RELATIONS: Sacred Ground
I had always heard that there was a “slave cemetery” at Locust Ridge but had never seen it during my visits there as a child. Finding it and documenting the names of the people buried there was one of the main purposes of my journey to my ancestral home in Louisiana. I wanted to find the people whose lives I had been reading about in the plantation ledger that Mr. William McDonald, who now owns the property, had shared with me. He had found the ledger pages in an old trunk beneath the house and sent them to me on a memory stick. When I arrived at Locust Ridge, he and his wife Sue met me there and graciously agreed to show me around the property
The burial ground is about a football field’s distance from the big house in a thicket of hackberries, locusts, and palmettos that in spring and summer would be dangerous to enter because of the many poisonous snakes. February, however, was the perfect month to visit — after hunting season and before snake season.
It took five minutes or so wandering through the brush to find the first headstone. And then another and another. I could barely contain my excitement. Would I find America, Big and Little Emily, Mick, Ann Willis, or any of the other people I had begun to feel I knew from reading about them in the plantation ledger?
The first headstone belonged to Josh Hatton, who died in 1885 at the age of 24. Born in 1861, he would have been a child during the last gasps of the antebellum south. By the age of 24, he would have experienced slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the beginnings of Jim Crow. I wondered how he had died — from of one of the many diseases that were rampant in the area at the time, such as malaria and yellow fever, or from something darker? Louisiana in 1885 was a time of racial terror with countless lynchings and murders of Black people. As a 24-year-old Black man, Josh Hatton would have been a prime target for such violence — just as he would be today.
The next headstone belonged to Rena Hatton, 1834–1943. If the dates were correct, she would have been enslaved for the first 30 years of her life, then transitioned into sharecropping after the Civil War. She had survived Josh, presumably her son, living to the age of 109. What a remarkable life! It was obvious from her headstone that she was beloved. My heart swelled with joy to read the words, “Dear mother — well done.” What stories would Rena have been able to tell us? What stories might she tell us even now if we listened closely?
Nearby and illuminated by the sun was a moss encrusted headstone on which I deciphered the name Henderson Lewis, 1883–1949. I would later learn his relationship to Rena.
A few yards away, the tilted headstone of Edward W. Wright rose from the leaf litter, its ornate inscription also dappled with sunlight. Born in 1856, Edward had been born a slave and had then likely worked the same cotton fields as a sharecropper. Yet despite what must have been a life of hard labor, he had lived to see 80 years old.
On the other side of a hackberry tree, I found Lillie E. Wright. After a little digging, I found her birthdate — February 27th, 1884. She might have been Edward’s daughter. The date of her death, however, remained hidden underground.
The plantation ledger had listed a Violet Wright among those enslaved by my 2nd great grandfather between 1860–1862. Violet Wright may have been Edward’s mother and Lillie’s grandmother.
Violet’s name appears in the ledger again in 1866. She is no longer enslaved but is still picking cotton. Records show that my great grandparents paid her only 25 cents per hundred pounds of cotton, or less than 50 cents per day for the back-breaking work. So while she was no longer technically enslaved, her life as a sharecropper would not have been much easier.
Between the headstones and the ledger, I was now aware of three members of the Wright family that had worked on my ancestors’ plantation. I also knew that Richard Wright was born and spent his early life in the area. Could these Wrights be related to him?
Further back in the thicket a headstone with a heart-shaped inscription caught the morning light — Lula Allen, 1893–1954. Beloved Wife at rest. I wondered if the husband who had loved her so much was buried nearby but could not find another Allen amongst the headstones.
More tromping through the tangled thicket led to the discovery of two more headstones — Sarah H. Arms, July 18, 1898-Oct 17, 1948, and Johnnie Battle, Aug 24, 1918-Feb 16, 1857. One headstone was completely enveloped by a tree that had grown up around it.
