Marilyn Yalom on the cemeteries of America—Entitled Opinions 02/28/2006

02/28/2006

Marilyn Yalom on the cemeteries of America

Dr. Marilyn Yalom grew up in Washington D.C. and was educated at Wellesley College, the Sorbonne, Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She has been married to the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom for fifty years and is the mother of four children and the grandmother of five. She has been a professor of French and comparative literature, director […]

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00:00:00.000	[ Music ]
00:00:13.000	This is KZSU Stanford.
00:00:15.000	[ Music ]
00:00:17.000	Welcome to entitled opinions.
00:00:19.000	My name is Robert Harrison.
00:00:21.000	[ Music ]
00:00:23.000	And we're coming to you live from the Stanford campus.
00:00:26.000	[ Music ]
00:00:49.000	For those of you just joining us,
00:00:51.000	we're sticking with the theme of the day on this Mardi Gras.
00:00:54.000	Mr. Bird, who hosts the great bird of Paradise Blue Show on Saturday mornings on KZSU,
00:01:01.000	has been at it since noon today.
00:01:04.000	A five-hour musical and informational Gulf Coast Marathon,
00:01:08.000	with live call-ins from the entire Gulf Coast region,
00:01:12.000	including special legendary guest DJs and all that great Gulf Coast music.
00:01:18.000	I'm here to wind it all down in the next hour,
00:01:21.000	with some quiet reflection.
00:01:24.000	I have a guest with me in the studio,
00:01:27.000	Marilyn Yallam, and we're going to talk with her today
00:01:30.000	about the cemeteries of America,
00:01:33.000	including the cemeteries of New Orleans,
00:01:36.000	and what's happened to them in the wake of Katrina.
00:01:39.000	So please, say tuned.
00:01:42.000	[ Music ]
00:02:09.500	Katrina was a revelation of many things,
00:02:12.500	most of them not very uplifting, in fact downright depressing,
00:02:16.500	especially when it comes to the social fabric
00:02:19.500	and current leaders of this nation of ours,
00:02:22.500	which it's been said, was conceived in liberty
00:02:26.500	and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
00:02:32.500	But let's take a step back from the social and political aspects of the disaster,
00:02:37.500	and look at the hurricane from a broader, call it, elemental perspective.
00:02:42.500	Katrina reminded us of something very basic,
00:02:45.500	that we are not aquatic creatures.
00:02:50.500	Is that bird I hear out there going, "What?"
00:02:54.500	Well, it's true, and every now and then we need to be reminded of it,
00:02:57.500	we are not aquatic creatures.
00:03:00.500	We are terrestrial through and through.
00:03:03.500	A foot or two of water on the ground we stand on
00:03:06.500	is enough to make life unlivable for us.
00:03:10.500	The sea is a beautiful thing as long as it doesn't overflow its basin
00:03:14.500	and start rushing through our legs.
00:03:17.500	Rain is a blessing, unless it pours for 40 days and 40 nights.
00:03:23.500	A relatively dry earth is the foundation of almost everything
00:03:27.500	that makes human life possible.
00:03:29.500	Our diets, our homes, our institutions,
00:03:32.500	our books, records, archives and memorials.
00:03:36.500	We sometimes forget that the sea is at bottom a terrifying element,
00:03:41.500	and that in an instant it can completely obliterate our life worlds.
00:03:46.500	That's why so many end of the world scenarios envision the sea rising up
00:03:51.500	and reabsorbing the earth into its primordial matrix.
00:03:56.500	Swinburn describes such an apocalyptic scenario at the end of his poem
00:04:01.500	A forsaken garden.
00:04:05.500	Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
00:04:09.500	Till the terrace and meadow, the deep gulfs drink,
00:04:13.500	Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble,
00:04:17.500	The fields that lessen the rocks that shrink.
00:04:21.500	Here now in his triumph were all things falter,
00:04:25.500	Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
00:04:29.500	As a god self-slaming on his own strange altar,
00:04:33.500	Death lies dead.
00:04:38.500	Almost all ancient mythologies had their flood stories,
00:04:41.500	As if to remind people of how precarious is the foothold we have on this earth of ours.
00:04:47.500	Nowadays it takes events like Katrina, or the tsunami,
00:04:51.500	To give us intimations of what we so easily forget,
00:04:55.500	That the surface of our planet is mostly water,
00:04:58.500	And that in the elemental scheme of things,
00:05:01.500	It's only the natural restraint of the sea that lets us do our thing on land.
00:05:08.500	The sea defies humanisation.
00:05:12.500	No one knew this better than Joseph Conrad,
00:05:15.500	Who was a sea man before he became a writer.
00:05:19.500	The amazing wonder of the deep wrote Conrad,
00:05:23.500	Is its unfathomable cruelty.
00:05:26.500	In one of his books Conrad describes the moment when a ship that had been battered and disabled by a storm,
00:05:34.500	Finally sinks into this unfathomable cruelty on a perfectly calm day on the Pacific Ocean.
00:05:42.500	Quoting Conrad,
00:05:44.500	Far away where the brig had been,
00:05:47.500	An angry white stain, undulating on the surface of steely grey waters,
00:05:53.500	Shot with gleams of green,
00:05:56.500	Diminished swiftly without a hiss,
00:05:59.500	Like a patch of pure snow melting in the sun.
00:06:04.500	The cruelty of the sea is its passion for erasure.
00:06:08.500	It leaves no traces on its surface.
00:06:11.500	There are no grave stones on the sea.
00:06:14.500	Human history and memory depend on inscription,
00:06:17.500	But the sea is uninscribable.
00:06:19.500	It closes over its victims,
00:06:22.500	And presents an appearance of eternal presence to the human eye,
00:06:26.500	Which is why we find it so beautiful.
00:06:29.500	But we should always remember that it is a terrible beauty.
00:06:33.500	As the Austrian poet Rainer Wilke put it,
00:06:36.500	Beauty is but the beginning of terror,
00:06:39.500	Which we can just barely endure.
