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kelsey moore.
"we just don't trust our memories to stone"

cohort. 2022-2023

project. “We Just Don’t Trust Our Memories to Stone”: Remapping Flooded Black Cemeteries

location. low country plains, SC

medium. exhibit

Delano, Jack, photographer. Negro graveyard on abandoned land in the Santee-Cooper basin near Moncks Corner, South Carolina. South Carolina Berkeley County Moncks Corner United States, 1941. Mar. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017793938/.

“We don’t build monuments, but we do have memories,” the Hebrew Elders of Goshen explain to Pharaoh. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, Pharaoh holds a meeting in Goshen, the province where Hebrews lived under the “New Egypt,” to tell them about his new plan for a public works project. Tensions rise as he questions the Hebrews’ ability to be fit citizens of Egypt. He asks, “Why should I trust people without monuments and memories?” To Pharaoh, Hebrews were unremarkable, a past-less people who deserved to be controlled and exploited. Under Egyptian law and social order, Pharaoh used Hebrew men for their physical labor while criminalizing women for their reproductive labor. The Elders try to get Pharaoh to “look at it another way,” explaining their epistemologies. They continued, “Perhaps we do not need stones to remind us. It could be that some folks need stones to remind them. It could be that memorial stones are signs of bad memories. We just don’t trust memories to stones.” Pharaoh scoffs at the Elders’ sage assertion. He condemns Hebrews to more work to build the new city that would further dispossess and displace them. Exasperated and desponded, Amram, Moses’ father, gasps, “No rest, no property, no babies, no gods. Why would anybody want to live?”

For months, I meditated on the conflict between the Elders and Pharaoh after reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain. In this scene, Hurston had precisely illustrated similar dynamics that I attempted to articulate in my research.[1] The Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project, a New Deal dam-building project administered by the South Carolina Public Service Authority, took place between 1938 and 1942 in the low-country plains of South Carolina. Although one of the largest earth-moving projects of its time, what brought me to the topic was not just an interest in a modern infrastructural project but its spiritual, epistemic, and ecological consequences. The Authority’s project required the inundation and removal of over 9,000 graves, most of which belonged to enslaved Africans and their descendants. Though not as explicit as Hurston’s Pharaoh, the Authority disregarded and condemned black southern epistemologies to build a monument of New Deal progress in the South. Amram’s words took a new meaning for black residents in the project area. They would have no rest as they worked on public works projects, no property as black landowning farmers lost their land to the Authority, and no gods as their cemeteries would be submerged under two new reservoirs.

Screen Shot 2023-10-03 at 5.30.13 PM.png

Goshen Plantation Cemetery, untitled, undated, photograph, South Carolina Public Service Authority

(Photo received through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests).

But the submersion and removal of black knowledges were not complete processes. As I began my archival research, I came across a report of a cemetery marked to be flooded—Goshen Plantation Cemetery. The Authority had created the form to collect data on any given cemetery. They wanted to know its owner, number of total graves, names of buried individuals, names of deceased relatives, and perhaps, most importantly, the cemetery's condition. Investigators repeatedly marked black cemeteries in the basin as “no fence, badly neglected, overgrown grass and bush.” The description became such an expectation that a stamp was created to mark cemeteries as such easily. Taking the reports at face value, it would appear the Authority had defined what could be known about black cemeteries in the basin.

Yet, I looked closer. I saw what Hurston meant in those documents: “We just don’t trust our memories to stone.” The reports reveal the communal and kinship relations necessary to maintain a cemetery. Most black cemeteries did not have many graves with headstones. Still, relatives and neighbors remembered who was buried and where each grave was located. Burial sites were, in fact, monuments to Conjure traditions that evolved and expanded West and West Central African traditions. They were not monuments made of stone but memories held together within the land—grass, bush, swamps, and trees. Cemeteries like Goshen were not “neglected,” impediments to capitalist visions, but sites of value—a “Conjure value.”

 

To honor the Elders and their ways of knowing, I created a digital project that obliterated the perspectives of the Authority and Hurston’s Pharaoh. “We Just Don’t Trust Our Memories to Stones”: Remapping Flooded Black Cemeteries retraces the investigation and inundation of Goshen Plantation Cemetery, replots swamps, springs, and other sites, and remaps over 30 flooded black cemeteries that enslaved Africans and their descendants intimately knew before the Authority permanently transformed the landscape. In doing so, this digital project gestures toward remembering the various Conjure knowledge(s) necessary to the lives and deaths of black South Carolinians in the Santee-Cooper Basin. Still, this project is not meant to make Conjure knowledge “set in stone” but to acknowledge how black people honored the land, the living, and the dead.

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1. Hurston was an editor for the WPA’s Federal Writers Project in 1938.

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Citation: Moore, Kelsey. “'We Just Don’t Trust Our Memories to Stone': Remapping Flooded Black Cemeteries." SPIRIT HOUSE: A Crossroads Project. October 2023. Date Accessed. https://www.crossroads-spirithouse.org/moore.

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