the untold story of uncle nick & homer
when i was little, every sunday after church my family would drive to see my dad's elderly great aunt berta in ft. worth, texas. aunt berta was in her 90s when i was 10 years old. she never married or had any children. her home was always spotless and filled with black and white photos and tin-types in ornate frames, lots of china and porcelain, and i remember that she had a lot of knick-knacks, but her house never seemed cluttered. we would spend a couple of hours with aunt berta and afterward we always went to the colonial cafeteria in the ft. worth hospital district. i always hated the colonial cafeteria, but was usually starving by the time we got there, and my dad had fond memories of eating there as a child and while he was at TCU. i always got the chopped beef (and doused it with a copious quantity of worcestershire sauce at the table) and the mashed potatoes (runny and oddly grainy) with gravy, and usually mushy, overcooked italian green beans, which were the least offensive of all of the remaining side vegetable choices. i would tuck in to lunch with my parents at the table and anxiously wait for my parents to finish so we could get out of there and head off on our last stop and my favorite part of our sunday: the cemetery. we'd always finish our ft. worth sundays with a trip to one of the city's marvelous historic cemeteries.
i grew up in a family that had a healthy respect for cemeteries as a source of history and quiet beauty. some of my friends used to refer to my family as the addams family because of our love of cemeteries. i always thought that was kind of cool, actually.
cemeteries haven't ever been something creepy or scary to me, except for an old cemetery in euless with the headstone that glowed in the dark; sara might remember that. it was pretty creepy. oh! and that cemetery in bedford where somebody named jacob bobo was buried... i'm digressing again. back then, cemeteries were almost always a place to admire beautifully carved mausoleums and headstones that dated back to the early 1800s. some of the headstones were so old and weathered we couldn't read them without making a rubbing of the stone. i used to still have a few rubbings left until a few years ago, but they have sadly been lost.
my love for cemeteries was born then, on those sunday afternoons in ft. worth, down on my hands and knees, rubbing a black crayon over a piece of paper held up to a gravestone to be able to read the names and the dates. i always made up stories in my head of how these people died and dreamed of one day writing a book, using the names of those i'd found on tombstones as characters. i wanted to tell somebody's story, even if i had to make it up.
when i was in high school, i read edgar lee masters' "spoon river anthology" and my love for cemeteries and the stories that they tell was ignited all over again. this was a story all about dead people; a collection of poems written in the form of epitaphs. there was something so sad and sweet about it. i remember reading spoon river anthology over and over, falling in love with each of the poems and wishing i'd written it myself.
about 6 years ago while driving home from a scuba diving & camping trip at balmorhea, we drove through a tiny little texas town called east sweden. as far as any of us could tell, east sweden was home to an old abandoned school house built sometime in the early 1900s, a church built around the same time, and in the field to the west of the church, a cemetery.
we turned the car around.
east sweden cemetery was surrounded by a chain-link fence on all sides, and was well maintained dispite the fact that upon closer inspection, the church looked to be about as abandoned as the old school house. there must have been at least 150 ground-set headstones in the cemetery in tidy rows; i think i must have read each and every one of them. there were two headstones though that particularly caught my attention.
they piqued my interest and broke my heart.
these two headstones were in one of the corners furthest from the church, up against the chain link fence. they were nearly completely obscured by grass growing around them, even though the rest of the cemetery seemed to have been cared for and maintained. they seemed to be removed from the rest of the headstones in the cemetery, sort of forgotten.
the headstones were semi-square natural stones, just a little larger than bricks. they were weathered and spotted with moss and at first glance it wasn't immediately obvious that they even were headstones. they weren't ornately decorated and carved like the other headstones that said things like "beloved son" and "loving father".
these headstones read very simply.
"(a negro)
uncle nick
born about 1853
died december 28, 1898"
and
"(a negro)
homer
born about 1860
died december 28, 1898"
that's all. still, even with as little as both of these headstones revealed, they told more stories than any of the other more stately, ornately carved headstones in the rest of the cemetery.
i wanted so badly to remember exactly what they looked like, so i snapped a picture of each with the only camera i had with me; one of those one-time use, disposable cameras. this one was encased in a waterproof housing and we'd used it to take pictures underwater for our diving trip. unfortunately, the housing had cracked at some point during the trip and water had leaked into the camera, so all the film was ruined. no diving pictures, but more disappointing for me, no pictures of uncle nick & homer's grave markers.
uncle nick & homer's gravestones haunted me for weeks after that. i wanted desperately to go back and take pictures with a real camera, and just be able to sit and look at them. i wanted to know their stories; why did they both die on the same day? were they in a fire? an accident? were they murdered? hanged? had they been accused of some horrific crime and been mobbed by the townspeople? were they related? had they been slaves? was there anything else known about them other than the day they died and that they were black?
i've been searching the internet ever since, trying to learn something about uncle nick and homer online. so far all i've managed to glean is that east sweden is considered a certified texas ghost town, and that the history of east (and west) sweden is short and fraught with tragedy; the church was destroyed by a tornado in 1916 before being rebuilt in 1920 and the school house was destroyed by a fire in 1933 and rebuilt in 1934. nothing at all about the town's residents, itinerate or permanent, except for the founder of east sweden, swen leander hurd, a swede from williamson county who wrote to family in sweden and encouraged them to migrate to the "new sweden" community he and his family had created in texas along with 2 other families of swedish descent.
i've gone so far as to contact the mcculloch county offices to see if anybody working for the department of county information would be able to help with any information. no joy. not only was the woman i spoke with genuinely disinterested in my query, she had a tone in her voice that seemed to say "move it along, folks. nothing more to see here." this, of course, made me even more curious.
when the weather gets a little cooler, i might make a trip west about 130 miles to east sweden and start knocking on doors. it's not that far really, only about a two hour drive with some pretty nice texas postcard views along the way. i would like to go and take some decent photos of uncle nick & homer's headstones as well and as i mentioned before, just sort of sit and feel them. remember them.
there's a cemetery here in temple, a potter's field or pauper's cemetery. as is common, it's located on a narrow strip of field between a road and the railroad tracks, hidden in the shadow of hillcrest cemetery whose entrance is at the end of my street. it's called seven star cemetery, taking it's name from the underground railroad. presumably most of the bodies interred at seven star were slaves and freed slaves. the majority of the headstones at seven star read "unknown", spray-painted in black on cinderblocks. other headstones are made of woodplanks nailed together, bleached by 100 years of texas sun. still others are crude slabs of cement with names - sometimes only a first name and "title" like "miss annie", written with something like a stick or a finger while the cement was still wet. because seven star is so close, i go out there pretty often, and i'm always alone. i've never been to seven star cemetery while there's somebody else out there. it's a sad but beautiful little cemetery. i just read the article (linked above) about a church group taking care of seven star cemetery yesterday and was glad to know that somebody has taken some ownership of the grounds. apparently no local or state government entity will claim it, and since it's a potter's field, it isn't a private cemetery. seven star cemetery belongs to no one. maybe it belongs to everyone. i imagine there are quite a few stories to be told at seven star cemetery.
it's heartbreaking that someone lived their life without leaving the story of their life behind, no matter what that story might be. realistically i realize that this happens every day. i suppose that's just life; people live and die without leaving any kind of a legacy.
or do they? maybe everybody's life tells a story.
one day, i'd like to be able to tell the story of uncle nick & homer.
maybe that could be my legacy.
