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A Ghost In New Orleans

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Jason Medina

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“There’s a great mystery in that cemetery, even deeper than the painful or tragic events that populated it. Inside its stone walls are the citizens of my town: they built the stores and mapped out the roads, put up electric lights, founded the hospital, and organized the public library. A few probably lived in my home at one time. They have made my life possible in more ways than I can count, yet we are entire strangers. . . . I do not take these silent neighbors for granted either. Sometimes, when all of the library staff have gone home, the lights are off, and I’m working alone at my desk, I think about them . . . . But most of the time, my feeling is more sadness than fear. It is hard to think about people who have lived full and eventful lives, only to end up as a faded name on a monument; it is even harder to realize that this will eventually happen to me and to all the people I love. My library shelves are full of forgotten books written by unknown people. It is an amazing fact, one that I sometimes contemplate with awe, that all of these books are connections with people now on the other side of mystery, surviving only as a name on a tattered binding. That’s one reason why I sometimes pause and say their names out loud, just to give the universe a chance to hear an old and beloved combination of words one more time. (pp. 100-101)”

“Every Friday evening since the late sixties, at 5:00 p.m. we'd walk into the nearby Brompton Cemetery, which, since its four corners connect Fulham, Chelsea, South Kensington, and Earl's Court, was a convenient meeting point for all our friends. We'd plan our weekend on the grave of Admiral Angus Whitewater. We didn't know the Admiral, he just happened to have an impressive horizontal slab of black marble over his last resting place, which made a great table for drinks.”

“As we drove down the highway and out of the Till country, we passed a large, well-kept graveyard. At one end of it there was a section in very bad condition, separated from the rest by a high iron fence. "That's the Negro section," Amzie remarked, "but I don't get excited about that. The graveyard is the only place where things can be separate ... and equal.”

“Everything in Louisiana is flat, so I found myself lost in the expanse of crawfish fields, telephone lines, rice silos, and lonesome rural homes, and my ability to judge distance became compromised. Nevertheless, it seemed a long, bouncy ride on dirt roads before we arrived at Ardoin (pronounced “ard-wahn”) Cove Cemetery, the rumbling truck engine often stirring pink-tinged Egrets from the roadside slews.”