This time last year, I was in New Orleans on a cemetery tour with a friend. 💜⚜️💚 Everyone thinks it’s fun to bring the medium to a cemetery. It’s not. I don’t understand why people go to cemeteries if they have no one to visit. Having picnics, riding bikes and making out in the cities of the dead never appealed to me. The spirits like attention but not like that. Not that I could feel. 💀 … Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge is a garden cemetery and the most landscaped cemetery in the country. It’s home to many east coast notable poets, writers, politicians and first settlers. Beautiful as it is - the flowers, the trees, the fountain - for a medium of African descent, it’s not exactly the most welcoming place. 👻 Attitudes of the colonial era still prevail among these dead. Most of the dead here did not see Africans as people, did not think we would survive as people and because we have, are cautious about what business we have in their resting place. Because landscaping and architecture indicate how much love and money families are willing to dedicate to a fruitful memory of their dead, and because slaves had no access to these things, we and our dead are very much disregarded. Even in death, the colonists fear our presence as a threat to the destruction of their memory. Other Anglo visitors’ energy conveyed very much the same sentiment. 🙅♀️🙅♂️ … Looking out at Boston and Cambridge from the phallic tower at the highest point of the cemetery, meant to commemorate George Washington and his (penis) conquest of the city, I see this cemetery as nothing more than an huge ‘fuck you’ to the slaves and indigenous people who built the city and so-called monuments within it. 🖕🏾 … I did visit Harriet Jacobs, though. I thanked her for her work, her presence and her honesty. I told her she is remembered and honored among those who know our history. Funny how her spirit seemed most at peace. She had called us over a few times during our visit but I didn’t know it was her until we got a map on our way out. Immediately turned back around to greet her, such a gentle ancestor and the highlight of my trip. 🙏🏾 (at Cambridge, Massachusetts)
