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| Photo: Angels in Havana by Sarah Bryan |
Folklore is interwoven through the tapestry of the world, encompassing almost every part of everyone's lives. There's nowhere where folklore thrives more than through death.
Sarah Bryan runs Folk Funeraria, a blog looking at grave decorations in the American south. I spoke to Sarah about her fascination with gravestones, folklore and history.
What inspired you
to start taking pictures of tombstones and grave decorations?
Though I don’t
remember precisely when or why I started taking pictures of gravestones, it was
probably as a fairly young child, with my first camera. My mom was photographing
tombstones long before that, so I’m sure it has to do with her influence. (My
mom, whose academic training is as a medievalist, is a writer and historian of
the American Civil War era. She’s a cofounder of Ancestry and Life Stories,
which sells family tree kits for kids, including materials for making
gravestone rubbings.) I grew up in South Carolina and Virginia, and whenever we
would travel and had time to explore historic places, we’d visit the oldest
graveyards we could find. It’s a great way to learn a lot about the culture of
a place—its history, religious beliefs, ethnicities, aesthetics, language,
genealogy—an awful lot is revealed about how people lived by the way their
survivors memorialize them. Part of the appeal is the emotional connections one
makes in an old graveyard to people who’ve been dead for many years. Most
people who have spent time in old cemeteries know that pang of sympathetic
grief one feels seeing two large tombstones next to a series of small stones
decorated with carvings of lambs—a sign of parents who lost children. Here in
the Southern US, one might visit a family burying ground on an antebellum
plantation, admire the elaborate decoration and documentation on the
landowners’ tombstones, and then realize that the graves of the slaves who
worked their land, cooked their meals, tended their homes, and raised their
children are only marked with rocks or plain wooden boards, if they’re marked
at all. So the appeal begins with that inherent poignancy of remembering those
who have gone before us, and how (and whether) they are memorialized.
Also, there is the
aesthetic appeal of funerary art. A lot of people, myself included, really like
Victorian graveyards, particularly the angel sculptures in their various
attitudes of contemplative sorrow or triumphant jubilation. Here in North
Carolina the most famous graveyard angel is in the foothills town of
Hendersonville, a celestial woman with single-starred tiara, said to have
inspired novelist Thomas Wolfe when he wrote “Look Homeward Angel.” The most
beautiful and hair-raisingly vivid angels I’ve ever seen are in
late-nineteenth-century cemeteries in Cuba. There’s a monument in Havana’s
Cementerio Colon to eight medical students who were executed in 1871. Their
angel is bursting out of a temple, and the overall effect is of a cuckoo clock
announcing Judgment Day. Another one in Havana is crouched down with one hand
to her ear and the other stretched out in the universal “hang on a second”
gesture, as if she hears some sort of tumult brewing underground. Then there’s
this Victorian cemetery in the southern Cuban town of Cienfuegos that is just
stuffed to bursting with angels. It’s a Victorian taphophile’s fantasy.
Then of course there
are the wonderful eighteenth- and very early nineteenth-century carvings for
which New England churchyards are so well known, and which are to be found in
old Southern port towns as well. The carvings on these stones often feature depraved
death’s heads framed by sickles, or alarmed-looking angel faces with wings
sprouting right out where their ears should be. Sometimes there are even
portraits of the deceased. My favorite examples of portraiture in this style
are found in Charleston, South Carolina, at Circular Congregational Church.
They’re slightly cartoonish in a half-creepy but also quite endearing way that
reminds me a lot of the medieval Lewis Chessmen.
Much as I love the
Victoriana and the colonial and early post-Revolutionary tombstone art, my very
favorite grave markers are often the most rudimentary. Whether carved with a
chisel into a piece of sandstone two hundred years ago, or with a stick in wet
concrete in the 1970s, the markers that appeal to me most are the homemade
stones, inscribed with halting, eccentrically spaced, sometimes backwards
letters, and vernacular spelling, and perhaps a bit of spare decoration like a
simple flower or star. Markers like this were made by people who didn’t have
the means to buy their loved ones elaborate, professionally made gravestones,
so they made do with what they had, both in terms of materials and literacy. These
to me are the most emotionally affecting, because they’re really the proverbial
labors of love.
