10/10/2017 What Do We Do with Our Dead?

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Books October 16, 2017 Issue

What Do We Do with Our Dead?

Our mortuary conventions reveal a lot about our relation to the past.

By Jill Lepore

P. T. Barnums first exhibit was a blind, crooked, and shrivelled old woman, a
hundred and sixty-one years old, and his second was her dissection, conducted in
an amphitheatre on Broadway in front of more than a thousand New Yorkers, who paid
fifty cents each to see her get cut up. Her name was Joice Heth, and the story shed
told, long before she met Barnum, was that she was born in Madagascar in 1674,
kidnapped into slavery in 1689, and transported to Virginia, where she became the
property of George Washingtons father. She said shed been in the room when George
Washington was bornlittle Georgy, she called himand that shed been the first
to swaddle him. In fact, she said, I raised him.

Was she alive or was she dead? She looked like a mummy. She is a mere skeleton
covered with skin, one observer remarked. She weighed forty-six pounds. She was
paralyzed; she had no teeth; her eyes had sunk into her skull; her skin was like India
rubber. She was a relic of the United States most famous relic, as unloved as he was
loved. Sometimes she said shed fed George Washington at her breast, though she
would have been fifty-eight when he was born, in 1732. In honor of the hundredth
anniversary of that event, in 1832, Northerners had tried to get Washingtons bones
moved from Mount Vernon to a tomb beneath the U.S. Capitol, arguing that his
sacred remains were a treasure beyond all price that belonged not to the South but
to the nation. That hadnt worked out; Washingtons bones stayed put. But, spying an
opportunity, Joice Heths owner, a man from Kentucky, had taken her on the road,
along with a stack of documents to prove her age, including an ancient bill of sale,
treasure beyond price, all of which he sold, in June, 1835, for a thousand dollars, to P. T.
Barnum, who, when he met Heth, was twenty-five, running a grocery store in
Manhattan, and bored.

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Barnum later claimedand still later deniedthat he starved Heth and pulled out all
her teeth to make her look older. He billed her as The Greatest Natural and National
Curiosity in the World. She was the sensation of the agean age obsessed with
fakery, ancestry, monuments, and the walking dead. In February, 1836, having been
exhibited for nine months, six days a week, she died. Her corpse was carried by a horse-
drawn sleigh to Barnums boarding house. He stowed her in a small, cold room and
began selling tickets to her autopsy, although, after the surgeon declared that she could
not possibly be a day older than eighty, Barnum said that her death was a hoax and that
hed given the surgeon a dierent dead body; Heth was alive and well and living in
Connecticut, on her way to becoming a hundred and sixty-two.

There are only so many ways to deal with the dead: remember or forget, put up statues
or pull them down, bury or burn. Heth is an edge case, like a head on a pike, or a mass
grave, or a man hanging from a gallows, a display of decay, a spectacular atrocity. But
the edge is not so far from the viscera. Frederick Douglass called slavery a tomb. The
way Americans still bury their dead is a consequence of the war that was fought to end
it.

We cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground, Lincoln said at Gettysburg.

But bodies could be embalmed and brought home, to be seen, one last time, beloved
and mourned. A business grew. Before the war, families washed and shrouded and
carried their own dead, burying them in boxes built of softwoods like pine and cedar.
During the war, families hired undertakers to preserve their sons long enough to bring
them home from distant battlefields on railway cars. Night and day journeys a con,
Walt Whitman wrote. Gravestones filled the fields like poppies. There were fields of
black and fields of white. In 1868, when the radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens was
on his deathbed, weeks after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, which hed
drafted, he insisted on being buried in an integrated cemetery. He wrote his own
epitaph:

I repose in this quiet and secluded

spot,
Not from any natural preference
for solitude
But, finding other Cemeteries
limited as to Race,
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by Charter Rules,
I have chosen this that I might
illustrate
in my death,
The principles which I advocated
through a long life:
EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS

CREATOR.

Cemeteries remained segregated for another century.

After the war, cons and cemeteries got fancier and embalming more elaborate. There
is no need to preserve a body that has no distance to travel before burial, but preparing
the dead by pickling them and sealing them in boxes made of hardwoods and
unbreachable metals turned out to be a good business: the denial of decay. The price of
dying rose. It used to be that you pretty much had to be famous to get your name on
your grave; after the Civil War, nearly everyone did, except the poorest of the poor,
interred in potters fields. Then, too, remains were dug up, and moved: it became
fashionable to relocate the eminent dead to better quarters, to elevate them above the
more ordinary departed. Very often, monuments were built in places that lacked the
bodies, creating more permanent markers.

