Morning at Mount Carmel

You'll come into the main gate to a circle. You can go right. You can go straight. You want to go left. Keep going for as long as you can then hit your brakes. Look out your left window. You'll be looking at it. I'll meet you there at eleven.

It is late morning, bright with spring, and it couldn't have taken more than ten minutes for Sanders to start digging and prodding toward a conversation that I don't think he really didn't want to have with me. He is speaking as if we speak the same language. While I am very much American, I am neither Catholic nor am I white. I am certainly not from around here. Wait, I guess that last statement is not true. That is in fact why I am standing in this grave yard maintaining patience and trying to listen with an open mind to this old, kind of frail, medium-sized white-haired white man in canvas shoes and 80s style jogging pants explaining things to me. We are near the top of a gentle hill. It really is a beautiful day. While not Kentucky blue grass, the grass is green enough. After he leaves I'll actually lay down on it and let go to take it all in.

We're both vaccinated but still a bit timid from the pandemic. We greet by bumping gloves so to speak. He moves around, trying to get position, I suppose, though in any case I am taller than him no matter where he stands. He hands me two white sheets of paper. One holds a black and white photocopied image of a headstone, like one of the one's I'm looking at right in front of us. A bit thrown, I ask if it's okay to take my own. He says it's okay. The other sheet sports two paragraphs of black type, looks like arial 12-point single spaced. He seems more interested in showing things off than letting me read, so I listen.

Sanders guides me by pointing out the boundaries of the black section carved out within Mount Carmel, the historic Catholic cemetery for Paducah Kentucky and the surrounding McKraken County. An small area criss-crossed by a rank and file mix of about eighty anonymous markers and maybe a dozen enscribed headstones, slopes east and down from where we are standing. Sanders explains that a previous caretaker had taken the time to identify where most of the bodies were actually enterred, marking them with the paving stones. Eventually them might put up a fence he adds, like an off-hand gratuity from which I suppose I was to pick out the holy folks' magnanimity. Just to the side of the black section sits what my host calls The Angel Garden, built and recently expanded with funds donated by the local Catholic parish, it is to be a special place where mothers can bury souls lost any time from conception to birth. This garden features a 20-yard monument wall, an angel sculpture reclining against what looks like a marble uterus, lettering, placards, and stone landscaping, with it's perimeter defined by a curving paved walkway that loops conspicuously into the black section.

I look at the blue sky. Sanders talks.

So is this how it is? I'm thinking.

Everything you all don't want to talk about, you jam over here into one section of the yard? This is how it is? You actually paved over how many black bodies so you can make this so-called angel garden? And you are now going to stand here and talk to me about how you don't agree with 'those people' who want to erase southern history. These are the words coming out of your actual mouth?

We are ten minutes in.