Raised in the sticky warmth of Miami, the below-90°F morning heat outside the Lafayette Cemetery rolls off my shoulders as easily as the insults of an impatient Brooklynite truck driver when in my newfound home of New York City. But baring the heat there proves simple after waiting only 2 minutes for the appearance of our Save Our Cemeteries tour guide Gayl, who will help, inside the serene cemetery surroundings, transport me to my high school days of Ann Rice devotion and Gothic industrial music enthusiasm.
Warning us to layer ourselves with sunscreen and ensuring we’d feel the icy touch of a frozen bottle of water if we dared feign even the least bit of heat wooziness, Gayl leads us beyond the entrance walls -- walls that you will later discover are actually one type of tomb from the array of ways New Orleanians have discovered to honor their dead. First, though, Gayl needs to explain her passion –- promoting awareness about the often-deteriorated states of many abandoned family tombs and the restoration needed to keep them from crumbling into pieces of stone. Only through understanding the delicacy of the tombs and the amount of passion put into them by those restoring their intricate artwork and carvings can you proceed in awe through the forgotten vaults and graves, those freshly dug (yes, that’s right, as in underground), and even ones adorned with flowers that change with the season.
Getting back to that concept of underground tombs in New Orleans, Lafayette does, contrary to a popularized myth that there are no underground graves in New Orleans, contain a scattering of such graves, although they are by far outnumbered by the daunting family vaults. As Sybil jokingly explains, "We can’t bury them in the ground –- they’ll miss the Mardi Gras parades!"
The most striking, and also the most depressing, of the vaults are those serving as a sort of mass grave, also called society tombs. They are vaults belonging to clubs, groups, and organizations such as the Society for the Relief of Destitute Orphan Boys, boys who were purposefully abandoned by their parents or unintentionally left behind due to the scourge of yellow fever. Whenever one belonging to such an organization died, they were put in these burial places with others who had previously belonged to their society, eerily (somewhat) resembling miniature forms of the mass concentration camp graves found in photos at The National D-Day Museum.
After listening to stories about family lineages that have ended in this cemetery and current ones about to record their history with newly built family vaults, I’m deemed "glistening," instead of using the uncouth word "sweating," by Gayl as we make our way back to the open gates. Glistening, after all, is evidence that you succeeded in making your way through hundreds of years of New Orleans history with only a few droplets of sweat, and maybe a sunburn or two, as scars.