New Orleans Graveyard Is Overgrown With Memories

Headstones lean to and fro, some wood, some stone, many without names. A spigot drips. Green elephant’s-ear sprouts. Plastic toys, faded by the sun, adorn a child’s grave. One mound of earth is topped with lawn chairs.

This is Holt, a seven-acre municipal cemetery unique in a city known for the way it buries its dead.

“Holt is naturally New Orleans, decayed in places, decadent, yet it is royal, majestic,” said fine-art photographer Jackie Brenner, picking her way through the overgrown, rundown graveyard surrounded by a community college and hushed homes.

It is here at Holt, under a dead oak hung with Spanish moss, that voodoo rituals take place at night.

A small brick crematory, blackened with ash, is full of debris. Homeless people sleep nearby.

On New Year’s, a mother and daughter drink toasts to their loved ones. They leave two glasses of wine at the grave.

The bones of jazz great Buddy Bolden are under the grass somewhere. No one knows where for sure.

Crowded Graves

The number of people buried at Holt, in use since the 1880s, is a mystery.

It is extremely crowded. New Orleans officials say the seven-acre cemetery contains 10 acres’ worth of graves.

It was laid out at the edge of New Orleans as a burial ground for the city’s poor, unknown and unclaimed.

Today about 200 people are buried here a year. In the mid-1900s, thousands of burials took place every year.

Unlike the famous aboveground tombs of New Orleans, all graves at Holt are below ground.

Families have been given grave sites forever on condition that they maintain them. Untended sites revert to the city.

Often, when the city needs a new grave, workers break open one left untended, put whatever remains they find into bags and place these in the newly deceased’s casket. A lot of strangers share caskets at Holt, said Edwin Mazoue Jr., the city real estate administrator.

City workers rarely cut the grass, pick up trash or fight off weeds. The city’s cemetery budget is $179,000, a sum that pays for the upkeep of six cemeteries, officials say.

Tires, ironing boards, broken televisions get dumped here. Trash blows in.

Now some New Orleanians want to stop the trashing of Holt.

In the last year, three volunteer groups have adopted the cemetery with the goal of cleaning it up and restoring it.

“It’s overgrown, there’s trash all over the place, people hanging out at night,” said Louise Fergusson, executive director of Save Our Cemeteries. “Holt clearly has a need.”

“We can only do what we can with the manpower provided to us,” Mazoue said.

Families should take better care of their sites, he added. “The city gets the black eye when the families do not cut the grass.”

Wyatt Hines, a member of New Orleans Cares, said the cemetery was overgrown with crab grass, blackberry bushes and shrubs before volunteers started taming the grounds. It was so overgrown that a family complained they could not get to their grave site, Hines said.

The volunteers are in the unusual position of cleaning up a place where the boundaries separating art, junk, nature and death blur.

“How do you make a distinction between what is trash and what has sentimental value?” Mazoue said.

A Strange Order

For instance, the grave of Korean War veteran Darrell A. Alexander, who died in 1980, has an unopened beer can on it. The can has come loose from a concrete slab in front of the headstone. Could it be mistaken for trash?

Preservationists envision putting up a sign for the cemetery, fixing the fences and establishing better order in Holt’s records.

William Greiner, another fine-art photographer, who has published a book focusing on Holt, says the cemetery has many moods as it evolves under the care of descendants.

Although the place may appear unkempt, families rearrange sentimental objects on their relatives’ graves and keep a watch over their dead, Brenner said.

“These grave decorations say as much about the living as the dead by what they choose to leave,” Greiner said.

Holt is an outdoor gallery of folk art. One grave has a pair of women’s slip-on shoes. Another bears a soggy open Bible propped against a wooden cross. A winning bingo card is stuck to one wooden headstone.

“I think all we need to do is make sure Holt survives for the families that are here, and not judge it,” Brenner said.

Edward Dupclay was visiting his family site one weekend. His mother, father, brother, aunt and cousins are buried in Holt.

It had been a couple of months, and the family site was in terrible shape. The ground had sunk. The box frame around the grave had caved in. There was no marker. Weeds were running wild.

Dupclay was upset.

“I think it’s just terrible that the family has to maintain city ground,” he said. “I think this all falls on the city. It needs to care as much about the living as the dead.”

The cleanup efforts by volunteers will help, but Dupclay is doubtful they will really change the wild state of the cemetery.

“It’s probably going to be like this after I’m buried here,” Dupclay said.

He came back the next morning, hauling dirt to fill in the family grave. Finally he stuck a handmade wooden marker at the site to reclaim his family resting place for a few more months.

“If you don’t come out here regularly, you’re going to lose it,” he said.

Three weeks later, weeds were running wild over Dupclay’s family site. A wooden cross with no name on it leaned in the dirt.