ceremony, under a grace lab that had nothing more than his or her initials,
Or name and dates of life and death.
The assumption was that only a select few would make their way into heaven,
And the rest would be consigned to hell.
But one thing was sure, the body would decompose,
And there was great emphasis upon this deterioration and decomposition of the body.
So knowing that, and that had been impressed upon Puritan children from the time of the earliest of ages,
of age, they would be preparing for death all of their lives.
And this of course created a great deal of anxiety.
I have not read your entire book.
It's just the chapters that you gave me.
I know the basic outline.
You do start with the cemeteries of Puritan cemeteries in the northeast,
Then you travel south, down along the coast, and you go to the midwest,
And then finally to California and Hawaii.
We're not going to be able to cover that entire itinerary,
But the Puritan cemeteries are particularly fascinating.
When I was reading how it was really against Catholicism and the kind of pomp and flourishes
That Catholic burials were typically accompanied by that caused the Puritans to really puritanize the funeral ceremony.
And also they wouldn't put crosses on their gravestones.
That was considered a popish relic.
But instead they had what these death skulls and stuff.
They had what are called death's heads.
And they're essentially skulls, very often ghoulish, leering skulls,
And sometimes crossbones.
And that is practically the only image you find on 17th and many 18th century tombstones.
Oddly enough, over time those macabre skulls, death's heads,
Are transformed into something that looks more like a cherub,
Which is a symbol of the souls after life.
So we just in studying gravestones and the images on them.
You can see the transformation of theology over two and three hundred years.
Yeah, and it goes from a very austere or puritan conviction that only a very few of us are making the heaven.
And the rest are do what a weird way to go on living your life.
But these cemeteries, where are they exactly Maryland in the Puritan cemeteries?
Well they're all through New England.
It's of course very easy to find them in Boston.
They're marked out on the famous freedom trail.
They're two of them in central Boston on Triman Street.
They're just a few blocks from one another.
One, the one that's called King's Chapel, was founded in 1630 with the group of Puritans who came over from England under Governor Winthrop.
John Winthrop and he's buried there.
He's buried there.
Right, and then down the street is the granary.
That was established 30 years later because all of the space had been allocated and used up in King's Chapel.
And the granary, which was on the site of an old granary, an old barn,
and has about two thousand gravestones in it.
And there are three or four other cemeteries all within a mile or two of downtown Boston.
It's very strange to be there and to have the cars whizzing by and then to step inside one of these gray, grim picturesque church yards.
Well they weren't church yards.
I should, graveyard.
I have to make it very clear.
They were not church yards because the Puritans did not bury their dead next to churches.
Again, church was a symbol of Catholicism and/or the Anglican church.
Right.
Well, is there a particular aura still in these cemeteries?
Do you have a sense that you're in a place that was where the ghosts of the Puritans are hovering there?
You certainly feel in immense difference stepping off the sidewalk into the cemetery.
Now something has changed in the course of the first 200 years of cemeteries.
Originally, the graves were placed randomly in the cemeteries.
They weren't called cemeteries and they were called graveyards or burial ground.
Then in the 19th century, with a new aesthetic, the graves were lined up in orderly rows,
which meant of course that sometimes the tombstones didn't correspond to the remains underneath them.
But never matter.
It was more in keeping with the 19th century aesthetic.
One of the places that you can see, the original arrangement is if you go across the Charles River
over to a cemetery in Charles Town.
The Charles Town cemetery that has a different name now the Phipp Street Cemetery.
And there you find a hill, small hill, and all of the grave stones are arranged in clusters rather than in straight rows.
And at the top of that hill, there is the grave of John Harvard, the man who was a minister in the early 17th century,
who gave half of his money in his will to the newly found college in Cambridge, which was then named in his honor, Harvard.
Well, we want to get to the New Orleans cemeteries, but before we leave this chapter in American history and cemeteries surrounding the whole Puritan colonies there,
I was very struck in your chapter about the practice of glove giving.