In 1836, the year Joice Heth died, George Washington memorialists, unable to get the
Presidents bones moved from Mount Vernon, announced a competition to design the
Washington Monument. In the age of Jim Crow, the Confederacy followed a similar
practice. The corpse of Jeerson Davis, buried in New Orleans at his death, in 1889,
was removed from his vault four years later and carried, by windowed railroad car, to
Richmond, a former capital of the Confederacy. New Orleans, bereft of the corpse,
built a monument to Davis. At its dedication, white schoolchildren dressed in red,
white, and blue stood in the formation of a Confederate flag.

All these burials and reburials were a danger to public health, according to advocates of
cremation, who argued that burning the dead would put a stop to the dreadful practice
of horrid exhumations and mangling of remains. A sudden American vogue for
cremation took place in 1874, the year the New York Cremation Society was formed.
(The Times published one article about cremation in 1873, and seventeen in 1874.) To

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counter the objection that cremation would interfere with resurrection, the Reverend
O. B. Frothingham assured Americans that to recover a shape from a heap of ashes
can be no more dicult than to recover it from a mound of dust. Cremationists,
spurning the open pyre of the ancients, built an industrial-age cremation furnace,
which was used for the first time in 1876. As the religious historian Stephen Prothero
has argued, Gilded Age advocates for cremation hoped to purify the remains of the
wealthy, by fire, and keep them separate from the rotting, polluted remains of the
buried masses.

The Gilded Age cremation movement failed, largely because of the extraordinary
power of the growing burial business. There is nothing too good for the dead, the
author of The Modern Funeral wrote, in 1900. And yet the dead were very often left
behind, especially those descended from the enslaved. During the Great Migration,
millions of African-Americans departed their homes in the South, abandoning the
remains of their ancestors in search of a future for their children. In 1945, Zora Neale
Hurston asked W. E. B. Du Bois, Why do you not propose a cemetery for the
illustrious Negro dead? Hurston wanted to move the remains of Nat Turner and
Frederick Douglass to a site in Florida, and to add black leaders as they fell, creating a
place of pilgrimage for a scattered people. Let no Negro celebrities, no matter what
financial condition they might be in at death, lie in inconspicuous forgetfulness, she
wrote Du Bois. You must see what a rallying spot that would be for all that we want to
accomplish and do. Hurstons plan was never realized. But the dead did play a rallying
role in the civil-rights movement: black deaths mattered. After fourteen-year-old
Emmett Till was tortured, shot, and thrown into a river in Mississippi, his mother had
his body shipped to Chicago, where she had his disfigured and decayed remains
displayed in an open casket, seen by tens of thousands of mourners.

Throughout the nineteen-forties, most American cemeteries were subject to the same
racially restrictive covenants as housing, and were just as resistant to integration, even
after courts deemed this practice a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Black
graves were more likely to be unmarked, their occupants buried in the old ways, a
traditional homegoing. In the fifties, consumer conformity drove the conventions of
burial; the rising cost of dying outpaced the rising cost of living. Black funeral directors
sold the same wares. Negro undertakers gross more than $120 million for 150,000
funerals each year, Ebony reported in 1953, in an article titled Death Is Big Business.

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If a person drives a Cadillac, why should he have a Pontiac funeral? one funeral
director asked Jessica Mitford, as she reported in The American Way of Death, in
1963. What sounded like a hoax worthy of Barnum had become by then the way a
great many Americans buried their deadon satin sheets in stainless-steel caskets,
with hymns piped in their crypts through high-fidelity stereo, beneath vast, manicured
lawns. The desirable crypts are now in the new air-conditioned section, another
funeral director told Mitford when she updated the book.

There were, nevertheless, dissenters, a cadaver counterculture. In 1971, the Last

Whole Earth Catalog oered instructions for a Do-It-Yourself Burial that you could
arrange for fifty dollars. Cremation is generally cheaper than burial, and it makes a
certain sense if you have no intention of maintaining the geraniums on the family plot.
Long forbidden in the Jewish and Muslim faiths, and disparaged by Christians, it
slowly became more acceptable. By 1980, the cremation rate in the United States,
which had been virtually zero, had risen to nearly ten per cent. For people with no
religious faith, cremation proved particularly appealing. (That number is growing, fast:
one in three younger millennials has either never or rarely attended a religious service.)
In the Gilded Age, the rich were the ones who wanted to be cremated; in the Second
Gilded Age, cremation is the only kind of end the poor can aord. Stagnant wages and
the financial crisis of 2008 appear to have accelerated the flames: people whod lost
their homes could hardly aord mahogany cons. In 2013, Time declared cremation
the new American way of death.