00:06:42.500	What we admire about it so is that it calmly distains to destroy us.
00:06:47.500	Human have a natural need to preserve the trace of the sea.
00:06:51.500	Hence the anguish of those whose loved ones died at sea.
00:06:54.500	In Moby Dick,
00:06:56.500	Eeshmile speaking of the widows of the whalemen who never made it home,
00:07:00.500	Says,
00:07:02.500	"Oh ye whose dead,
00:07:03.500	Librarian beneath the green grass,
00:07:05.500	Who standing among flowers can say,
00:07:08.500	Here,
00:07:09.500	Here lies my beloved,
00:07:11.500	Ye know not the desolation that broods and hearts like these."
00:07:16.500	The same could be said for the desolation of those who lost loved ones in the Katrina flood,
00:07:20.500	Or the tsunami,
00:07:22.500	And whose bodies were never found,
00:07:23.500	Or could not be identified.
00:07:26.500	It's thanks to the earth,
00:07:28.500	The most solid and memory friendly of the four else,
00:07:31.500	The most solid and memory friendly of the four else,
00:07:35.500	And the most solid and memory friendly of the four else,
00:07:39.500	That were able to preserve connections with the past,
00:07:42.500	And mark the place of the dead.
00:07:44.500	This is a fundamental human need.
00:07:47.500	Commemoration of the dead presupposes an earth in which to lay our dead,
00:07:51.500	And on which to mark their disappearance from life.
00:07:55.500	My guest today has been deeply engaged in these questions of commemoration,
00:08:01.500	Grave marking, and cemeteries.
00:08:04.500	And she's here to share her thoughts about them with us on this very early day.
00:08:08.500	Mary's
00:08:09.000	Special Marty Grohl, Maryland, welcome to our program.
00:08:11.500	Hello, glad to be here.
00:08:13.500	Maryland Yalom is a senior scholar at Stanford's Institute for Women and Gender,
00:08:17.500	Which he directed for many years,
00:08:19.500	And she's authored several important widely read books, including Blood Sisters,
00:08:24.500	The History of the Breast, and the Chest Queen.
00:08:28.500	She's currently finishing an illustrated book in collaboration with her son,
00:08:32.500	Read Yalom, on cemeteries in America.
00:08:36.500	Which includes a fascinating chapter on the cemeteries of New Orleans,
00:08:40.500	Which we'll be asking her about a bit later in the program.
00:08:44.500	But before we discuss the American cemeteries, you write about in your new book, Maryland,
00:08:48.500	Let me ask you whether you agree with me that commemoration of the dead,
00:08:51.500	As well as the marking of the place of the dead is a fundamental human need.
00:08:56.500	Certainly seems to be a fundamental human need.
00:08:59.500	If you look at all civilizations over time,
00:09:02.500	Like religion, it seems to be inbuilt into the human psyche.
00:09:08.500	We need to remember our ancestors,
00:09:12.500	Apparently for several reasons, first of all, because we identify with them,
00:09:17.500	And we hope that others will remember us.
00:09:21.500	And also perhaps because we fear the dead, many, many civilizations,
00:09:28.500	Playcate the dead, perhaps more out of fear for dead spirits than for simple reverence.
00:09:38.500	I don't know. What do you think about that?
00:09:40.500	I think you're right that there's not a culture in the world known to me,
00:09:45.500	That was indifferent about the dead,
00:09:48.500	Or was indifferent about the ritualized disposal of the remains of the dead.
00:09:55.500	And I think you're also right to remind us that in many of these cultures,
00:10:02.500	It was fear of the potential vengeance that the dead could take on their descendants,
00:10:07.500	If they felt neglected.
00:10:10.500	So you have all these rituals around grave sites, like feeding the dead,
00:10:15.500	And funeral repass, and giving them sustenance,
00:10:20.500	And things that will actually take on a whole kind of afterlife,
00:10:25.500	And things like the two San New Orleans that we're going to talk about a little bit.
00:10:28.500	So yeah.
00:10:29.500	Living here in California, at certain times of the year,
00:10:33.500	It's obligatory for descendants say of the Chinese community,
00:10:38.500	To turn out at the graveyard,
00:10:41.500	And they have what they consider funeral packets that they buy,
00:10:46.500	In Chinatown, in San Francisco, or in Honolulu, in Hawaii,
00:10:51.500	Where you burn paper money, and you have special food for the dead,
00:10:57.500	And a whole series of rituals that puts you in touch with your ancestors.
00:11:05.500	Even if you don't literally believe that spirits return,
00:11:10.500	People do this, they continue to do this,
00:11:13.500	To preserve not only the ritual and the memory of the ancestors,
00:11:18.500	But to create a sense of solidarity among themselves, and with their children.
00:11:24.500	Isn't that extraordinary that even today people will visit the grave site of loved ones?
00:11:33.500	And we know that originally, in burial of the dead,
00:11:38.500	People believe literally that the dead continue to have some kind of subsistence under the ground,
00:11:44.500	And therefore they need nourishment, they need to be buried with their favorite objects,
00:11:48.500	Sometimes with their servants and with their kings.
00:11:51.500	And we no longer believe that the dead can carry on an active afterlife of the grave site,
00:11:57.500	And yet the grave site still has a particular charisma,
00:12:00.500	Even for us today.
00:12:03.500	Yes it does, and I loved the long, not a log that you had at the beginning of this hour,
00:12:10.500	Because it points out that people return to the grave of their loved ones,
00:12:17.500	That it means something to know where your mother, your father, your husband was buried,
00:12:24.500	And the loss of that particular site of burial can be an enormous psychic loss for any individual.
00:12:32.500	I remember the thinking at the time that the dead were carried up,
00:12:38.500	Or the remains of the dead were carried up from ground zero,
00:12:42.500	That at a certain moment the firemen would stop,
00:12:47.500	And they would take off their hats,
00:12:49.500	And they would start the ritualization process that would continue from that site,
00:12:57.500	Which now will be a hallowed site, because we know that people died there.