Do you want to, can you tell our listeners what this was all about and how it kind of got out of hand at a certain point?
Yes, initially I had said that people were to be buried without great ceremony, but that changed over the course of time.
And it became a common practice to send a pair of gloves to the person or persons you wanted to come to the funeral.
And initially there were you'd send a pair of gloves to immediate members of your family and maybe to the minister.
It was a kind of a summons, like a court summons, you have to come to the cemetery and the gloves will bring you there.
I haven't been able to find out exactly why gloves were sent rather than some other item, maybe because it was so cold in the cemeteries.
In time cemeteries got more and more extravagant and it wasn't uncommon to send out 500 pairs of gloves, which was an enormous cost.
And you said in some cases they were spending half of the inheritance of the...
Not half, but a good quarter of the inheritance could be spent on gloves, on other ramento, such as rings with deaf heads on them.
And of course the funeral banquet, that got to be a very big thing.
In New York, among the Dutch, they were as extravagant, maybe even more so than the New Englanders.
And they had cake, a special kind of cake, which they made, and which there was to be sent home, like a wedding cake.
And also they would give away spoons, silver spoons.
Now you know how expensive spoons are.
Well Marilyn, we're going to move now to a very different region of the country and also a very different culture.
Far more Catholic and extravagant in its memorials and commemorations of the dead.
And namely we're going to... on this Mardi Gras move into New Orleans.
And I have someone that I'm having called in, a friend of mine from New York, who actually grew up in New Orleans.
What I thought we'd do is get her on the line. She's there on hold now and get some on the ground sort of reflections and impressions from a native New Orleans.
And then we can talk about what you found out about the cemeteries of New Orleans.
Let's see if I can make this work.
So I think we have Frances Alston on the line. Frances, are you there?
I'm there. Hello.
Hi. Frances Alston is a good family friend of mine and she's living in New York now, but she comes from New Orleans.
And we thought we'd have you on the show. Frances, tell us a little bit from the ground what your experience was.
When you were growing up in New Orleans surrounding the cemeteries and the kind of things that would actually go on in New Orleans.
Especially we're interested in the question of burial and of course we know that most of the graves in New Orleans have to be built above ground.
That's right.
The ground water and is that the case for all the cemeteries or is there a difference between what we might call the higher end cemeteries and then the lower end ones like Holt for example?
Where they don't have the tombs above ground like they do in the cemeteries where the wealthier people are buried.
The interesting thing about the cemeteries for the wealthy of families is that these tombs began being built right after the Civil War was when they decided that they must bury people.
And they became extremely elaborate.
And one of the things that's rather sad and very characteristic of New Orleans is that the tombs are sinking because the ground is so wet and is essentially mud.
Every year the tombs sink a little.
And the front of the tomb is a large tablet on which the names of all the people as they are buried are added inscribed into this large marble tablet.
It's sort of a door to the tomb.
And so as the tomb sinks we lose the names of the older members of the family who died years and years ago.
You were telling me before we came on there that Mark Twain has very interesting statement about how most of the architectural genius in New Orleans went into its cemeteries.
Yes, Mark Twain said you always has no real architecture except what's found in the cemeteries.
And if those tombs are sinking that's going to be, it kind of reminds me of Venice which is through subsidence every year is sinking more and more in and it might just be the natural sublime sort of disappearance of Venice as well as these.
Well in my lifetime charity hospital in New Orleans which was the biggest hospital in the city and the one that of course was spring to poor people.
Some one whole story so that what had originally been the first story became the basement.
So that's how muddy and porous the land is.
Now the poor people of course can't afford many of them can't afford to build these elaborate tombs.
Two of which resemble Egyptian temples or any Dalam homes. I mean they're very elaborate.
But what they've done to deal with the issue of not being able to dig, if you did eight to twelve inches in New Orleans you hear the water rushing under the ground.