Ashes scatter. In 2016, for the first time, more than half the American dead were
cremated, marking a change to the landscape of every city and towntombstones
uncarved, graveyards abandonedand a weakening of the ties that bind the living to
the dead. The dead are a people and the past is a place that half of Americans no longer
visit, except to topple stones.

C aitlin Doughty founded the Order of the Good Death, a death acceptance
collective, in 2011, not long after she finished mortuary school. The death-
acceptance movement is sometimes called the death positive movement, and its
something like the fat positive and sex positive movements, except that it has
ancient roots, since the search for a good death is older than the oldest bones. Members
of the Order of the Good Death include death professionals with titles like street

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anatomist, eco-death revolutionary, and death midwife. They believe, according to

the collectives Web site, that there is a revolution afoot in the way our society handles
death which has to do with rootlessness, secularism, and globalism, developments that
unhitch children from their parents, believers from their faiths, and people from their
homes. All these things might easily be considered devastating, but members of the
Order of the Good Death consider them emancipating: All of a sudden, we are able to
choose the rituals we perform with our dead and how we dispose of dead bodies.

From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death (Norton) is
Doughtys tour of the death ways of other peoples, from Bolivia to Barcelona. Doughty,
who styles herself after Morticia Addams, is a sort of cheerful and companionable
Grim Reaper. In Crestone, Colorado, population a hundred and fifty, she visits the only
sanctioned open-air pyre in the United States (she calls the town a morbid
Mayberry). She describes a structure of pion and spruce, sitting in a field of black-
eyed Susans, that costs five hundred dollars (technically a donation to cover wood, fire
department presence, stretcher, and land use). The average burial, by contrast, costs
between eight and ten thousand dollars. The pyre sounds beautiful, especially when
compared with industrial crematoriumsbig, ugly buildings often found next to scrap
heaps and junk yards, o limits to mourners, and with cremation tribute centers,
which charge upward of five thousand dollars for a more sanitized experience of the
burning of the dead.

At Doughtys own funeral home, in Los Angeles, she, like other American funeral
directors, is required by law to pulverize the fragments of bone that come out of the
cremation machine with the ashes. In Japan, where the cremation rate is 99.9 per cent,
Doughty reports on a ceremony known as kotsuage, in which the mourners, each with a
pair of chopsticks, pick up the bone fragments, starting with the feet and moving to the
skull, and place them in an urn. In the southern part of the Indonesian island of
Sulawesi, Doughty visits families who live with their mummified dead for months or
even years, dressing and feeding them, until the dead are ready to go into their graves.
In North Carolina, at the Urban Death Project, she helps compost a corpse, an
environmentally sustainable process known as recomposition. Instead of ashes in
urns, mourners end up with bags of rich, dark soil to add to their own gardens, so that,
for instance, a mother who loved to garden can, herself, give rise to new life.

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A bad version of this book would read like Ripleys Believe It or Not! But Doughty
chronicles each of these practices with tenderheartedness, a technicians fascination,
and an unsentimental respect for grief. One premise of her work is that dead bodies
shouldnt be carried o and hidden from families, pumped up with fluids and slathered
with makeup: mourners should be allowed to see and touch the dead and to prepare
the body. Many grieving people will agree. I held my fathers hand as he died, the two
of us, alone. I stroked his fingers, before, and after. I didnt see my mothers dead body
until I saw her in her con, waxen and unrecognizable, smiling a half smile she had
never smiled before. I know that he is dead. I have never quite accepted that she is.

The year before Thomas Mira y Lopezs father, Rafael, got sick, he planted a buckeye
seed on his farm in Pennsylvania. A buckeye tree can grow to forty-five feet and live for
eighty years. After Rafael died, Thomass mother took him to visit the tree every year.
Come see Dads tree, shed say. She had come to think of the buckeye as him. The
hands that scooped out the pocket of earth and laid the seed to rest are now the
buckeyes leaves, his limbs the branches, the mind that decided to plant the tree exactly
there are its roots, Mira y Lopez writes, in The Book of Resting Places: A Personal
History of Where We Lay the Dead (Counterpoint). Mira y Lopez hated the annual
pilgrimage to the buckeye. He was only twenty when his father died, still in the throes
of post-adolescent rebellion, and every way his mother saw that death was a way that
he did not. I cannot see the buckeye the way my mother sees it, he writes. My father
does not stand tall within it, this ugly thing choking the water and stealing sunlight
away from the evergreen. He also didnt like it when, two years after his father died,
his mother bought a memorial tree in Central Park, a horse chestnut. He decided to go
in search of better ways to remember the dead.

