Gravestones and Rabbit Holes

My visit to Paducah last spring covered about five days. I flew in on a Wednesday night and out on a Monday. Much of what I share now will incorporate things learned after, dots I connected in the middle of the night, oh-my-fucking-god realizations that occured, I don't know, maybe when I was in the shower. During my trip there were visits to the McKracken County Public Library, the local civil war museum, Green Book destintation Hotel Metropolitan, the mainline Catholic church, I-Hop and another grave yard.

The cemetery in town where most not-catholics historically were buried is Oak Grove. There's yet another cemetery where, I gather, not-catholic-not-negro-not-poor-people were buried. I didn't visit that one. Now there are lots of threads to follow but I need to follow the one that runs through Oak Grove -- and backwards from there. It was placed in my hands, unintentionally I think, by Nathan one of the county library's archivists. The two of us still haven't met in person but I first connected with Nathan after reading an historical scan he'd published: A Short History of Paducah. Nathan's also a songwriter, musician and folklorist. And he presents online like back-woods Kentucky. So you know those guys who ironically wear hunting boots plaid shirts and scraggly rail-splitter bro beards? Yeah. No. Nathan looks and sounds the real deal. He was and contiues to be an incredible help.

Oak Grove was established in 1847 when civic leaders bought 36 acres and moved graves from the town's first burial sight to a new location. The old ground is where city hall stands today. I don't know if this is truly the first concecrated ground in the area. The young state of Kentucky took control of the territory which includes Paducah from the Chickasaw nation in 1818. The name Paducah itself refers to the Paducoua people wiped out or pushed west from this area following the Louis and Clark expedition. With all due respect to the original people on this land, famous souls buried in Oak Grove include Fate Marable, the legendary jazz conductor who brought Louis Armstrong north on the riverboats, John T. Scopes of that Monkey Trial and a mule everyone seemed to be really worked up about when it died. In recent years there has been considerable effort put into developing a searchable database that catalogues names, demographics, plot numbers and causes of death. Archivists are pulling from country records along with records collected and recovered from local mortuaries. Nathan suggested I look at the database. I followed Nathan's advice and found:

- James E. Roberts d. 1947, section 3, lot 50; my great grandfather

- Medora Roberts (Dora Moore), section 3, lot 50; d. 1933; my great grandmother, buried with her husband

- Izora Roberts (Jones), d. 1921, section 9, lot 220.5; my great-great grandmother, not buried with her husband, Gregory Roberts, who was buried in 1930 over in the Catholic cemetery.

Warning: Gravestones and Rabbit Holes.

With this information, I waded into Oak Grove a couple of times. My walks around the grounds were done where done in late afternoon and I must admit I was nervous. I was by myself, untrained and in the South! I scanned around looking for, I don't know, graveyard hounds and klansmen I guess. I figured out the grid system of lanes and sections corresponding to the database but when I got to the plots where my ancestors were supposed to be found, things were a jumble or clearly worked over. Markers were not where I guessed they would be. Everything was roughly tended. Newer graves or open grass and uneven landscaping was all I could find.

Before my trip, my cousin had said her mother, my aunt, had remembered my grandfather saying he'd gone back to Paducah from Kansas City in 1947 to bury his father. He'd paid for headstones for him and his mother (Dora d. 1933) but that he hadn't stayed to see them placed and had always worried that he'd been swindled by the cemetery managers. I'm still not ready to say that he was in fact swindled, but I couldn't find the headstones. Like I said, I was nervous and not a trained grave hunter. But I couldn't find the airline gateway to the past where I could touch base. I became even more unsettled when I looked around the hodgepodge and saw more than a few well-tended stones baring the chiseled letters CSA, Confederate States of America.

I could see what they wanted everyone to believe. But I couldn't find my black bodies.

The question hits me: why is Izora over here but Gregory over there?

If you remember, I mentioned there were three headstones in Mount Carmel honoring members of my family. The biggest marker, supposedly honored the orignial married slave couple Charles and Jane (I'll get back to that) and the other two were for sons Phillip and Gregory. I am directly descended from Gregory. I called my cousin to see if she recalled Granddaddy ever talking about being Catholic. She didn't. Neither did I. Clearly there had been some type of break or disconnection. Gregory wasn't just Catholic, apperantly he was a "Well Known Negro" warranting several column inches in the Paducah Sun when he died in 1930. But his wife is buried miles away in Oak Grove.

And there's this: almost all of the black gravesites up through the 1960s appear to have been poorly tended to or completely unmarked regardless of whether they were in Oak Grove or Mount Carmel. But this one family of former slaves gets these really big headstones?

Then there's the math.

Rabbit Hole Warning. For background, I invite you to read the official account about Mount Carmel provided by the local parish. Scroll down to the 'Old Black Section' header. Maybe read it twice. Let it simmer for a minute.

Now take a close look at these headstones.

Now let's go back to Jane and Charles, the married couple referenced in Mount Carmel history. According to documentation I've found (thanks to Nathan), including U.S. census data and Jane's will, Jane was born in about 1815. Charles was born in 1838. This means that in 1850, when John 'Jack' Roberts bequeath his slaves from Nelson County, Just south of Louisville, to Paducah's Catholic church, Jane was about 30 years old and Charles or Henry Charles was about 12 (supported by a 1906 marriage license Charles filed with a Martha Dillard). This enslaved odd couple arrived in Paducah with a one-year-old, Phillip, born in 1849, a baby conceived when husband Charles would have been about 11. So Jane arrives on the scene with a a 12-year-old "husband," and a 1-year-old infant (Phillip). Gregory, the once and future well-known negro is born in May of 1856, five years before the start of the Civil War. By record he was born in the catholic settlement of Fancy Farm, the new home of slave owner Jack Roberts, about twenty miles from Paducah. I guess now Charles could plausably be Gregory's father. After all, by 1856 he would have been about 18. Now there's also Martha, not Jane. The Martha whose name appears on Henry Charles' headstone as his wife, was born according to several sources (Including the headstone) in about 1861, five years after Gregory. Indeed, Nathan provided me with the marriage certificate for Henry Roberts, age 60, and a Martha Dillard, age 43, registered November 3, 1906, as a second marriage for both. Check the headstone. Jane is in the church story but not Martha. Martha is on the headstone, not Jane.

"At the risk of sounding excessive, what I always felt, when I finally left the country, and found myself abroad, in other places, and watched the Americans abroad – and these are my countrymen – and I do care about them, and even if I didn’t, there is something between us. We have the same shorthand, I know, if I look at a boy or a girl from Tennessee, where they came from in Tennessee and what that means. No Englishman knows that. No Frenchman, no one in the world knows that, except another Black man who comes from the same place. One watches these lonely people denying the only kin they have. We talk about integration in America as though it was some great new conundrum. The problem in America is that we’ve been integrated for a very long time. Put me next to any African and you will see what I mean. My grandmother was not a rapist. What we are not facing is the result of what we’ve done. What one brings the American people to do for all our sakes is simply to accept our history. I was there not only as a slave, but also as a concubine. One knows the power, after all, which can be used against another person if you’ve got absolute power over that person."

-- James Baldwin,1965, Cambridge University