But you reach it at maybe eighteen inches but you can hear it already.
This is a burying coffin had to be given up a long time ago.
But what the poor people do is they buy burial insurance.
Every family has burial insurance.
It's one of the, they pay it before they pay their rent.
And the burial insurance adds up to having a funeral of their taste and preference which usually includes having the marching band which accompanies the coffin to the cemetery.
And as it proceeds from the church to the cemetery the music is very sad and dourge like music.
But of course once the coffin is in the ground the spirit has gone to heaven and the music becomes happy and joyful and the band leads the dancing back to town.
New Orleans has a real love affair with death and cemetery's definite because the other great institution is of course all the people who are in the community.
Of course all saints stay the toussères.
Which is a big holiday. All the banks are closed post office doesn't deliver businesses or close.
Absolutely nothing happens on Tuesday.
Yeah it's as big as Christmas almost.
It is.
Except that everyone and it's interesting by the way that the day before toussères is Halloween.
And Halloween is not a big holiday in New Orleans.
First of all because it's totally eclipsed by toussères the day that follows.
And second of all because people dress up on Mardi Gras so they don't express that on Halloween.
Exactly.
Anyway on toussères I remember as a child it was something we looked forward to with great anticipation because the entire family goes out to the cemetery for the day.
And presumably ostensibly to clean all the tombs and garden around the tomb and plant things and make sure the grass is clipped properly.
But actually all that preparation is done prior to toussères.
Because toussères really is social day.
Everyone brings armfuls of flowers.
Usually yellow pretentums but all kinds of flowers.
And they bring food and drink.
Now they say at Sandery Cemetery that everybody brings gumbo.
But when I was a child we went to Metery Cemetery and we brought sandwiches and cookies and lots of Sherry wine.
And everyone sat around all day the children were sent to fill all the vases with water from the faucet which was quite a runaway.
And then the children were put digging out the front of the tablet to see if there were any lost names on the tablet.
While the adults sat around and told stories about their beloved family members who were buried there and socialised and ate and drank and had an absolutely wonderful day.
These tombstones might be sinking and New Orleans has taken a big hit with Katrina but that's a healthy relationship to the dead.
Absolutely.
And that continues even among the few families that are back in New Orleans.
I was told that last November 1st everyone was to be found in the cemetery.
My feeling is that if there's one thing that's going to bring people back to New Orleans, the remnants of their ancestors are buried there and there's such a deep attachment to those places or cemeteries that for no other reason that will bring a lot of people back there.
Absolutely. Place is everything in the South and in fact southern riders are always accused of giving more emphasis and interest to place them to their characters.
Place is certainly primary.
I remember one story that might amuse you.
When I was a child we hated long car rides. Most children hate to be thrown in the car and driven for hours and hours.
And we were always told don't fuss anymore. We're almost home. You soon see the coffin in the tree.
And in the little town next to the town we lived in was a town called Baldwin and it was famous for one thing. There was a coffin in the tree.
And live oak trees in southern Louisiana are huge trees and their branches reached down there.
They always say their elbows touch the ground because the branches come down low. They often do touch the ground.
But in one of these trees there was a coffin that had been lodged there during one of the floods and hadn't been properly buried and hadn't remained underground.
And it just stayed there. No one claimed it. No one else wanted to bother it. It was like someone else's family. You didn't touch them.
Amazing.
And it remained there because nobody felt they felt it would be offensive to touch someone else's family.
And there it was. So that was the high point. We're almost home but soon we'll see the coffin in the tree.
Beautiful. Well, Francie, thanks very much for joining us.
We've been with these insights from the ground. It really brings it alive in a very vivid way for us. Thanks again and we'll talk to you again in a future occasion.
Wonderful. Thank you. Thanks. Bye-bye.
So we're back on air with Marilyn Yalom. We're talking about cemeteries in America.
That was an intro into our new region. We were talking about New Orleans.
So some of the things that Frances Olson was saying conformed to what you discovered about the cemeteries in New Orleans.
