Memoir

Lives in Earth and Stone:

Reacquaintance with Mobile’s Magnolia Cemetery
Manny Blacksher
“Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.”
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961)

For the fifteen years that I grew up in Downtown Mo-

bile, Magnolia Cemetery was around the corner and
down the road a bit. The Mobile I remember was a
subtle place. The gang of kids I played with roamed
through a twenty-block urban preserve that our par-
ents deemed ‘safe’. And if we ten- and twelve-year-
olds naturally pushed the boundaries of this domain,
we didn’t go too far afield. Or at least I didn’t. So
I didn’t often walk to Ladd Stadium, Home of the
Senior Bowl, even though Ladd Stadium was a block-
and-a-half away from our house on South Monterey
Street. It never crossed my mind to stroll from the
stadium down Virginia Street, less than a mile, to ex-
plore Magnolia Cemetery’s sprawling grave beds.

During the 1970s and ‘80s, Magnolia Cemetery was

still a working municipal graveyard. People got buried
there every day. People from ‘other’ neighborhoods
were reputed to meet up there at night. Occasionally
somebody got shot or stabbed in the grounds. We kids
accepted the moral propriety of occasional murders in
the graveyard. Like nighttime murders at the Mobile
Docks and other “bad areas,” they proved our unspo-
ken recognitions of enduring distinctions of race and
class.

But nearly every time we drove across the Bay to get

to Fairhope’s beaches or to travel to my grandparents’
house in Lillian, Alabama, my parents drove down
Virginia Street. That was the quickest route to the
newer, faster George Wallace Tunnel and the east-
bound causeway. For a period of years roughly corre-
sponding to my sitting in the back seat of the family
van, hoping we would stop for burgers at McDonalds,
I intensely disliked the stretch of Virginia Street that
bisects the hundred acres of Magnolia Cemetery. It
didn’t feel deserted. Day or night, it felt as alive as any
other Downtown residential district. But it was some-

2 Memoir
body else’s neighborhood. ‘Those people’ had their own
unspoken distinctiveness. The dead were busy about
their own homes and yards, going in and out their own
driveways. That stretch of Virginia Street–about eight
city blocks–was theirs. And like every other part of
Downtown, there were always people on the sidewalks
looking for a lift to get out of their neighborhood and
go someplace else. It’s dangerous to pick up strangers. I
always felt anxiety driving through the graveyard. There
were periods when I tried holding my breath from Ann
Street to where the wrought-iron fences ended at Gayle
Street—without success.
The Magnolia Cemetery of my childhood in the 70s
and early-80s was a business concern, a source of limit-
ed revenue for the city and Downtown funeral homes.
The grounds were tended with some indifference by
poorly paid municipal workmen. Meanwhile, white-
flight to the western suburbs drew off clientele to new-
er, cleaner, more comfortably homogeneous memorial
parks. Magnolia Cemetery had gotten a reputation for
being a decaying urban eyesore. And yet it was Mobile’s
second-oldest graveyard, instituted by “municipal ordi-
nance” in 1836 to replace the original Church Street
Cemetery that had been overpopulated by successive
malarial epidemics. It is estimated that Magnolia Ceme-
tery now contains over a hundred-thousand interments,
though many of the oldest are unmarked and cannot
be attributed by local historians. During the ‘80s it was
recognized as being a site of enduring historical impor-
tance: among its residents are “two Alabama governors,
seven congressmen, 20 mayors, six generals, rabbis, free
blacks, society women, Apache prisoners of war, writers,
and citizens from all walks of life.” Mobile’s Historical
Society, which has an enduring commitment to preserve
the structures of the city’s old port and venerable res-
idential districts, began organizing volunteer mainte-
nance events for Magnolia Cemetery in 1981. The His-
torical Society prompted the foundation of a Friends of
Magnolia Cemetery association, which through mem-
bers’ efforts and increasing charitable donations man-
aged by 1987 to secure a contractual agreement with
the City of Mobile to oversee the cemetery’s restoration
and perpetual maintenance. The Friends society now
supervises a small number of new burials annually. But
its primary mission is to preserve the graveyard as a na-
tional landmark that is accessible and hospitable to all
public visitors.
Homeward
I was one of the ‘non-local’ visitors who explored Mag-
Municipal Map of Little Magnolia Cemetery
nolia Cemetery during the Independence-Day holidays
of 2011. My parents moved away to Birmingham, Al-
abama, in 1987. I had not stayed in Mobile for longer
than a few nights in over twenty years. However, I re-
turned for a week in July 2011 at the invitations of my
oldest friend Brad and his wife Judy. In the best char-
acter of Old-Mobile tradition, Brad and Judy lavished
hospitalities upon me. Not least among these was orga-
nizing reunions with many of my high-school friends. I
was reacquainted with my schoolmate Tracy Neely, who
works as a special-needs care-giver and remains excep-
tionally bright and vivacious. Tracy suggested a Satur-
day excursion to Magnolia Cemetery to “look up” some
old relations, and I readily agreed, looking forward to
another opportunity for catching up.
Tracy turned off Ann Street in her SUV and took us
down one of the many service roads that make the cem-
etery’s matrix like a carefully premeditated city design
in miniature. Her distantly-deceased relations were not
immediately discoverable using one of the web’s “find-
a-grave” database services, so we wandered. It was a typ-
ically fine July day for Mobile: blazing bright, sticking
humid for most of the afternoon until the humidity
either produced an hour of glowering clouds or precip-
itated a flash thunderstorm. We lucked out with dark
thunder heads and a light shower in the late-afternoon.
Friends of Magnolia Cemetery have done a wonderful
job of returning the site to agreeable orderliness and se-
renity. I’d only visited the interior of the cemetery once
as an adolescent in the ‘80s. It had been a foul day of rain
that churned up the un-graveled service roads to foetid
pools and ruts that mired the funeral cortege. The day
Tracy and I visited we found well-surfaced, dry-pebbled
Memoir 3
roads and recently clipped lawns. The whole scene was
pastoral, nearly Arcadian. If anything broke the sense
of ordered harmony, it was things peculiar to the Deep
South. Though recently cut, the grass had an avid,
overripe luxuriance. The lawns were very much dis-
tinct living, climbing, expanding things. The air swam
with moisture even in bright sunshine. And you always
smelled the rich moist earth. Occasionally, you got a
whiff of something else that wasn’t quite definable, and
you realized that every graveyard close to the Gulf is,
more than a burial ground, a natural pressure cooker.