00:13:05.500	Well, I don't know what the particular charisma is about the burial site,
00:13:13.500	Or even the dead body, because you also talk about the corpse in your book,
00:13:18.500	And the way that one cannot be indifferent to this object,
00:13:22.500	Because the corpse is such a strange thing that on the one hand,
00:13:27.500	It seems to contain the person who has died,
00:13:31.500	It's the perfect image of the person who has passed away,
00:13:34.500	And yet that person is not there, it's absent from the corpse,
00:13:38.500	And therefore perhaps it's the uncanniness of the corpse that requires us to find all these
00:13:46.500	ceremonial ways to accompany that transition from life into some kind of afterlife,
00:13:55.500	However, one may conceive that.
00:13:58.500	Well, the ways we've conceptualized burial and a possible afterlife have certainly changed over 400 years of American history.
00:14:09.500	If you think about the beginnings in Boston, among the Puritans,
00:14:15.500	Their graveyards were very grim somber places,
00:14:20.500	Where a person was buried without great ceremony, under a grace lab that had nothing more than his or her initials,
00:14:29.500	Or name and dates of life and death.
00:14:33.500	The assumption was that only a select few would make their way into heaven,
00:14:40.500	And the rest would be consigned to hell.
00:14:43.500	But one thing was sure, the body would decompose,
00:14:46.500	And there was great emphasis upon this deterioration and decomposition of the body.
00:14:55.500	So knowing that, and that had been impressed upon Puritan children from the time of the earliest of ages,
00:15:02.500	of age, they would be preparing for death all of their lives.
00:15:08.500	And this of course created a great deal of anxiety.
00:15:12.500	I have not read your entire book.
00:15:15.500	It's just the chapters that you gave me.
00:15:17.500	I know the basic outline.
00:15:19.500	You do start with the cemeteries of Puritan cemeteries in the northeast,
00:15:22.500	Then you travel south, down along the coast, and you go to the midwest,
00:15:27.500	And then finally to California and Hawaii.
00:15:30.500	We're not going to be able to cover that entire itinerary,
00:15:33.500	But the Puritan cemeteries are particularly fascinating.
00:15:36.500	When I was reading how it was really against Catholicism and the kind of pomp and flourishes
00:15:44.500	That Catholic burials were typically accompanied by that caused the Puritans to really puritanize the funeral ceremony.
00:15:54.500	And also they wouldn't put crosses on their gravestones.
00:15:59.500	That was considered a popish relic.
00:16:02.500	But instead they had what these death skulls and stuff.
00:16:06.500	They had what are called death's heads.
00:16:09.500	And they're essentially skulls, very often ghoulish, leering skulls,
00:16:16.500	And sometimes crossbones.
00:16:18.500	And that is practically the only image you find on 17th and many 18th century tombstones.
00:16:26.500	Oddly enough, over time those macabre skulls, death's heads,
00:16:34.500	Are transformed into something that looks more like a cherub,
00:16:39.500	Which is a symbol of the souls after life.
00:16:43.500	So we just in studying gravestones and the images on them.
00:16:49.500	You can see the transformation of theology over two and three hundred years.
00:16:58.500	Yeah, and it goes from a very austere or puritan conviction that only a very few of us are making the heaven.
00:17:06.500	And the rest are do what a weird way to go on living your life.
00:17:10.500	But these cemeteries, where are they exactly Maryland in the Puritan cemeteries?
00:17:16.500	Well they're all through New England.
00:17:18.500	It's of course very easy to find them in Boston.
00:17:21.500	They're marked out on the famous freedom trail.
00:17:24.500	They're two of them in central Boston on Triman Street.
00:17:29.500	They're just a few blocks from one another.
00:17:31.500	One, the one that's called King's Chapel, was founded in 1630 with the group of Puritans who came over from England under Governor Winthrop.
00:17:44.500	John Winthrop and he's buried there.
00:17:47.500	He's buried there.
00:17:48.500	Right, and then down the street is the granary.
00:17:51.500	That was established 30 years later because all of the space had been allocated and used up in King's Chapel.
00:18:00.500	And the granary, which was on the site of an old granary, an old barn,
00:18:04.500	and has about two thousand gravestones in it.
00:18:08.500	And there are three or four other cemeteries all within a mile or two of downtown Boston.
00:18:14.500	It's very strange to be there and to have the cars whizzing by and then to step inside one of these gray, grim picturesque church yards.
00:18:25.500	Well they weren't church yards.
00:18:27.500	I should, graveyard.
00:18:28.500	I have to make it very clear.
00:18:30.500	They were not church yards because the Puritans did not bury their dead next to churches.
00:18:37.500	Again, church was a symbol of Catholicism and/or the Anglican church.
00:18:44.500	Right.
00:18:45.500	Well, is there a particular aura still in these cemeteries?
00:18:49.500	Do you have a sense that you're in a place that was where the ghosts of the Puritans are hovering there?
00:18:59.500	You certainly feel in immense difference stepping off the sidewalk into the cemetery.
00:19:06.500	Now something has changed in the course of the first 200 years of cemeteries.
00:19:12.500	Originally, the graves were placed randomly in the cemeteries.
00:19:17.500	They weren't called cemeteries and they were called graveyards or burial ground.
00:19:24.500	Then in the 19th century, with a new aesthetic, the graves were lined up in orderly rows,
00:19:34.500	which meant of course that sometimes the tombstones didn't correspond to the remains underneath them.
00:19:40.500	But never matter.
00:19:42.500	It was more in keeping with the 19th century aesthetic.
00:19:47.500	One of the places that you can see, the original arrangement is if you go across the Charles River
00:19:53.500	over to a cemetery in Charles Town.
00:19:57.500	The Charles Town cemetery that has a different name now the Phipp Street Cemetery.
00:20:02.500	And there you find a hill, small hill, and all of the grave stones are arranged in clusters rather than in straight rows.