Do you think the
type of grave decorations you encounter are more prevalent in the South? If so,
why do you think that?
In some cases they
are; in other cases they are to be found more widely, or, conversely, only very
locally. There is a lot about funerary
art in the South that traces back to African cultures. The most classic example
of African American grave decoration is broken crockery or other objects owned
by the deceased. I very often see burial sites at which the deceased’s loved ones
have left objects that belonged to him or her. I find it hard to tell whether
broken objects left on graves were broken intentionally for symbolic purposes, or
if they have been subsequently broken by vandals or exposure to the elements.
More often than not, the objects I see are not broken at all, but I think that
this can still be viewed as a part of the same tradition. Recently, in an
African American churchyard in South Carolina, I photographed a grave on which
there were several pairs of sunglasses. (I can’t speak for the people who left
them there as to what the significance was for them—I presume the man buried
there was known for liking to wear sunglasses—but it made me think of the
Southern religious songs that refer to death with the metaphor of turning one’s
face to the sun, and of an old song that goes, “Lights in the graveyard,
outshine the sun.”) I also see tools of the deceased people’s trades left on
their graves. For example, in Warren County, North Carolina, in the eastern
Piedmont near the Virginia line, there is a very deep tradition of African
American brick masonry. In that county, you can see graves decorated with
bricks and trowels. It’s also traditional in African American communities,
especially along the coast, to decorate graves with seashells. Most often I see
conch shells placed on top of gravestones or on the ground next to them. It
says a lot about diversity of influences in Southern culture that these burial
traditions that are believed to originate in Africa are also to be found in
white and American Indian graveyards. In earlier generations, and to some
extent today, people of different races were usually buried in different
cemeteries, and it’s generally easy to tell if a particular burying ground is
white, black, or Indian. But the kinds of decoration won’t always tell you the
community’s race, because our funerary traditions influence each other so
thoroughly.
What's the most
interesting thing you've come across when recording folk funeraria?
Everything about it
interests me, but among my favorite things to document are gravestone
inscriptions that reflect the way local people speak. My favorite example of
this is a headstone in the eastern North Carolina tobacco town of Kinston. In
Kinston, like in many Southern towns, the old municipal cemetery is segregated;
in this case, the black burying ground is across Lincoln Street from the larger
white section. On the African American side is an elaborately carved stone
depicting the gates of heaven flung open—it’s a very distinctive design that
I’ve seen on several stones there in Lenoir County, all clearly made by the
same carver. Near the bottom, just above the grass-line, it reads, “NOW SHE
REST IN PEACE.” Grammatically, that’s the way many rural and small-town
Southerners, especially African Americans, would say that sentence aloud.
Do you have any
interest in wider Southern folklore?
Indeed! All of my
professional life, and much of my personal life, revolves around Southern
folklore. I received my MA in folklore at the University of North Carolina,
after completing a BA in American Studies with a heavy concentration in
folklore at George Washington University in Washington, DC. I work as a
freelance folklorist and oral historian, and have the good fortune to do folklife
fieldwork and writing for such organizations as the North Carolina Folklife
Institute, the University of South Carolina’s McKissick Museum, South Carolina
Arts Commission, North Carolina Arts Council, and Blue Ridge National Heritage
Area. My husband and I are traditional fiddlers and spend much of our time
listening to old-time music, and we both work for the Old-Time Herald, a
magazine about old-time Southern string band music. (My husband, who’s a native
of New England, has taken beautiful photographs of old gravestones over the
years, and oddly enough it wasn’t until after we began to live together that we
realized we had that shared interest.)
For your readers who
are interested in the funerary art of the American South, there are a lot of
great resources. A couple of particularly nice websites, with a lot of photos,
are John and Retta Waggoner’s thegravewalkers.com, and Tom Kunesh’s
Slot-and-Tab Tombs at darkfiber.com. (The latter has a good bibliography for
Tennessee and Georgia gravestone studies.) There are also a lot of good books
on the subject. Two wonderful recent titles are Dan Patterson’s The True Image: Gravestone Art and the
Culture of Scotch Irish Settlers in the Pennsylvania and Carolina Backcountry,
and Alan and Karen Jabbour’s Decoration
Day in the Mountains: Traditions of Cemetery Decoration in the Southern
Appalachians.
