“In this cemetery, we have slaves,” said Barbara Barksdale. “Some who came off the ship, some who were born here.”
Barksdale was standing in the shade of a few trees near the entrance of the Midland Cemetery, a burial ground of six or so square blocks on the outskirts of Steelton, Pa. She wore gray sweatpants, a visor, and a pink shirt that said “Cemetery Lady” over a woven insignia of a gravestone. She addressed a small crowd of volunteers, most of them employees of Capital Blue Cross, who had signed up for the United Way Day of Caring. It was early September.
“We also have Buffalo Soldiers,” she went on. “We also have Tuskegee Airmen. We have the men from World War I and World War II. We have a lot of our people who helped us start our area here, as far as the African-American communities. We have the slave who actually broke ground for the AME church that’s down on 2nd and Adams Street.”
To her right and left, over uneven land, stretched a few hundred graves and markers. Behind her, in a forested patch, were others, lost beneath weeds and trees.
Twenty years ago, the forest covered almost the entire cemetery. Barksdale, who is the president of Friends of Midland, a nonprofit she founded to restore the site, only knew the graves existed because of visits she had made as a child. “My parents would just park down at the bottom, across from that brown house over there, and then they would disappear into the woods to visit my grandfather,” she said. “I never knew and I still don’t know where he’s buried at.”
Barbara Barksdale.
She recruited help from conservationists and local volunteers, and in a few years they managed to clear much of the overgrowth. But many of the headstones had sunken into the soil. Every year, with the help of an ancient map, she and her volunteers unearthed new gravesites. “It’s like a pimple on a face,” she said. “You keep on wiping it, something’s gonna pop out.”
With a warning to “watch out for lumps and bumps,” the volunteers dispersed over the grounds. Some, equipped with a pry bar, set about wresting markers from the weeds and propping them up with bricks. Others mowed. A few slopped sealant into little plastic buckets and began coating the cemetery’s wooden fence in preparation for winter.
Barksdale stayed near the entrance, setting up lunch, and spoke with one of her regular helpers. “He’s a descendant of some people out here,” she said. “He has kinfolk.”
The man nodded. “I grew up right over the hill, not even three minutes walking distance, and I never knew this was here til I started here with her. Never knew it.”
“I call him one of my revolving door inmates,” Barksdale confided as he walked off. Early in the cemetery’s restoration, she had seen inmates operating mowers near the county prison, and had asked the warden to loan her some laborers. They had been coming every year since. Some, like that day’s helper, continued helping after they’d been released. “When he first came out,” Barksdale said, “all this side was filled with stumps. And he would get down in the holes, and I said, ‘Twist it out like a tooth!’”
Midland is one of a network of cemeteries involved in the Hallowed Grounds Project, a statewide effort to recover the neglected burial sites of African-Americans, particularly members of the United States Colored Troops. “The United States Colored Troops (USCT) were segregated in death as they were in life,” a recent pamphlet explained. “Until recently, their final resting places were vanishing from the landscape.”
A few weeks before September’s Day of Caring, Barksdale met with Lenwood Sloan in the offices of Jump Street, an arts-education nonprofit on North Cameron Street and a partner in Hallowed Grounds. Sloan—a “jack of all trades,” Barksdale said—is one of the project’s organizers, as well as a driving force behind various heritage initiatives in the region. They were preparing for Hallowed Grounds’ annual public meeting, which would be held on Oct. 12.
Sloan described the dramatic extent to which some cemeteries had been forgotten. One had been covered by the parking lot of an Applebee’s in Reading; another was under a playground in Carlisle. “Sometimes the cemetery is sliding down the hill due to erosion,” he said.
Sloan, who speaks with a resonant, preacherly baritone, has a knack for the lively phrase. He referred to physical labor as “sweat equity,” and described the Hallowed Grounds network as “an affinity group, a connect-the-dots, a constellation of advocacy.” The Oct. 12 meeting, he said, was a chance for conservationists and caretakers to share best practices, identify labor and funding sources, and swap resources like bricks and mulch. “It’s more like a family reunion than a conference,” he said.
On the Day of Caring, an hour into their work, a small group of volunteers discovered a stone submerged in the grass. As they dug it free, they saw it was connected to another stone—which was in turn connected to another.
“It kept going and going and going,” one volunteer said. “Then we all jumped in and—”
“Went for it!” someone concluded. Soon, they had exposed an entire stone boundary, perhaps sixteen feet square. No corresponding headstone was found.
A little ways off, another group of volunteers reclined on a shallow slope and reflected on the outing. “I think it’s just neat that, you’re looking at the year they were born, the year that they died, and back then, they didn’t live very long,” one of them reflected. She pointed at a nearby pair of stones. “That one, the wife was covered up completely.”
Barksdale paused at the entrance, where medals from the Civil War through the Korean War were affixed to a granite memorial. “It’s rewarding,” she said. “It’s fun, it’s beautiful. You can look around and say, well yeah, I did something here. This is part of my dash.”
Her dash?
“The dash,” she repeated. Barksdale, ever the Cemetery Lady, was invoking the image of a headstone. “You know. I’m born in the 1950s, I’ll die in, uh—3000 and something, maybe.” She grinned.
“And that little dash represents what I’m doing here. That’s your lifeline. You got it? That’s my dash. Part of my dash was being born, part of my dash is going to school, becoming a nurse, being a teacher, having children, having grandchildren—that’s part of my dash. You know, meeting you, part of my dash. Taking care of this cemetery. It’s part of my dash. You know? Doing reenacting. Part of my dash. So, like, what did you do with your life? Look at my dash.”
The Hallowed Grounds Project will host a benefit concert tomorrow, Thursday, Oct. 3, at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore at 7:30 p.m. The gospel group Spiritual Messengers will perform a free concert; donations are encouraged. Readers interested in the Oct. 12 meeting, at 599 Eisenhower Blvd., can sign up at the invitation page or email Barbara Barksdale at mscmtyldy@aol.com for more information.
