Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
All of us, five middle-aged white women, looked at the open land in front of us. We were
in West Virginia, 780 miles to the north of Thomasville, Georgia. A hill's curves ended at a
pond half covered with duckweed. A red-winged blackbird trilled “conk-la-ree, conk-la-ree”
before dropping off the power line to the reeds below. The hill was awash with blooming Ber-
muda grass, white and pink clover, a sprinkle of horse nettle. Streaks of green shot across the
crest of the hill and just below the crest. A bull thistle interceded here and there. The six slaves
reportedly were buried without coffins and not too deep. Maybe a child or two was there. A
few might have slabs of granite on top of them, thought the farmer who owned the field, to
keep animals from disinterring them.
It had taken a half hour for Kathy Holbert and her good friend and fellow cadaver-dog
handler Lisa Lepsch to negotiate the search with the old man who owned the cattle farm,
with its pristine white house and barns. Some of that time was taken up with listening to
his memories of cattle drives from Montrose to the slaughterhouse in Elkins when he was
young. About the two herding dogs who didn't mind getting kicked in the face and would
challenge the recalcitrant back into line. His master herder, a long-haired red dog, was scarred
and tough as nails. Probably not an Irish setter. Much of the talk was about the rules of dog
engagement: that the gates be opened and closed quickly. That the dogs not stress the herd.
Whatever the outcome, he said, he didn't want any archaeologists digging. If the bodies were
there, they should be left in peace.
This site, unlike Thomasville, had no surviving documentation that we were aware of—if,
indeed, anyone who could have created a record had cared enough. The oral history of the
slaves, three men and three women, who perhaps lay on this particular West Virginia hill-
side in unmarked graves, had already served a modern purpose as a small branch of a bigger
protest against a highway. The stories of the buried slaves—combined with endangered flora
and fauna, Confederate and Union historic sites—helped prevent the huge ribbon of Route
33, a Senator Robert Byrd pork barrel project, from being laid across a section of Randolph
County. The highway ended at Montrose and began again beyond.
When slaves were there, the top of the hill would have been filled with apple trees. Apples
always played a big role in West Virginia agriculture. Any orchard would have had at least
five or six varieties: for cooking, for eating, for cider, for preserving, for shipping, dried, to
England.
Digging a grave in that orchard would have been difficult, with tree roots and rocky soil
interceding. That was what West Virginia had: rocks and apples, salt and coal. What it didn't
have was a lot of slaves; it was a mountainous region with few large plantations, and tobacco
grew only in a few areas. Cotton nowhere. Other than the salt mines, where slaves like Book-
er T. Washington toiled, most West Virginia slave owners were farmers with fewer than five
slaves.