Absolutely. And I was so moved to hear her account of her childhood and her memories of La Toussaint.
And of course this unique phenomenon of the earth.
Not accepting, in a sense, the bodies and pushing them upwards.
There's a terrific book by John Gregory Brown called Decorations in a Ruin Cemetery.
And the young girl is talking about her grandfather who had made grave markers.
And she was told by her father that he couldn't just bury a body in the earth.
Yet, to set it in marble or granite, otherwise the water would gradually force the body to float back up to the surface.
The bones would emerge from the mud like dinosaur fossils.
And she notes the difference, this young girl, between what she calls, I'll use the offensive terms, the nigger cemeteries.
She says there weren't any giant tombs or great marble squares. They're only headstones made out of cement.
And she asks, did they simply pull the bones out once they'd risen to the surface?
And to this day, if you visit New Orleans, you'll see that there are the wealthier cemeteries with these above-ground tombs and the poorer cemeteries, the black cemeteries,
where people are stuck into the earth and every so often with a flood, the bodies do rise up.
And the markers get washed away. There was considerable damage after Katrina in the poorer cemeteries, where people were buried directly in the earth.
But I tell you, they're quite extraordinary because since people can't afford the granite and marble headstones, they improvise.
And they come up with just amazing handmade decorations, wooden cross, with hand-written messages.
And sometimes they'll use a yellow street sign, which is painted over, or a rectangle made out of pipes.
And you find all matter of things in these poorer cemeteries.
So what are some of the main cemeteries in New Orleans? The poorer ones, for example, I believe Holt is one of them, no?
Holt is one of the poorer ones, and it's not built above-ground.
And I saw some pictures that you showed me from that are going to be reproduced in your book.
And what Francis Alton was saying about the sinking, you could see some of these headstones actually half-buried already in the ground.
And that's prior to Katrina, I imagine.
These were, I suppose, Katrina, the photos in the book.
They do show the devastation.
But the interesting thing was that the dead in a way fared better than the living.
Because many of the tombs were above-ground vaults.
And also because the early masons and builders learned that if you buried people directly in the ground,
or at ground level, you're going to have problems.
They chose hills and elevations if they could.
That's true of the metary cemetery that she mentions in the Garden District.
And there, the losses consisted mainly of downed trees.
And in the other even earlier cemetery, St. Louis I and St. Louis II, most of the devastation was in the plaster.
That fell off the tombs and underneath there were bricks.
And the bricks held up pretty well.
Do you want me to tell the audience exactly how people are buried in these above-ground vaults?
Yes, I am. It's interesting.
Please do. It's a two-story vault, so to speak.
And the body is placed in a coffin in the upper level.
And after a year and a day, one can legally open that upper vault, presumably the coffin,
and the body will have disintegrated.
And at that point, they're brushed through a grate into the lower level.
And this provides space for another body, if one has another body, to be entered at this time.
So you have a very different ethos in New Orleans.
And that is that people are going to quite literally be buried with their kin.
Their bones will intermingle with their blood relatives.
In a very literal way.
And they actually, I think I was reading in your chapter that they look for, in a sense they look forward to death as a reunification.
They certainly think about the family tomb the same way some of us think about our family home during childhood.
You know you're going to be reunited with your kin.
So that's something comforting in that.
The question I have is, is there something special about New Orleans that goes beyond the strong Catholic element in the occasion population,
maybe the tomb says, is a typically very Catholic celebration.
You have it big time in Mexico, for example.
But what Francis was saying about the poor black people who will buy all this insurance for the funeral,
that there's something that goes beyond just the denomination.
It seems like that city has a celebration of the dead, the tomb, and so forth.
That is quite unique in the American landscape would you say?
It is unique.
It is different from the day of the dead in San Antonio, Texas, where people do congregate in graveyards with flowers and absolutely amazing decorations and night time visuals.
And that too is a celebration.
