I spend a lot of time in the woods walking and working on tracts of timberland. The face of the south is constantly changing. In some places, it changes because of urban sprawl and development. In other places, the land changes simply because change is in the natural order of things.
Part of change is loss. Loss of what once was. It's a difficult thing to grasp but it's part of the human condition. Sometimes, the loss is personal to us. Other times, it's not and we can only see evidence of the loss as we walk the same ground long after the lives involved played out.
The two graves above belong to Dollie and Izza Sumner. They would have been my paternal great aunts. My grandfather, Carl Sumner, used to take me with him when he put flowers on the graves of his family members who are buried in the cemetery at Bethany Baptist Church and in the Wrightsville City Cemetery. He was the youngest of eleven children and outlived them all so he had a lot of graves to tend to. He made the rounds on every special holiday and sometimes at random on regular days because he just wanted to put fresh flowers on the graves. I was with him on just about every mission. Especially when school was out. I asked him question after question about everything thing under the sun as we travelled the dirt roads of Johnson County in his pickup truck. I had particular difficulty with the size of the graves of Dollie and Izza since it appeared to me that they were mighty small and it was my belief at the time that only "grownups" of advanced age died. He explained to me over the course of those afternoons that they were his baby sisters who had left here to live in Heaven. Granddaddy wasn't born until 1918 so Izza would have been twenty years older than him. I assume he referred to them as his baby sisters simply because they died as infants so that's how his mind's eye always viewed them. Regardless, I finally came to terms with it and thereafter assumed them to be angels who watched over us on our routine journey.
Now that I myself am a grownup, I understand the harsh reality of what had happened... they took ill shortly after birth and there was nothing any medical doctor of the day could have done to save them. This is change and loss in the worst way. But, again, it is part of being human. It makes me understand now why Granddaddy always insisted that I wear a jacket in the winter. He didn't want me to "take cold."
Behind the cemetery in which Dollie and Izza Sumner were buried as infants is another cemetery. It is on a hill that, in its day, would have looked out over vast agricultural fields. Monstrous pine and white oak trees now tower over the land and keep vigil over the last remaining hint of lives that were.
This cemetery has kept its secrets well. There is little to no record that I am aware of as to who was laid to rest there. Scattered among the graves are seemingly wild growing Easter lilies. Maybe they're descendants of those originally planted by the families of those who are buried there. Those who may have known are long since dead. Every one has a story but we'll probably never know it.
The likelihood is that this was a slave cemetery though it was probably used some after the Civil War. The hill is pockmarked with graves but you have to know what you're looking for to realize it. Were it not for a few grave markers, I might have never known it was hallowed ground. Now that I do, I have been able to identify the depressions in the earth as graves. It is covered with them.
The one that strikes me most is marked very simply, "Babe." Probably a stillborn child. I have often wondered what caused his or her passing. I have been to see it more than once. It's a 4x8 monument to a life that may have been. Yet, the child's parents who had to have been poor clearly loved him or her enough to place this little monument on the hill in hopes that it would stand for the ages. It has. As long as we own the land, it always will. But, we too shall pass and time and the earth will constantly grind away to reclaim it.
This leads me back to what Granddaddy told me about Dollie and Izza. Their time here was short but their permanency wound up existing where you'd want it to be. Jesus loves the little children. Granddaddy was right... Dollie, Izza and Babe could care less about what happens to their little monuments. It's where they are that counts.
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