Cousins
We searched for hours for Tracy’s forebears but nev-
er quite settled on the right plot in the oldest quad-
rants of “Little Magnolia Cemetery.” Still, there were
many other things to draw notice and spark curiosity.
Almost immediately, we discovered a magnificent and
imposing mausoleum for the Mobile clan of “BLACK-
SHER[S].” It wasn’t a monument to my bunch, so I
couldn’t trace any exact connection to the family en-
tombed there. Alabama Blackshers made their fortunes
in the nineteenth century from lumber mills they built
on the many rivers that converge in Mobile Bay. My
great-grandfather wanted to live near his recently mar-
ried sister, so he sold up his stakes in the timber busi-
ness and moved northeast to the little town of Brewton,
Alabama, where he started a dairy business and built an
elaborate Italianate stucco mansion in the woods, close
to his cows. The prosperity enjoyed by the Mobile lum-
ber barons wasn’t sustained by my Brewton relations.
Those distant Mobile cousins are still prospering–as are
not a few of my nearer Brewton-Blacksher relations. It’s
all part of a family’s hereditary dramaturgy. One can
admire the magnificence of a distant relation’s mauso-
leum with curiosity, but envy’s pointless. It’s literally
dirt shifting under old stone.

Nonetheless, there’s a great deal of interesting old

stones in Magnolia Cemetery. Many have remarkable
bass-relief images and memorable snatches of elegiac
verse. Others are themselves unique marmoreal sculp-
tures.

Griefs
Among some of the most impressive epitaphs, there is
fine poetry. One husband jubilates that the passerby
must not mistake his dear wife’s present circumstances:
“Think not she lies entombed below/ To happiness a
stranger now!/ Ah no – she lives, a being bright:/ In

4 Memoir
realms of endless pure delight.” At grief’s other sublime
extreme, a husband mourns: “My Wife. She is not: For
God took her.” Conversely, one widow has left a head-
stone shaped as an ogival arch that reads only “In Loving
Memory of My Husband.” And among the ranks of uni-
form white tablets laid for the Confederate dead, one stone
names the occupant stowed in earth as “UNKNOWN.”
In attempting to truly name the unidentifiable soldier, the
anonymous headstone works like a universal memento mori,
suggesting that however much we rely on the testimonials
of names, marriages, kinship, and military company, the
departed hero or heroine can be honored, can be remem-
bered, but ultimately cannot be “known” by survivors.

