Death, my father’s, pointed me toward home. In 2011, I traveled from Brooklyn, New York, to Virginia to complete some unpleasant tasks after he passed away and to do some potentially more enjoyable investigating with Erin, my wife. We’d learned that my great-grandparents, Julia Fox Palmer and Mat Palmer, had been enslaved in Virginia. The search for documentation of their lives yielded a few amazing discoveries, among them Mat’s Union pension application and a special census done in York County, Virginia, from 1865, that listed members of Julia’s immediate family. Mat and Julia had freed themselves during the Civil War, the records seemed to show. Through them, I learned of “contraband slaves” and the United States Colored Troops, as well as Magruder, the community they helped create. Archivists and historians warned us that their paper trail would likely vanish, as it does for so many African Americans held as property before 1865. It did, but this led us, inevitably, to cemeteries. Mat’s stone, though crumbling, is the last tangible vestige of his existence. The stone next to his, which we believe is Julia’s, has been wiped clean by weather and time. I touched it, gently.
We moved to Virginia to explore this history, which to me was liberatory and grounding. Erin and I explored historic Black cemeteries across Virginia to piece together Mat and Julia’s story, and to place it in a solid historical context. So many of these places were overgrown and desecrated, while across the street or just blocks away, there’d be a pristine Confederate burial ground. We needed to hack our way in to read the inscriptions. The extent of neglect was, to me as an African American, nearly overwhelming. I knew that the same Jim Crow policies that oppressed and harmed Black people had starved our burial grounds and directed public resources to white communities, institutions, sites of memory, including Confederate monuments and cemeteries. The causes of neglect were structural, I understood. But the abject condition of these sites, of which there are thousands, still hurt.
I would write a story about it, make a documentary. I would show the damage and injustice and tell the stories of people dedicated to reclaiming these burial grounds. That’s how we found our way to East End Cemetery, which straddles the border between Richmond and Henrico County. After a day of watching and documenting a group of Boy Scouts clear brush from burial plots, Erin suggested we come back. As volunteers. While pitching in with the scouts, she discovered what it took me several more months to learn and, more importantly, to feel: this too is reclaiming hidden Black history, but with our hands as well as our minds. We went back the next week, right before Christmas 2014. We’re still going.