00:20:11.500	And at the top of that hill, there is the grave of John Harvard, the man who was a minister in the early 17th century,
00:20:22.500	who gave half of his money in his will to the newly found college in Cambridge, which was then named in his honor, Harvard.
00:20:37.500	Well, we want to get to the New Orleans cemeteries, but before we leave this chapter in American history and cemeteries surrounding the whole Puritan colonies there,
00:20:54.500	I was very struck in your chapter about the practice of glove giving.
00:21:03.500	Do you want to, can you tell our listeners what this was all about and how it kind of got out of hand at a certain point?
00:21:10.500	Yes, initially I had said that people were to be buried without great ceremony, but that changed over the course of time.
00:21:21.500	And it became a common practice to send a pair of gloves to the person or persons you wanted to come to the funeral.
00:21:33.500	And initially there were you'd send a pair of gloves to immediate members of your family and maybe to the minister.
00:21:42.500	It was a kind of a summons, like a court summons, you have to come to the cemetery and the gloves will bring you there.
00:21:50.500	I haven't been able to find out exactly why gloves were sent rather than some other item, maybe because it was so cold in the cemeteries.
00:22:01.500	In time cemeteries got more and more extravagant and it wasn't uncommon to send out 500 pairs of gloves, which was an enormous cost.
00:22:13.500	And you said in some cases they were spending half of the inheritance of the...
00:22:18.500	Not half, but a good quarter of the inheritance could be spent on gloves, on other ramento, such as rings with deaf heads on them.
00:22:30.500	And of course the funeral banquet, that got to be a very big thing.
00:22:36.500	In New York, among the Dutch, they were as extravagant, maybe even more so than the New Englanders.
00:22:46.500	And they had cake, a special kind of cake, which they made, and which there was to be sent home, like a wedding cake.
00:22:54.500	And also they would give away spoons, silver spoons.
00:23:00.500	Now you know how expensive spoons are.
00:23:05.500	Well Marilyn, we're going to move now to a very different region of the country and also a very different culture.
00:23:11.500	Far more Catholic and extravagant in its memorials and commemorations of the dead.
00:23:19.500	And namely we're going to... on this Mardi Gras move into New Orleans.
00:23:25.500	And I have someone that I'm having called in, a friend of mine from New York, who actually grew up in New Orleans.
00:23:35.500	What I thought we'd do is get her on the line. She's there on hold now and get some on the ground sort of reflections and impressions from a native New Orleans.
00:23:46.500	And then we can talk about what you found out about the cemeteries of New Orleans.
00:23:51.500	Let's see if I can make this work.
00:23:56.500	So I think we have Frances Alston on the line. Frances, are you there?
00:24:00.500	I'm there. Hello.
00:24:01.500	Hi. Frances Alston is a good family friend of mine and she's living in New York now, but she comes from New Orleans.
00:24:10.500	And we thought we'd have you on the show. Frances, tell us a little bit from the ground what your experience was.
00:24:18.500	When you were growing up in New Orleans surrounding the cemeteries and the kind of things that would actually go on in New Orleans.
00:24:30.500	Especially we're interested in the question of burial and of course we know that most of the graves in New Orleans have to be built above ground.
00:24:41.500	That's right.
00:24:42.500	The ground water and is that the case for all the cemeteries or is there a difference between what we might call the higher end cemeteries and then the lower end ones like Holt for example?
00:24:54.500	Where they don't have the tombs above ground like they do in the cemeteries where the wealthier people are buried.
00:25:01.500	The interesting thing about the cemeteries for the wealthy of families is that these tombs began being built right after the Civil War was when they decided that they must bury people.
00:25:11.500	And they became extremely elaborate.
00:25:15.500	And one of the things that's rather sad and very characteristic of New Orleans is that the tombs are sinking because the ground is so wet and is essentially mud.
00:25:27.500	Every year the tombs sink a little.
00:25:31.500	And the front of the tomb is a large tablet on which the names of all the people as they are buried are added inscribed into this large marble tablet.
00:25:40.500	It's sort of a door to the tomb.
00:25:43.500	And so as the tomb sinks we lose the names of the older members of the family who died years and years ago.
00:25:51.500	You were telling me before we came on there that Mark Twain has very interesting statement about how most of the architectural genius in New Orleans went into its cemeteries.
00:26:04.500	Yes, Mark Twain said you always has no real architecture except what's found in the cemeteries.
00:26:12.500	And if those tombs are sinking that's going to be, it kind of reminds me of Venice which is through subsidence every year is sinking more and more in and it might just be the natural sublime sort of disappearance of Venice as well as these.
00:26:30.500	Well in my lifetime charity hospital in New Orleans which was the biggest hospital in the city and the one that of course was spring to poor people.
00:26:39.500	Some one whole story so that what had originally been the first story became the basement.
00:26:44.500	So that's how muddy and porous the land is.
00:26:48.500	Now the poor people of course can't afford many of them can't afford to build these elaborate tombs.
00:26:54.500	Two of which resemble Egyptian temples or any Dalam homes. I mean they're very elaborate.
00:27:00.500	But what they've done to deal with the issue of not being able to dig, if you did eight to twelve inches in New Orleans you hear the water rushing under the ground.
00:27:12.500	But you reach it at maybe eighteen inches but you can hear it already.
00:27:17.500	This is a burying coffin had to be given up a long time ago.
00:27:23.500	But what the poor people do is they buy burial insurance.
00:27:27.500	Every family has burial insurance.
00:27:29.500	It's one of the, they pay it before they pay their rent.
00:27:32.500	And the burial insurance adds up to having a funeral of their taste and preference which usually includes having the marching band which accompanies the coffin to the cemetery.
00:27:45.500	And as it proceeds from the church to the cemetery the music is very sad and dourge like music.
00:27:54.500	But of course once the coffin is in the ground the spirit has gone to heaven and the music becomes happy and joyful and the band leads the dancing back to town.
00:28:05.500	New Orleans has a real love affair with death and cemetery's definite because the other great institution is of course all the people who are in the community.
