Fragile Grounds: Louisiana’s Endangered Cemeteries by Jessica H. Schexnayder and Mary H. Manhein
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
What an important topic for a book about cemeteries! Louisiana loses the an area the size of a football field every half an hour, as its coast is devoured by the sea. In the last 50 years, Louisiana has lost an average of 34 square miles per year. More than 500 cemeteries exist in Louisiana’s coastal zone: last resting places of Native Americans, slaves and freemen, French, Spanish, Cajun, and more. The book does a good job of laying out the threats these cemeteries are facing, from salt intrusion to ground subsidence, flooding, hurricane damage, and being reclaimed by the ocean.
Unfortunately, Fragile Grounds doesn’t do such a great job describing what will be lost. The photos are simple snapshots, usually taken in the flat light of midday. For the most part, these aren’t grand cemeteries with statuary or stained glass or famous names. This doesn’t make them expendable, however. In fact, if the book had focused on the cemeteries, detailing their communities’ history, it would have made a stronger case for saving them. Instead, each graveyard gets a scant handful of paragraphs jammed onto a single page with long captions and multiple little photographs. The layout allows the authors to cover a lot of ground, but I would have liked more depth.
Still, some of the photos are heartbreaking, showing vaults broken open by hurricanes or vandalism, coffins displaced by flooding, tombs sinking beneath the Gulf of Mexico. As the authors point out, “As humans, not only do we mourn the loss of our loved ones, but we also mourn our burial grounds….When those cemeteries left behind fall victim to natural and manmade devastation, such loss unravels the fabric of our history and renders it unrecoverable for future generations.”
I’m glad the authors are drawing attention to the losses to come. I hope someone else will spend more time documenting exactly what will be lost and thereby preserve the memory of it for the future.
I bought my copy from Dark Delicacies in Burbank, California, but you can also find the book on Amazon.