It is very, very different. It has a very different feel from the Toussaint in New Orleans.
Part of it may have to do with the fact that the communities are so varied in New Orleans.
You have, of course, a black population and you had a French population.
You had a Spanish population.
You had an Anglo and a German population.
And somehow they have managed to coexist and to fertilize each other.
Let's not forget the voodoo inheritance that they have in New Orleans.
You can say a word about that.
Yeah, voodoo was brought to New Orleans from Haiti and originally from Africa.
And all through the 19th century, you and into the 20th century, voodoo was practiced openly.
Marry Lavo, who is buried in St. Louis, won the oldest extant cemetery, heard tomb, receives visitors from all over the world.
Now who was this Marry Lavo? She was New Orleans's most eminent 19th century voodoo queen.
And she dispensed charms and potions called Gregory and she gave advice on love and she told portions.
And she called forth the spirits of the dead.
And if you think about who this woman was, she was a free person of color.
And she was the illegitimate daughter of a rich, creole plantation owner.
So, where did she learn a word? She learned voodoo.
Well, it had already been imported into New Orleans and obviously she had a teacher.
But I think what is interesting is that here is this woman who would have been shunned in the Anglo world, both because of her color.
And also because of being the daughter, the illegitimate daughter of a plantation owner.
But no, she was accepted.
And I think that New Orleans has always been more accepting to people of mixed blood than most Anglo American communities.
So you have vitalization coming from all sorts of places.
And two months after Katrina, there were offerings left at Marie Lavo's tomb.
They were Mardi Gras beads and they were eggplant, so shrunken that they resembled hearts and candles.
Did she have a fancy tomb?
Yes, she has quite a nice tomb.
People go there on the voodoo tour of New Orleans, which has resumed.
And there's even an active voodoo temple still operating into New Orleans.
I don't know at this moment, but I wouldn't be surprised.
What a great pagan city.
And really, but even in the 19th century, 18th century, it had a reputation even in Europe among the French as being a kind of den of sinners and pagans and so forth, isn't it?
Well, a lively place.
A lively place.
Well, let's call it that.
Yeah, more than lively though, but it was, I think, had a very solid reputation there as we're being a lively place.
Are there any other cemeteries in New Orleans that we should take note of?
Well, there's St. Louis 1 and St. Louis 2.
And these are classical cemeteries in the Mediterranean mode.
They look like little pedimented houses.
There aren't many trees or shrubs.
And those two were Catholic.
Then there's Lafayette, which was founded in 1833 as a municipal cemetery.
So there you have Protestants as well as Catholics and more and more Anglos and Germans as well, who began to
fly with the Catholic Creoles for domination of the city.
It was originally a plantation and it, this Lafayette cemetery has many bushes and trees and shrubs, and that was the major damage incurred by Katrina.
And then of course there is a metary cemetery, which is considered the Gondam of all New Orleans cemeteries.
It's over, it's spread out over 150 acres.
It was established in 1872 on the model of the garden cemeteries that had been established in New England, for example, Mount Auburn Cemetery and Laurel Cemetery in Philadelphia.
That was the big move, of course, from the Puritan Grey, Sombre cemeteries to the garden cemetery movement of the 19th century.
This is one of those gorgeous garden cemeteries.
It was founded, laid out on an old racetrack.
And for a while, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Concept Federacy, was buried there.
But he was considered to valuable an icon to remain in New Orleans.
So they moved him to Richmond, which had been the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War.
It's still a very met, metervy is still considered the best place to be buried.
Do you agree with what I mentioned at the end of my conversation with Francis Alston that, as long as he cemeteries are intact, and the dead have endured Katrina, that that's going to be a strong pull on people who might have left and that to come back?
I think that's very, very astute observation.
In that, people from New Orleans are very connected to place and very connected to their ancestors.
This is a major reason for them to return.
We hope it'll be a major reason for some of the musicians to return because the jazz funeral is such a unique phenomenon.