00:28:14.500	Of course all saints stay the toussères.
00:28:17.500	Which is a big holiday. All the banks are closed post office doesn't deliver businesses or close.
00:28:23.500	Absolutely nothing happens on Tuesday.
00:28:25.500	Yeah it's as big as Christmas almost.
00:28:27.500	It is.
00:28:28.500	Except that everyone and it's interesting by the way that the day before toussères is Halloween.
00:28:34.500	And Halloween is not a big holiday in New Orleans.
00:28:36.500	First of all because it's totally eclipsed by toussères the day that follows.
00:28:40.500	And second of all because people dress up on Mardi Gras so they don't express that on Halloween.
00:28:46.500	Exactly.
00:28:47.500	Anyway on toussères I remember as a child it was something we looked forward to with great anticipation because the entire family goes out to the cemetery for the day.
00:28:56.500	And presumably ostensibly to clean all the tombs and garden around the tomb and plant things and make sure the grass is clipped properly.
00:29:05.500	But actually all that preparation is done prior to toussères.
00:29:10.500	Because toussères really is social day.
00:29:12.500	Everyone brings armfuls of flowers.
00:29:15.500	Usually yellow pretentums but all kinds of flowers.
00:29:18.500	And they bring food and drink.
00:29:20.500	Now they say at Sandery Cemetery that everybody brings gumbo.
00:29:25.500	But when I was a child we went to Metery Cemetery and we brought sandwiches and cookies and lots of Sherry wine.
00:29:34.500	And everyone sat around all day the children were sent to fill all the vases with water from the faucet which was quite a runaway.
00:29:41.500	And then the children were put digging out the front of the tablet to see if there were any lost names on the tablet.
00:29:47.500	While the adults sat around and told stories about their beloved family members who were buried there and socialised and ate and drank and had an absolutely wonderful day.
00:29:59.500	These tombstones might be sinking and New Orleans has taken a big hit with Katrina but that's a healthy relationship to the dead.
00:30:09.500	Absolutely.
00:30:10.500	And that continues even among the few families that are back in New Orleans.
00:30:14.500	I was told that last November 1st everyone was to be found in the cemetery.
00:30:20.500	My feeling is that if there's one thing that's going to bring people back to New Orleans, the remnants of their ancestors are buried there and there's such a deep attachment to those places or cemeteries that for no other reason that will bring a lot of people back there.
00:30:42.500	Absolutely. Place is everything in the South and in fact southern riders are always accused of giving more emphasis and interest to place them to their characters.
00:30:53.500	Place is certainly primary.
00:30:56.500	I remember one story that might amuse you.
00:31:00.500	When I was a child we hated long car rides. Most children hate to be thrown in the car and driven for hours and hours.
00:31:06.500	And we were always told don't fuss anymore. We're almost home. You soon see the coffin in the tree.
00:31:14.500	And in the little town next to the town we lived in was a town called Baldwin and it was famous for one thing. There was a coffin in the tree.
00:31:22.500	And live oak trees in southern Louisiana are huge trees and their branches reached down there.
00:31:27.500	They always say their elbows touch the ground because the branches come down low. They often do touch the ground.
00:31:34.500	But in one of these trees there was a coffin that had been lodged there during one of the floods and hadn't been properly buried and hadn't remained underground.
00:31:45.500	And it just stayed there. No one claimed it. No one else wanted to bother it. It was like someone else's family. You didn't touch them.
00:31:53.500	Amazing.
00:31:54.500	And it remained there because nobody felt they felt it would be offensive to touch someone else's family.
00:31:59.500	And there it was. So that was the high point. We're almost home but soon we'll see the coffin in the tree.
00:32:05.500	Beautiful. Well, Francie, thanks very much for joining us.
00:32:09.500	We've been with these insights from the ground. It really brings it alive in a very vivid way for us. Thanks again and we'll talk to you again in a future occasion.
00:32:21.500	Wonderful. Thank you. Thanks. Bye-bye.
00:32:25.500	So we're back on air with Marilyn Yalom. We're talking about cemeteries in America.
00:32:31.500	That was an intro into our new region. We were talking about New Orleans.
00:32:37.500	So some of the things that Frances Olson was saying conformed to what you discovered about the cemeteries in New Orleans.
00:32:47.500	Absolutely. And I was so moved to hear her account of her childhood and her memories of La Toussaint.
00:32:56.500	And of course this unique phenomenon of the earth.
00:33:02.500	Not accepting, in a sense, the bodies and pushing them upwards.
00:33:08.500	There's a terrific book by John Gregory Brown called Decorations in a Ruin Cemetery.
00:33:15.500	And the young girl is talking about her grandfather who had made grave markers.
00:33:22.500	And she was told by her father that he couldn't just bury a body in the earth.
00:33:27.500	Yet, to set it in marble or granite, otherwise the water would gradually force the body to float back up to the surface.
00:33:35.500	The bones would emerge from the mud like dinosaur fossils.
00:33:40.500	And she notes the difference, this young girl, between what she calls, I'll use the offensive terms, the nigger cemeteries.
00:33:52.500	She says there weren't any giant tombs or great marble squares. They're only headstones made out of cement.
00:33:59.500	And she asks, did they simply pull the bones out once they'd risen to the surface?
00:34:06.500	And to this day, if you visit New Orleans, you'll see that there are the wealthier cemeteries with these above-ground tombs and the poorer cemeteries, the black cemeteries,
00:34:20.500	where people are stuck into the earth and every so often with a flood, the bodies do rise up.
00:34:29.500	And the markers get washed away. There was considerable damage after Katrina in the poorer cemeteries, where people were buried directly in the earth.
00:34:42.500	But I tell you, they're quite extraordinary because since people can't afford the granite and marble headstones, they improvise.
00:34:54.500	And they come up with just amazing handmade decorations, wooden cross, with hand-written messages.
00:35:05.500	And sometimes they'll use a yellow street sign, which is painted over, or a rectangle made out of pipes.