Toward the end of the day, I sat on a fallen tree trunk as the palmetto fronds swayed, clacked, and rasped in the breeze. A faint rattle of tires on a gravel road, the kee kee kee of a songbird and rat tat tat of a woodpecker. A cloud of white-winged blackbirds flew low through the trees, and spider webs glimmered in the golden light. Peace settled on me. Not because this land had been a peaceful place — chattel slavery, the Civil War, and the racial terror of Jim Crow had all left their mark. Death was everywhere. But so were life and love, evident in the inscriptions on the headstones and in the gentle way the breeze and sunlight moved across them. Sacred ground.
A few days later, I returned to the cemetery with John Black, Curator of the Tensas Parish Library and Museum, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the area. John is interested in restoring and preserving historic burial grounds like this one and explained that there were likely hundreds of them scattered around Tensas Parish — all on private property and many already forgotten or inaccessible, swallowed by the fast growing vegetation and swampy soil. He assured me that he would help with restoration of this cemetery if he could.
Later that evening he sent me two newspaper clippings from the Tensas Gazette. One reported on the death of Willie Wright, son of Edward Wright, whose headstone we had seen at Locust Ridge. “Willie Wright was born and reared on Locust Ridge plantation in Tensas Parish, his father Edward Wright, also being born and reared on this place, having belonged to the Adams family in slavery times….” According to the article, Willie Wright had become a doctor and worked at a St. Louis, Missouri, hospital at the time of his death. I was pleased to learn that Willie, whose father had been enslaved, had gone on to become a doctor. I was also pleased to see that other family members that I might contact were listed.
The second clipping explained the untimely death of Johnnie Battle when he was literally hit by a bus.
The next day, historian and genealogist Antoinette Harrell accompanied me to the burial ground. Antoinette has been researching and writing about Louisiana history for more than thirty years. She has written several books and is the subject of a Vice documentary that focuses on the lives of people who were still functionally enslaved well into the 1960s.
In fact, Antoinette’s own ancestors were enslaved, so this proved to be an emotional journey for both of us. It was also a physically arduous one for Antoinette, an amputee, who struggled to make her way across the muddy cotton field and then navigate the fallen branches, twisting vines, and thorny locusts of the thicket on her crutches.
‘This is good for me,” she said, as one crutch sank into the mud. “It helps me understand what they went through — enslaved people who were disabled by hard work and mistreatment but had to work anyway. Forced to work — no matter what!”
We talked about what it would have been like to work these cotton fields barefoot, the cold mud sucking at your feet and the sharp cotton stumps driving themselves into your soles. Antoinette snapped photos as I dug into the black soil to uncover the date on another headstone — Rose Alice Jones, Born Feb 22, 1880.
Antoinette then made her way through the thicket, spending a quiet moment at each grave site. Rena Hatton’s grave particularly spoke to her, and later that evening, Antoinette worked her genealogy magic to hear one of the stories that Rena had to tell. Rena and Henderson Lewis had married in 1886. Rena’s Son Josh, who died in 1885, had likely been the product of an earlier marriage to Tom Hatton. Antoinette even found one of their descendants on Ancestry and reached out to her via a private message.
As we left the burial ground in the waning winter light, Antoinette and I agreed to work together to uncover the histories of the people who had lived, worked and been buried on Locust Ridge. We hoped also to document more burial grounds like this one to ensure that the lives of the people buried in them would not be forgotten — quite a journey for a descendant of enslaved people and a descendant of enslavers to make together!
Special thanks to Edward Adams, my newly discovered cousin, for granting me permission to title my blog RELATIONS. which is also the title of his book on his Adams and Stewart family history.
About the Author
I began researching my family’s involvement in the slave society of the South in the spring of 2021. Until that time, I knew very little about American history and nothing about genealogy. I am slowly learning about both. In addition to the essays and interviews published on Medium, I have published essays and op-eds in Salon, the Austin American Statesman, and Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine, among others. I have an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University.