The Book of Resting Places is Mira y Lopezs account of his travels, from a cemetery
to a crematorium to a cryonics company. Like Doughty, hes looking for the good
death, somewhere, anywhere. I even have a mummy out back, the proprietor of a rock
shop on the side of a two-lane highway in Arizona tells him. You wanna see?
Doughty is a death professional. Theres something warmer about Mira y Lopezs
writing, as a chronicle of his own mourning, and theres also something colder, for the
same reason. On visiting his father in an I.C.U., after hed had brain surgery, he writes,
There wasnt much to do: hold my fathers hand, read Graham Greene, watch soccer
or CNN, masturbate in the shower, nap, wipe the sweat from my fathers forehead, play

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solitaire on my iPod. He was there when his father died. He pried open his fathers
hand, pressed a penny into his palm, and closed it. He might need this, he told his
mother. He does not know why he did this. I was not being me, but watching myself
be me, he writes, and hes still watching. The night before his father died, he had
looked back at him before leaving the room and closing the door: I saw his body
propped up on the bed, his shrunken torso and caved-in head, and I realized he would
have to go through the night alone. The trouble is, we all go through that night alone.

The idea that the disposition of the dead, loved or unloved, is a matter of personal
choice, absent the commitment of belief and the burden of history, is an illusion of a
cockeyed and shortsighted present. The dead like to stay close to the living, the
literary scholar Robert Pogue Harrison once argued, in The Dominion of the Dead,
an account of the importance of burial and of burying places in human history. To be
buried is to hope for resurrection, but to bury the dead is to build a future on top of the
past. A grave is a monument. So is a tree. There are other ways to dispose of the dead,
worse ways and better ways, but theres no escaping the reach of the dead that havent
found peace.

T he dead cannot vote, but they are very often recruited to political causes, armies of
the night. The latest conflicts, between people who march in the streets carrying
photographs of black men shot by the police and people who circle monuments draped
in Confederate flags, are in some ways battles between the newly dead and the long-
ago dead, between the present and the past. It remains to be seen whether the struggle
over the dead will grow fiercer, and wilder, the past made into a mummy, carted and
carried, displayed and dissected.

Earlier this year, New Orleanss Jeerson Davis monument was taken down, on the
orders of the city, after a series of protests. Its current location is a well-kept secret.
Three years ago, archeologists at Mount Vernon began excavating a slave cemetery on a
hill south of George Washingtons tomb. Forgotten No Longer is the name theyve
given to the project. They suspect that there are about a hundred bodies buried there;
theyve located forty-six, among them the graves of sixteen children. No graves have
been opened, no remains disturbed. The dead cannot be desegregated. But history has
got to be, or else Americans will keep on clobbering one another with the bones of
their ancestors.

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Joice Heth is not buried at Mount Vernon. The best archival evidencepainstakingly
compiled by the historian Benjamin Reisssuggests that Heth was born about 1755
and that by the seventeen-nineties she was the property of a Revolutionary War
veteran named William Heth, a petty civil servant from Richmond who barely knew
George Washington but who regularly dined out on lavishly embroidered stories about
his visits to Mount Vernon. Joice Heths own tall tales, Reiss thinks, began as mockery
of her pued-up and ridiculous owner, a theory that may or may not be true but that is
far less painful to think about than the ways she was used and abused by Barnum, who,
in abolitionist towns, claimed that he was using the money he made by exhibiting her
to buy her great-great-grandchildren out of slavery.

P. T. Barnum died in his bed in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on April 7, 1891. The scene
at the deathbed was deeply pathetic, the Times reported. His rise, the obituary
reported, had begun with a remarkable negro woman. Hed made his own funeral
arrangements: In accordance with the expressed wish of the deceased he will be buried
in Mountain Grove Cemetery, where he recently had erected a massive granite
monument. Barnum once said hed arranged for Joice Heth to be buried in his family
plot. He was lying.

This article appears in other versions of the October 16, 2017, issue, with the headline Dead
Weight.

Jill Lepore is a sta writer and a professor of history at Harvard. The Secret History of
Wonder Woman is her latest book. Read more

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