00:35:15.500	And you find all matter of things in these poorer cemeteries.
00:35:20.500	So what are some of the main cemeteries in New Orleans? The poorer ones, for example, I believe Holt is one of them, no?
00:35:28.500	Holt is one of the poorer ones, and it's not built above-ground.
00:35:32.500	And I saw some pictures that you showed me from that are going to be reproduced in your book.
00:35:36.500	And what Francis Alton was saying about the sinking, you could see some of these headstones actually half-buried already in the ground.
00:35:45.500	And that's prior to Katrina, I imagine.
00:35:47.500	These were, I suppose, Katrina, the photos in the book.
00:35:52.500	They do show the devastation.
00:35:54.500	But the interesting thing was that the dead in a way fared better than the living.
00:36:01.500	Because many of the tombs were above-ground vaults.
00:36:08.500	And also because the early masons and builders learned that if you buried people directly in the ground,
00:36:16.500	or at ground level, you're going to have problems.
00:36:19.500	They chose hills and elevations if they could.
00:36:24.500	That's true of the metary cemetery that she mentions in the Garden District.
00:36:29.500	And there, the losses consisted mainly of downed trees.
00:36:33.500	And in the other even earlier cemetery, St. Louis I and St. Louis II, most of the devastation was in the plaster.
00:36:41.500	That fell off the tombs and underneath there were bricks.
00:36:46.500	And the bricks held up pretty well.
00:36:49.500	Do you want me to tell the audience exactly how people are buried in these above-ground vaults?
00:36:55.500	Yes, I am. It's interesting.
00:36:57.500	Please do. It's a two-story vault, so to speak.
00:37:00.500	And the body is placed in a coffin in the upper level.
00:37:05.500	And after a year and a day, one can legally open that upper vault, presumably the coffin,
00:37:14.500	and the body will have disintegrated.
00:37:17.500	And at that point, they're brushed through a grate into the lower level.
00:37:21.500	And this provides space for another body, if one has another body, to be entered at this time.
00:37:29.500	So you have a very different ethos in New Orleans.
00:37:34.500	And that is that people are going to quite literally be buried with their kin.
00:37:39.500	Their bones will intermingle with their blood relatives.
00:37:43.500	In a very literal way.
00:37:45.500	And they actually, I think I was reading in your chapter that they look for, in a sense they look forward to death as a reunification.
00:37:55.500	They certainly think about the family tomb the same way some of us think about our family home during childhood.
00:38:02.500	You know you're going to be reunited with your kin.
00:38:05.500	So that's something comforting in that.
00:38:08.500	The question I have is, is there something special about New Orleans that goes beyond the strong Catholic element in the occasion population,
00:38:20.500	maybe the tomb says, is a typically very Catholic celebration.
00:38:26.500	You have it big time in Mexico, for example.
00:38:29.500	But what Francis was saying about the poor black people who will buy all this insurance for the funeral,
00:38:38.500	that there's something that goes beyond just the denomination.
00:38:41.500	It seems like that city has a celebration of the dead, the tomb, and so forth.
00:38:48.500	That is quite unique in the American landscape would you say?
00:38:52.500	It is unique.
00:38:53.500	It is different from the day of the dead in San Antonio, Texas, where people do congregate in graveyards with flowers and absolutely amazing decorations and night time visuals.
00:39:12.500	And that too is a celebration.
00:39:15.500	It is very, very different. It has a very different feel from the Toussaint in New Orleans.
00:39:21.500	Part of it may have to do with the fact that the communities are so varied in New Orleans.
00:39:30.500	You have, of course, a black population and you had a French population.
00:39:36.500	You had a Spanish population.
00:39:38.500	You had an Anglo and a German population.
00:39:44.500	And somehow they have managed to coexist and to fertilize each other.
00:39:50.500	Let's not forget the voodoo inheritance that they have in New Orleans.
00:39:56.500	You can say a word about that.
00:39:58.500	Yeah, voodoo was brought to New Orleans from Haiti and originally from Africa.
00:40:05.500	And all through the 19th century, you and into the 20th century, voodoo was practiced openly.
00:40:13.500	Marry Lavo, who is buried in St. Louis, won the oldest extant cemetery, heard tomb, receives visitors from all over the world.
00:40:25.500	Now who was this Marry Lavo? She was New Orleans's most eminent 19th century voodoo queen.
00:40:36.500	And she dispensed charms and potions called Gregory and she gave advice on love and she told portions.
00:40:44.500	And she called forth the spirits of the dead.
00:40:47.500	And if you think about who this woman was, she was a free person of color.
00:40:52.500	And she was the illegitimate daughter of a rich, creole plantation owner.
00:40:58.500	So, where did she learn a word? She learned voodoo.
00:41:01.500	Well, it had already been imported into New Orleans and obviously she had a teacher.
00:41:07.500	But I think what is interesting is that here is this woman who would have been shunned in the Anglo world, both because of her color.
00:41:18.500	And also because of being the daughter, the illegitimate daughter of a plantation owner.
00:41:25.500	But no, she was accepted.
00:41:27.500	And I think that New Orleans has always been more accepting to people of mixed blood than most Anglo American communities.
00:41:35.500	So you have vitalization coming from all sorts of places.
00:41:40.500	And two months after Katrina, there were offerings left at Marie Lavo's tomb.
00:41:47.500	They were Mardi Gras beads and they were eggplant, so shrunken that they resembled hearts and candles.
00:41:54.500	Did she have a fancy tomb?
00:41:56.500	Yes, she has quite a nice tomb.
00:41:58.500	People go there on the voodoo tour of New Orleans, which has resumed.
00:42:04.500	And there's even an active voodoo temple still operating into New Orleans.
00:42:10.500	I don't know at this moment, but I wouldn't be surprised.
00:42:13.500	What a great pagan city.
00:42:15.500	And really, but even in the 19th century, 18th century, it had a reputation even in Europe among the French as being a kind of den of sinners and pagans and so forth, isn't it?