And so representative of the New Orleans spirit, of course, musicians have to go where the work is.
And there hasn't been a lot of work in New Orleans up till recently, and there haven't been a lot of homes for the musicians to go back to.
So hopefully they will have extra reason in terms of newly built homes and more work to return to the place where their ancestors are buried and where they can continue to play when the Saints go marching in and other traditional favorites.
Great. When you organize your book chronologically, it's actually corresponds to geography so that you start in the Northeast and South and then the Midwest and then the West.
This also follows a pattern of immigration in the United States.
Since we don't have that much time left, we are here in California.
The Stanford campus, when can we take that big jump now maybe to California, is it a completely different scene when we get to the West?
It is a very different scene.
With two important strands, one begins with the missionaries, the Spanish missionaries coming up from the South, from Texas into California and establishing the whole string of missions in the 18th century.
And they introduce European style cemeteries to Native Americans.
Now Native Americans had different burial patterns. They buried them, say in the Mississippi region, they buried them in mountains.
Out on the plains, they may have exposed their dead or buried them wherever they happen to be.
Along come the Spanish missionaries and they attach church yards to their churches and to the whole mission complex and their aim, their sensible aim, is to Christianize the Native Americans.
So in addition to the food and the lodging which they provided in the missions, they provided introduction into Christianity, Catholicism and burial.
So when Native Americans died, if they had become Christian, they were buried in the church yard next to the mission church.
They were wrapped in shrouds, not placed in coffins, and their graves were not marked.
And after a certain amount of time, the bones would be removed and put into charnal houses.
We have some interesting descriptions of, say, the Santa Barbara mission that described the charnal houses of the 19th century.
Well, there's that strand and there's also the gold rush and the stream, about to speak, of Americans and Europeans who poured into California in 1849.
And of course, in addition to striking it rich, very few of them did that, many of them, all of them eventually died.
Many of them died sooner than they had hoped from epidemics and all of the other attendant ills of emerging fledgling communities.
But the graveyards of the gold country are really very moving, lonely, picturesque places to visit.
Very often, there's just the graveyard there. The town never grew up. Or even if the town grew, maybe it grew to a thousand inhabitants.
How far away would one have to go from here?
Three hours or so. Into the gold country and just look on the map and find highway 49.
And take it from town to town and it will be a very moving experience. Really throws you back to the 19th century.
I'm wondering in the time we remaze if we want to get a little bit more reflective on this, while the phenomenon of cemeteries and, you know, we're looking forward to your book, it's going to be a really valuable documentation.
But the question arises in our own times where so few people in our midst actually think about where they're going to be buried or if they're going to be buried.
It used to be one of the most common certainties among the vast majority of people was where they were going to be buried. And now it's probably an equal proportion, the uncertainty.
And of course, there's a question of whether people still believe in burial as such and therefore cemeteries with cremation and there seems to be an increasing desire to leave no traces behind to have one's remains just dispersed, become part of the environment, not occupy space, the way a cemetery is occupy space.
Do you think cemeteries are, as you were saying, French, on what did these patties feel?
Yes, no. One of the reasons that I'm writing this book is that we are, we have a history of 400 years of cemeteries behind us and they represent a kind of stone archive that is on time to despair at.
So there is a cemetery preservation movement at work now, preserving stones, graveyards, doing the archaeological work, doing the restorative work that's necessary even.
People going into cemeteries who are with their little cell phones or computers and writing down the name and dates of every single marker in a tombstone. Just hit the internet and you'll find this. On the other hand, a third of Americans are now choosing cremation.
And that means that they will scatter their ashes.
Does that mean that I should know this, but cremation doesn't necessarily mean that you're not going to have a marker.
That's true. You can put your ashes in an urn and most cemeteries now have niches for urns.
It's interesting how the religions are changing to accommodate that. There was a time when Catholics and Orthodox Jews would not allow for cremation. Now they do.
