The University of Mississippi Press’s America’s Third Coast book series, edited by Carl A. Brasseaux and Donald W. Davis, highlights the history, life, and culture of oft-ignored southern coastal areas. Jessica H. Schexnayder and Mary H. Manhein’s Fragile Grounds: Louisiana’s Endangered Cemeteries joins the series as a “visual treasury of [Louisiana’s] disappearing cemeteries and a call to preserve them” (back-cover blurb).
Fragile Grounds is a beautiful book with more than 250 high-gloss images presented across 148 pages. That is an achievement, but Fragile Grounds wants to be more than that. Schexnayder and Manhein want to yell into the void. The authors preface their book with a description of Louisiana’s coastal areas in dire straits: “Rapid advancement of coastal erosion combined with storm surges, rising sea levels, and compaction and sinking of the land have led to an unstable landscape. That instability is pushing Louisiana’s residents inland, forcing them to leave evidence of their histories, such as their cemeteries, behind” (xi). They face two antagonists: the oncoming of time that waylays all, and the specific environmental factors that speed up time’s processes in south Louisiana.
The book divides into four chapters: The Law, the Lands, the People; South Louisiana Burial Customs; Select Coastal Zone Cemeteries; Select Cemeteries beyond the Coastal Zones; and it concludes with an afterword and three appendices, listing the documented cemeteries, immigration dates, and the dates of Louisiana hurricane landfalls between 1851 and 2015. Throughout, photographs dominate the supplementary text.
In chapter 1, Schexnayder and Manhein outline their early plans to gather global positioning system (GPS) data for the more than 500 cemeteries found in Louisiana’s endangered coastal zones. Understanding that other groups had taken single-point location data for coastal cemeteries in the past, Schexnayder and Manhein painstakingly mapped out GPS points “around the perimeter of each cemetery,” noting that these GPS points “will always be there, even when the land is gone” (7). Clearly, these cemeteries took priority because they lie within the realms of ongoing coastal erosion and land loss, but the authors quickly admit the shortcomings of their earliest intentions: “What initially began as an effort to capture global positioning system (GPS) point data for the state’s coastal zone cemetery boundaries quickly turned into a race against time to also document cemeteries that might be at risk for other reasons” (7). They add, “Originally capturing the actual size of the cemeteries was important, but we soon learned that the cultural dynamics of the various regions could not be ignored.” Satellites and their high-tech imagery—as all quick-access technology is wont to do—offered a tantalizing beginning, but Schexnayder and Manhein found themselves wanting (needing) to have their boots on the ground in order to complete their project.
Chapter 2 orients us toward the view from the ground, presenting a typology of southern Louisiana’s burial types and customs. The first are inground burials, which the authors note are quite common “despite tales of water table woes” (13). Other examples, such as wall vaults, copings, and society tombs, are all well represented photographically. Each page features two to three images or one full-page image. They constitute a commendable selection of clearly framed shots—meant to exemplify type—alongside more artistic, subjective frames—meant to express character. One striking example is the full-page image that captures an open, weathered Bible, slowly disintegrating on top of an already dilapidated family tomb in New Orleans’s St. Louis I cemetery (27). Another half-page image shows an ornate wooden coffin in Denham Springs Memorial Cemetery surreally displaced by a recent storm surge, resting upside-down on top of some other soul’s headstone (30).
Having cataloged the major types and customs, Fragile Grounds’ latter half attends to localities, offering even more images alongside short, punchy historical anecdotes from thirty-seven cemeteries within the coastal zone (chapter 3) and six cemeteries lying beyond the coastal zone (chapter 4). While these anecdotes do not stand in for full, theoretical analyses of Louisiana’s burial customs and materials, intriguing nuggets of history and culture do rise to the surface. There is the mass grave of Isles Dernières that memorializes wealthy vacationers who were killed by a powerful hurricane in 1856 (102-4). There are the tragic, unmarked graves of slaves tended by Louisiana’s great novelist Ernest Gaines and his wife, Dianne Gaines, at Mount Zion River Lake Plantation Cemetery in Pointe Coupee Parish (117-9).
In their afterword, Schexnayder and Manhein reiterate the futility of ongoing mitigation efforts (e.g., newly designed heavy concrete vaults, metal tie-down straps) meant to protect the cemeteries: “Such measures can only be successful if the land is stable, but the land is not stable” (125). Curtly, but poignantly, they criticize talk of moving the cemeteries to safer, more stable grounds as “imaginative, but not realistic,” adding, “The harsh reality is that we cannot save these burial sites; we can only document them before they are gone” (126).
And so Fragile Grounds juxtaposes the image of these crumbling graveyards against the oncoming of death, of time, and of disappearance. Schexnayder’s and Manhein’s desire to yell into the void manifests as a gesture toward inevitability. Commendable as their project is, they can do no more than offer images of Louisiana’s stark, attractive, crumbling, and partially washed away headstones, tombs, mausoleums, tabletops, and potter’s fields.
Stone markers on a wet, Southern ground
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[Review length: 879 words • Review posted on October 3, 2019]