Fragile Grounds

While working for Louisiana Sea Grant (LSG), which is part of the National Sea Grant College Program and based at LSU, Jessica Schexnayder took classes when she could. She majored in English, reading writers ranging from Ernest Gaines to Kate Chopin and from Daphne du Maurier to Stephen King. Then around 2003, she took an introductory class in anthropology that changed her life. The class was taught by professor Mary Manhein, aka the Bone Lady, whose work with the Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services (FACES) lab at LSU has made her internationally famous. (Manhein retired last spring after thirty-four years at LSU.)

“Mary’s class just sucked me in like a vortex,” said Schexnayder, a wife and mother of a seventeen-year-old son, in a recent interview. “I’m interested in the way we interact with each other culturally. I switched my major to anthropology.” 

In 2010, Schexnayder took Manhein’s class in forensic anthropology. “I wrote a paper on cemeteries and eminent domain [the power of government to take private property for public use],” said Schexnayder. “Broadly stated, Louisiana law holds that the living take precedence over the dead. I discovered that there was a cemetery that had been moved to make way for the Morganza Spillway in Pointe Coupee Parish. There were two cemeteries inside the Bonnet Carré Spillway in St. Charles Parish. And the parking lot of the Superdome was built over the Girod Street Cemetery.”

Working on that paper started Schexnayder thinking about the ways in which cemeteries were threatened. Her years working with Sea Grant had taught her about such threats as coastal erosion, storm surge, subsidence (sinking), and sea-level rise. She told Manhein that she wanted to document the destruction of cemeteries, and Manhein agreed to work with her. Thus was born the Louisiana Endangered Cemetery Project.

“I’ve always been interested in cemeteries,” said Schexnayder. “I spent my childhood summers in east Texas with my grandmother and great-grandmother. The family cemetery was right down the road. I’d walk there with my cousins. I was fascinated by the names and dates on the tombstones. That’s been a part of me since childhood.”

Schexnayder talked to Chuck Wilson, then director of LSG. “I just went to his office one day and said, ‘What do you think about this idea—the loss of culture along our coastal zone?” Wilson thought the idea had merit. He gave her and Manhein a project-development grant of ten thousand dollars. Although they applied for other grants, that amount turned out to be the entire budget for their program, which began in 2011 and ended in April 2015. “We figured out how we could do it with this small amount of funding,” said Schexnayder.

With the money, Schexnayder bought a Trimble GPS (Global Positioning System) “good enough to collect satellite points.” Using information from the U.S. Geological Survey and from the Louisiana Cemeteries website, she found cemeteries to map.

“The USGS has documented many cemeteries in Louisiana with one single point. That made no sense to me. If land is eroding, when that one coordinate is gone, how do you know what you’ve lost? I took the hand-held GPS and collected data points along the perimeters of the cemeteries.

“I’d walk the entire perimeter so I had the whole polygon shape of the cemetery. Once the land is gone, you don’t just have one point. The polygon will hold its shape.

“That way, you can always see where the cemetery was, even if it disappears. That’s so important for emergency management. You need to know the boundaries of your cemetery. DHH [Department of Health & Hospitals] asked us for data after Hurricane Isaac in 2012. They were looking for cemetery perimeters in Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes. From an emergency management standpoint, this data is very important. A cemetery has to be put back in order, or it becomes a public health hazard.”

Using her own Nikon D60 digital camera, Schexnayder took multiple photographs of each burial ground. She and Manhein documented 137 cemeteries, taking thousands of photos along the way. “I stopped counting at ten thousand,” said Schexnayder. They visited twenty coastal parishes and four additional parishes, using grant money to purchase gas and a Garmin GPS for their cars.

As the project progressed, Schexnayder was invited to address two conferences: the Society for Cultural Anthropology in Providence, Rhode Island, and the International Cemetery Preservation Summit in Niagara Falls, New York. Grant monies covered her travel expenses. Last March, she and Manhein exhibited the results of their work at the Louisiana State Archives.

One area that made a big impact on Schexnayder was Isle de Jean Charles, a narrow ridge of land in the marshes of Terrebonne Parish, which was the inspiration for the film Beasts of the Southern Wild and is the subject of the documentary Can’t Stop the Water. It is home to a Native American community of about seventy-five Biloxi, Chitimacha, and Choctaw Indians whose first language is French. Residents of the island have long been at the front line of Louisiana’s coastal erosion. (According to the website isledejeancharles.com, coastal Louisiana loses a landmass the size of Manhattan every year.) “Another way to put it is that we are losing an acre—the size of a football field—every half hour,” said Schexnayder.

Facing the certain prospect of migration inland, the residents are simultaneously resisting and grappling with the changes that will affect the cultural fabric of their tight-knit community once living on Isle de Jean Charles becomes untenable. Part of that future means leaving important pieces of their history and culture behind, including some of their most sacred spaces: cemeteries.

“When people are pushed inland, they have to migrate,” said Schexnayder. “It’s not like they can pick the cemetery up and take it with them. Once you change the dynamic of a community, it changes their cultural fabric. 

“They don’t want to leave their island and move inland. Once they move they’re not the same community and culture they were. It literally is the unraveling of our coastal culture.”

Cemeteries aren’t just resting places for the deceased; they are also tangible reminders of the movement of peoples through an area. “You can see the immigration patterns on the headstones,” Schexnayder said. “In Donaldsonville I saw three—Ascension Catholic for Isleños [Canary Islanders], Spanish, and English. Two streets over is Bikur Sholim, a German Jewish cemetery, and nearby is Iberville African American Cemetery—all in a five-mile radius.”

Her work on the project has also taken her to Orleans Parish, where she has mapped and photographed about a dozen burial grounds. “My favorite is Holt, because it’s so eclectic,” she said. “There’s not that rigid, formal above-ground cemetery feel. The people buried there were not wealthy; they were indigent. You have to bury your own family members. Almost all the headstones are homemade.” Established in 1879, Holt contains the remains of many early jazz musicians, including Charles “Buddy” Bolden, whose tragic life ended with his death in an insane asylum in 1931.

A blues fan who was friends with the late musician Raful Neal (her son’s godfather), Schexnayder also mapped Mulatto Bend cemetery near Port Allen, where musician James Moore, better known as Slim Harpo, is buried. “I left him a harmonica,” said Schexnayder. She also mapped Lutheran Cemetery, an African American burial ground in the part of South Baton Rouge known as The Bottom. “It’s sort of lost in the heart of our city. Its ownership is ambiguous. There’s a volunteer group that cleans it up once or twice a year.”

A year or two into the project, Schexnayder and Manhein decided to write a book. “We had collected so many photos and stories,” said Schexnayder. “Often when we are in a cemetery, people want to know why we are there. They want to show us things and tell us things. We starting taking notes, collecting oral histories. “But the visuals tell the story. We have about 150 photos, both color that we shot and black-and-white historic photos.”

The book, Fragile Ground: Louisiana’s Endangered Cemeteries, is under review by a publisher. It will be heavy on photos; the text will be what Schexnayder calls “little vignettes.”

Although Schexnayder took medical leave from Sea Grant last month, she will continue to take classes; she needs thirty hours to earn her B.A. in anthropology. She plans to continue work on the cemetery project. “This is not about saving the cemeteries,” she said. “It’s about documenting them before they are gone. This won’t go by the wayside for me. It’s too much of a passion.”

Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.