00:42:33.500	Well, a lively place.
00:42:35.500	A lively place.
00:42:36.500	Well, let's call it that.
00:42:37.500	Yeah, more than lively though, but it was, I think, had a very solid reputation there as we're being a lively place.
00:42:47.500	Are there any other cemeteries in New Orleans that we should take note of?
00:42:52.500	Well, there's St. Louis 1 and St. Louis 2.
00:42:55.500	And these are classical cemeteries in the Mediterranean mode.
00:43:00.500	They look like little pedimented houses.
00:43:03.500	There aren't many trees or shrubs.
00:43:08.500	And those two were Catholic.
00:43:11.500	Then there's Lafayette, which was founded in 1833 as a municipal cemetery.
00:43:19.500	So there you have Protestants as well as Catholics and more and more Anglos and Germans as well, who began to
00:43:28.500	fly with the Catholic Creoles for domination of the city.
00:43:33.500	It was originally a plantation and it, this Lafayette cemetery has many bushes and trees and shrubs, and that was the major damage incurred by Katrina.
00:43:48.500	And then of course there is a metary cemetery, which is considered the Gondam of all New Orleans cemeteries.
00:43:56.500	It's over, it's spread out over 150 acres.
00:44:00.500	It was established in 1872 on the model of the garden cemeteries that had been established in New England, for example, Mount Auburn Cemetery and Laurel Cemetery in Philadelphia.
00:44:16.500	That was the big move, of course, from the Puritan Grey, Sombre cemeteries to the garden cemetery movement of the 19th century.
00:44:25.500	This is one of those gorgeous garden cemeteries.
00:44:30.500	It was founded, laid out on an old racetrack.
00:44:37.500	And for a while, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Concept Federacy, was buried there.
00:44:43.500	But he was considered to valuable an icon to remain in New Orleans.
00:44:47.500	So they moved him to Richmond, which had been the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War.
00:44:54.500	It's still a very met, metervy is still considered the best place to be buried.
00:45:02.500	Do you agree with what I mentioned at the end of my conversation with Francis Alston that, as long as he cemeteries are intact, and the dead have endured Katrina, that that's going to be a strong pull on people who might have left and that to come back?
00:45:20.500	I think that's very, very astute observation.
00:45:26.500	In that, people from New Orleans are very connected to place and very connected to their ancestors.
00:45:34.500	This is a major reason for them to return.
00:45:38.500	We hope it'll be a major reason for some of the musicians to return because the jazz funeral is such a unique phenomenon.
00:45:48.500	And so representative of the New Orleans spirit, of course, musicians have to go where the work is.
00:45:56.500	And there hasn't been a lot of work in New Orleans up till recently, and there haven't been a lot of homes for the musicians to go back to.
00:46:05.500	So hopefully they will have extra reason in terms of newly built homes and more work to return to the place where their ancestors are buried and where they can continue to play when the Saints go marching in and other traditional favorites.
00:46:25.500	Great. When you organize your book chronologically, it's actually corresponds to geography so that you start in the Northeast and South and then the Midwest and then the West.
00:46:38.500	This also follows a pattern of immigration in the United States.
00:46:42.500	Since we don't have that much time left, we are here in California.
00:46:47.500	The Stanford campus, when can we take that big jump now maybe to California, is it a completely different scene when we get to the West?
00:46:56.500	It is a very different scene.
00:46:58.500	With two important strands, one begins with the missionaries, the Spanish missionaries coming up from the South, from Texas into California and establishing the whole string of missions in the 18th century.
00:47:15.500	And they introduce European style cemeteries to Native Americans.
00:47:22.500	Now Native Americans had different burial patterns. They buried them, say in the Mississippi region, they buried them in mountains.
00:47:30.500	Out on the plains, they may have exposed their dead or buried them wherever they happen to be.
00:47:37.500	Along come the Spanish missionaries and they attach church yards to their churches and to the whole mission complex and their aim, their sensible aim, is to Christianize the Native Americans.
00:47:51.500	So in addition to the food and the lodging which they provided in the missions, they provided introduction into Christianity, Catholicism and burial.
00:48:03.500	So when Native Americans died, if they had become Christian, they were buried in the church yard next to the mission church.
00:48:11.500	They were wrapped in shrouds, not placed in coffins, and their graves were not marked.
00:48:19.500	And after a certain amount of time, the bones would be removed and put into charnal houses.
00:48:24.500	We have some interesting descriptions of, say, the Santa Barbara mission that described the charnal houses of the 19th century.
00:48:34.500	Well, there's that strand and there's also the gold rush and the stream, about to speak, of Americans and Europeans who poured into California in 1849.
00:48:52.500	And of course, in addition to striking it rich, very few of them did that, many of them, all of them eventually died.
00:49:02.500	Many of them died sooner than they had hoped from epidemics and all of the other attendant ills of emerging fledgling communities.
00:49:14.500	But the graveyards of the gold country are really very moving, lonely, picturesque places to visit.
00:49:23.500	Very often, there's just the graveyard there. The town never grew up. Or even if the town grew, maybe it grew to a thousand inhabitants.
00:49:32.500	How far away would one have to go from here?
00:49:35.500	Three hours or so. Into the gold country and just look on the map and find highway 49.
00:49:45.500	And take it from town to town and it will be a very moving experience. Really throws you back to the 19th century.
00:49:55.500	I'm wondering in the time we remaze if we want to get a little bit more reflective on this, while the phenomenon of cemeteries and, you know, we're looking forward to your book, it's going to be a really valuable documentation.
00:50:10.500	But the question arises in our own times where so few people in our midst actually think about where they're going to be buried or if they're going to be buried.
00:50:23.500	It used to be one of the most common certainties among the vast majority of people was where they were going to be buried. And now it's probably an equal proportion, the uncertainty.