Reliefs
Among the most evocative bass-relief carvings is the qua-
si-classical gowned woman, covering her face with her hand
and stooping in agony, her elbow supported by the funereal
urn itself. The woman overwhelmed by grief recalls “LYD-
IA” who was wife to Charles L. Roberts. Another carving
commemorates the departed man as a fireman second but
first a Mason: his fireman’s helmet is surmounted by hands
signaling membership by their secret clasp and, above
these, the Masons’ transposed calipers and square rule. On
another tombstone, the surviving siblings and relatives of
“John,” youngest son of the deceased “John Welsh” who
had emigrated from Liverpool England, leave a gloriously
iconic manicule: a sculpted hand rising from a cloud and
pointing straight up to the sky.

However, most intriguing of all the bass-reliefs is the com-

plex heraldry on the plinth left to a member of Michael
Krafft’s early-nineteenth-century precursor to the South’s
“mystic” Mardi-Gras societies. A “one-eyed” Pennsylva-
nian emigré of Dutch or Swedish ancestry, Krafft, with
a cohort of fellow inebriated gentlemen who had brought
in the New Year of 1830 with copious amounts of food
and liquor, attached cowbells to an assemblage of stolen
farm tools and paraded raucously through the streets of
Old Mobile. They continued this New Year’s parade in
subsequent years, dubbing themselves and their confed-
erates the “Cowbellion de Rakin.” Magnolia Cemetery’s
“COWBELLION” plinth displays a Roman torch crossed
with a caduceus. Above them is a placard or shield that
shows a horned creature–likely a bull. The shield is flanked
by a human skull to the left and a devil’s leering head to
the right. These are surmounted by a scythe crossed with a
rake, upon which is perched an owl who grips in his beak
a banner, exclaiming “COWBELLION.”
Mardi Gras in Mobile remains an obscure and tortuous Portrait of Michael Krafft - Mardi Gras Museum
institution. Famously or infamously, Mobile has always (http://andrewhopkinsart.blogspot.com)

Memoir 5
preceded New Orleans’ Mardi-Gras customs
with its own New-World traditions that com-
bine carnivalesque chaos with public displays
of gentrified prerogative and ebullient intoxica-
tion. But what strikes me as astonishing is that
the famous demobbed dipsomaniac Confeder-
ate veteran, Joe Cain, who recommenced the
topsy-turvy parade of defeated drunks through
the streets of Mobile on Fat Tuesday, and, con-
sequently, is credited as initiating “modern”
Mardi Gras celebrations, is buried in a plot of
honor in Mobile’s oldest cemetery at Church
Street. But Michael Krafft and his crew of an-
archic revelers reside in Magnolia Cemetery
with little recognition of their importance.
The omission might suggest as much about
the importance of “secret societies” in the Re-
construction South as it does about the will-
ingness to forget a whimsical Pennsylvanian’s
New-Year’s hijinx.

Markers
Arguably, the monuments to members of the
“secretive” Cowbellion de Rakin are the most
light-hearted landmarks in Magnolia cem-
etery. Other pieces of marmoreal sculpture
relate more sobering thoughts of how life’s
chaos ends. One terrible monument to a dead
infant is a full-sized stone cradle. A beautifully
sculpted but balefully darkened angel broods
over the graveyard. Confederate General Brax-
ton Bragg’s tall plinth is surmounted with a
funeral urn draped with an officer’s coat. And
the regiments of white markers for the military
dead radiate in perfect geometrical lines from
the graveyard’s tallest marker: a steel pole that
hoists the American flag.

Ultimately, we can question what ought to be

made of it all. Unlike the abjectly dreadful ne-
cropolis I imagined in my childhood, Magno-
lia Cemetery is a magnificent, historically sig-
nificant, but still ‘dreadful’ place. As a grown
man, I found that I already had a place there
as a witness to others now dead. I felt the im-
mediacy of the prospect that I would have a
similar berth at some point–whether it was a
stone-crowned grave, or a urn brimming with
ashes, or an unmarked, unseen piece of grass
in a place “unknown.” These are the traditional
reflections on mortality that graveyards elicit.

6 Memoir
But what I am left wondering is some half-coherent
notion about bodies, and presence, and how every-
thing about humans is both durable and unaccount-
ably changeable. Even the unrecollected are embodied
in the terrain of Magnolia Cemetery. I wonder if the
stones and bricks that once ‘commemorated’ bodies in-
terred beneath them haven’t incorporated some more
oblique connection with the dead in the ground who
are now “all but gone.”

City of Mobile, Magnolia Cemetery

1202 Virginia St., Mobile AL 36604
(251) 208-7307
Friends of Magnolia Cemetery
1202 Virginia St.
P.O. Box 6383
Mobile, AL 36660-6383
(251) 432-8672

Photographs courstesy of Manny Blacksher Memoir 7