![]() ![]() I had a first cousin out there and I know they put one on that little baby.” I got two grandfathers out there and they both had one, but I don’t see them nowhere. “I only seen one tombstone, but back then, most everybody out there had one,” Hutchinson said. Sharecropper graveyards don’t usually have expensive or prominent headstones like white graveyards, but Indianola resident Bonnie Hutchinson swears the old cemetery had plenty. Multiple witnesses insist this has not always been the case. The deceased inhabitants, many forgotten and left to linger in the buzzy, fetid wetness, have nothing to mark their existence. ![]() It left its water, however, and the mosquitoes. The cemetery-if you can call it that-snuggles up to a cypress-choked wetland that possibly used to be a section of Porter Bayou, before the small creek changed its route. Now it ain’t nothin.’ These folks spent all their lives working the fields out here by this old bayou and now ain’t nothing here.” “This place used to be an old Indian graveyard before it was a Black graveyard. “Everybody but my parents are here,” he announced to a swampy chorus of insects. He is confident who is buried out here in this Black cemetery, however. They done torn ‘em down.”īrown, who goes by the name “Hambone” to his friends, lives in the central city of Indianola now and almost got lost finding his old home. “There used to be tombstones over here by that big tree and them graves were all around here,” says Brown, pointing out over a field surrounded by encroaching soybeans. The cemetery was decommissioned in 1957, according to Sunflower County administrators, but it appears that some neighbors can’t wait to erase its existence. Torn from a depopulated church with no congregation, the graveyard was left to the trees and weeds. Community members trickled away to better pay and better jobs over the decades, while others gave segregationist Mississippi leaders like Ross Barnett and Walter Sillers the respect they deserved and deserted Mississippi to its poverty.īrown stands like a gnarled stump impervious to heat and humidity over what he claims is the old cemetery. This is a surprise considering the place once served a vigorous community of sharecroppers. Since that time, the disembodied graveyard has slipped away from public notice. Church graveyard, back before an owner severed the church from its graveyard and moved the building further up the road. Indianola native Alex Brown surveys a crop of soybeans lining the edge of a vanished graveyard containing his relatives.Īlex Brown, 82, used to live across the road from the old Mt. ![]()
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