00:50:36.500	And of course, there's a question of whether people still believe in burial as such and therefore cemeteries with cremation and there seems to be an increasing desire to leave no traces behind to have one's remains just dispersed, become part of the environment, not occupy space, the way a cemetery is occupy space.
00:51:01.500	Do you think cemeteries are, as you were saying, French, on what did these patties feel?
00:51:08.500	Yes, no. One of the reasons that I'm writing this book is that we are, we have a history of 400 years of cemeteries behind us and they represent a kind of stone archive that is on time to despair at.
00:51:28.500	So there is a cemetery preservation movement at work now, preserving stones, graveyards, doing the archaeological work, doing the restorative work that's necessary even.
00:51:43.500	People going into cemeteries who are with their little cell phones or computers and writing down the name and dates of every single marker in a tombstone. Just hit the internet and you'll find this. On the other hand, a third of Americans are now choosing cremation.
00:52:01.500	And that means that they will scatter their ashes.
00:52:05.500	Does that mean that I should know this, but cremation doesn't necessarily mean that you're not going to have a marker.
00:52:13.500	That's true. You can put your ashes in an urn and most cemeteries now have niches for urns.
00:52:21.500	It's interesting how the religions are changing to accommodate that. There was a time when Catholics and Orthodox Jews would not allow for cremation. Now they do.
00:52:32.500	Very recent, I think, among Catholics. Yes, and I do think that that is more the wave of the future that people will have their ashes in urns or scattered.
00:52:45.500	I know of one little girl whose baby brother died and she has her brother's ashes in her room with her and she finds that comforting.
00:52:59.500	Well, we are at Stanford and we're talking about cemeteries and burial of the dead and one can easily think that these are the side issue.
00:53:12.500	But so many of our institutions are founded upon the dead, the authority of the dead, and oftentimes even the very tombs of the dead.
00:53:23.500	I think Stanford as a private university bears this out when you think that Stanford was founded really in the name of a boy who died prematurely.
00:53:36.500	And he was the founding place for the institution.
00:54:02.500	And as Jane Stanford said, she's lost a son but she has now become the mother of a university.
00:54:10.500	And I personally think that a place like Stanford is still, whether we're aware of a consciously, we're certainly not aware of a consciously. It's still haunted by the early death of this boy and the need to redeem that early death.
00:54:26.500	And the Alice Rainer once spoke in a very fascinating way about this work of grieving that gets displaced into academic achievement.
00:54:36.500	Almost as if all of us who are inducted into this institution, whether as faculty members or graduate students or undergraduates, that we are all on a mission through our success to redeem that early death.
00:54:54.500	And so we have that that mausoleum right here on campus, very 19th century in aspect. I think originally it was where the angel of death statue is. It was now then moved nearby to the mausoleum.
00:55:09.500	But few people actually go and visit that place or even know where it is and yet nevertheless, you know, the dead are with us.
00:55:21.500	So, Marilyn, would you like to tell us when we can expect your book to be available to the public?
00:55:30.500	Well, I'm afraid it's going to be 2008 if I'm lucky.
00:55:36.500	That much, huh? Yes. I still have another year plus of work and then it takes another year before the book will be out.
00:55:46.500	Houghton Mifflin is my editor and we're very enthusiastic about this book and putting it together. My son and I, I just hope that the text is as good as his photos.
00:56:01.500	Well, I've seen both and I can, you know, I can vouch for the text and those photos that I've seen, but is it because of all the painstaking traveling and documentation and photographing of the cemeteries that
00:56:15.500	It will take that long. Yes. I mean, it's not that long or in 2000, I keep thinking we're not there.
00:56:20.500	Well, you know, there is an estimated 250,000 cemeteries scattered across the United States and of course we can only do a handful.
00:56:29.500	And those that we've chosen show how immigrants come to this country with various rituals, holding on to them and yet adapting to the country and to the white American mainstream.
00:56:43.500	And also said there's a cemetery history that has to be traced over 400 years.
00:56:51.500	One last question, Marilyn. Are there any cemeteries in our immediate area that you would recommend people to go and visit that are interesting historically speaking?
00:57:01.500	I would take a look at the small cemetery attached to Mission Dolores, which is the only cemetery still in San Francisco.
00:57:10.500	And then I'd go out to Colma and you'll see cemetery city, one cemetery after another. And that was because at a certain point all of the cemeteries in San Francisco were moved outside the city
00:57:23.500	and they're all in Colma. So one has one's choice.
00:57:29.500	Well, thank you very much for joining us. This has been an addition of entitled opinions with Marilyn Yalom. I'm Robert Harrison and I'd like to encourage you to go to our web page.
00:57:39.500	Click on the Stanford Department of French and Italians homepage and click there on the title of the opinions and leave your comments. Thanks, David Lummis. Stay tuned for DECA at the Cafe Bohemian coming up just in a few minutes and we'll be with you again next week. Thanks again, Marilyn.
00:57:59.500	Thanks.
00:58:04.500	Wow, I'm sick of doubt. Living light of certain self-cruel bindings.
00:58:12.500	The servants of the power, dogmen and their mean women, pulling poor blankets over our sailors.
00:58:22.500	I'm sick of dour faces staring at me from the TV tower.
00:58:33.500	I want roses in my garden, power, dick, royal babies, rubies, and must now replace the border of strangers in the light.
00:58:44.500	These mutants, blood and yellow, plant is flat.
00:58:50.500	They are waiting to take us under the severed garden.
00:59:15.500	If you know how pale and rotten, your profile comes death in a strange hour.
00:59:20.500	I don't know if it's done by a poor man.
00:59:23.500	Just scaring over-friendly guests you brought to bed.
00:59:27.500	Death makes angels of the soul and gives us wings for we had shoulders smooth as ravens' claws.
00:59:39.500	No more money, no more sense to dress, but other kingdoms seems by father of the guests to throw other jaw reveals incest and least the beauty of the spiritual law.
00:59:52.500	Our will not go, but first, feast of friends to the giant family.
00:59:59.500	[Music]
01:00:09.500	[ Emotional Music ]