Two fundamental facts underlie burial in New Orleans. First, drop a body into
water, and it bobs to the surface like a cork. Second, Catholics do not cremate
the dead; they bury them. New Orleans is built on swampland, that is, a place where the water table is but a few feet below the surface of the ground and, in many places, above ground level. Bury a body in New Orleans and with the first rain, the loved one will rise and float.
New Orleans, for all of its notorious debauchery, is a Catholic town. Settled by French and occupied by the Spanish, the town is home to a people and a culture that remain invested in the doctrines and rituals of Roman Catholicism.
Consequently, the dead in New Orleans are neither buried in the ground nor are they cremated. The result is that cemeteries are above-ground whitewashed brick and mortar crypts called "cities of the dead." The crypts--which resemble double, triple, quadruple ovens--are owned by families who must rather like the idea of spending eternity together, for "together" they are.
Here's what happens. When a family member dies, her body is placed into a coffin, the coffin is placed onto a sliding stone table that is slid into the crypt. The oven-like opening is sealed with bricks, and for a year and one day, the crypt may not be reopened. During that year, the heat and humidity of New Orleans work their baking magic and the body is reduced to mostly bone.
When a second family member dies, the crypt is reopened, the stone table slid out, the contents of the coffin swept into the basin at the bottom of the crypt, the coffin itself discarded, and the second body inside its coffin slid into place.
And so forth.
In St. Louis No. 1, the oldest cemetery in New Orleans, this procedure has been taking place since 1789. That is over 200 years of great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and children, lying, as it were, in one another's laps, embraced in one another's arms.
I thought of all this in a sort of romanticized, dry-bone vision until my guide to the cemetery--the highly knowledgeable and unnaturally blond Billy--showed me a rare photo of the remains in a basin of one of the New Orleans crypts. Instead of scoured museum-quality bones, the remains were identifiable bodies, emaciated and darkened, lying at impossible angles where they had been dropped from the table above.
Sobered and not just a little disillusioned, I
turned my attention to the decorative
architecture of the crypts. But the irony
here is that for all the good intentions of
people to outwit the natural forces of this
flooded, hurricane-besieged landscape,
the ubiquitous moisture has worn away the
engraving on marble slates, smoothed the
features on the faces of stone statues, and
in one case that I saw, even beheaded the
statue of a mother embracing two children.
At this point, the crypts themselves are so
fragile that concerned citizens of the Save
Our Cemeteries organization know better
than to pull the weeds that grow between
the bricks of mildewed, decaying crypts,
lest the entire tomb collapse.
And there is more. The cemetery has been stripped by poachers who find an eager antique market for stolen statuary, iron figures, and railings. According to Billy, the lacy wrought iron fences that turn the small areas around crypts into miniature yards become garden gates and headboards for king-sized beds.
Here, I pause a moment to whisper, Yikes.
And with the likes of Edgar Allen Poe in mind, I venture on. Because the burial procedure of New Orleans requires reopening coffins, the living occasionally discovered that people had been accidentally buried alive. Yellow fever, a disease that swept in epidemics across the mosquito-ridden swamps of New Orleans, can at certain stages so lower the pulse of its victims that people were mistakenly assumed dead and buried hastily, lest the remains spread further contagion.
When the coffins of such unfortunates were reopened, the inside of the coffin lids had been clawed, evidence that the person had not been dead when he or she was buried. Appalled, the living devised a means of avoiding such horror. The dead were buried with a cord close at hand, perhaps in the hand. The cord was threaded out of the coffin, through the brick and mortar crypt wall, and attached to a bell that dangled from a bracket attached to the outside of the crypt. On the frightening off-chance that the assumed dead person should regain consciousness and find herself buried, she had only to tug the cord, and a caretaker paid to stand watch over the graveyard, would un-crypt her.
The complicated procedures and contingency plans of burial in New Orleans
underline the old maxim: necessity is the mother of invention. Or, in this case,
perhaps caution and a tidy, practical regard for the dead is the wet nurse of
eternity. Whatever the case, St. Louis No. 1 Cemetery is an 18th century
apparition on the landscape of 21st century America--gothic, moldy and
rust-stained, evidence that we are not merely a nation of squeamish
embalmers of all that reminds us of our mortality. Truly, the place is a gorgeous
haunt.
Originally published in Tapestry, June 2002
Home