Very recent, I think, among Catholics. Yes, and I do think that that is more the wave of the future that people will have their ashes in urns or scattered.
I know of one little girl whose baby brother died and she has her brother's ashes in her room with her and she finds that comforting.
Well, we are at Stanford and we're talking about cemeteries and burial of the dead and one can easily think that these are the side issue.
But so many of our institutions are founded upon the dead, the authority of the dead, and oftentimes even the very tombs of the dead.
I think Stanford as a private university bears this out when you think that Stanford was founded really in the name of a boy who died prematurely.
And he was the founding place for the institution.
And as Jane Stanford said, she's lost a son but she has now become the mother of a university.
And I personally think that a place like Stanford is still, whether we're aware of a consciously, we're certainly not aware of a consciously. It's still haunted by the early death of this boy and the need to redeem that early death.
And the Alice Rainer once spoke in a very fascinating way about this work of grieving that gets displaced into academic achievement.
Almost as if all of us who are inducted into this institution, whether as faculty members or graduate students or undergraduates, that we are all on a mission through our success to redeem that early death.
And so we have that that mausoleum right here on campus, very 19th century in aspect. I think originally it was where the angel of death statue is. It was now then moved nearby to the mausoleum.
But few people actually go and visit that place or even know where it is and yet nevertheless, you know, the dead are with us.
So, Marilyn, would you like to tell us when we can expect your book to be available to the public?
Well, I'm afraid it's going to be 2008 if I'm lucky.
That much, huh? Yes. I still have another year plus of work and then it takes another year before the book will be out.
Houghton Mifflin is my editor and we're very enthusiastic about this book and putting it together. My son and I, I just hope that the text is as good as his photos.
Well, I've seen both and I can, you know, I can vouch for the text and those photos that I've seen, but is it because of all the painstaking traveling and documentation and photographing of the cemeteries that
It will take that long. Yes. I mean, it's not that long or in 2000, I keep thinking we're not there.
Well, you know, there is an estimated 250,000 cemeteries scattered across the United States and of course we can only do a handful.
And those that we've chosen show how immigrants come to this country with various rituals, holding on to them and yet adapting to the country and to the white American mainstream.
And also said there's a cemetery history that has to be traced over 400 years.
One last question, Marilyn. Are there any cemeteries in our immediate area that you would recommend people to go and visit that are interesting historically speaking?
I would take a look at the small cemetery attached to Mission Dolores, which is the only cemetery still in San Francisco.
And then I'd go out to Colma and you'll see cemetery city, one cemetery after another. And that was because at a certain point all of the cemeteries in San Francisco were moved outside the city
and they're all in Colma. So one has one's choice.
Well, thank you very much for joining us. This has been an addition of entitled opinions with Marilyn Yalom. I'm Robert Harrison and I'd like to encourage you to go to our web page.
Click on the Stanford Department of French and Italians homepage and click there on the title of the opinions and leave your comments. Thanks, David Lummis. Stay tuned for DECA at the Cafe Bohemian coming up just in a few minutes and we'll be with you again next week. Thanks again, Marilyn.
Thanks.
Wow, I'm sick of doubt. Living light of certain self-cruel bindings.
The servants of the power, dogmen and their mean women, pulling poor blankets over our sailors.
I'm sick of dour faces staring at me from the TV tower.
I want roses in my garden, power, dick, royal babies, rubies, and must now replace the border of strangers in the light.
These mutants, blood and yellow, plant is flat.
They are waiting to take us under the severed garden.
If you know how pale and rotten, your profile comes death in a strange hour.
I don't know if it's done by a poor man.
Just scaring over-friendly guests you brought to bed.
Death makes angels of the soul and gives us wings for we had shoulders smooth as ravens' claws.
No more money, no more sense to dress, but other kingdoms seems by father of the guests to throw other jaw reveals incest and least the beauty of the spiritual law.
Our will not go, but first, feast of friends to the giant family.
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