The man at the Library of Congress said, Mr. Abernathy, you gave my colleague the year 1880 and the name of your wifes family. I am holding the Freedmens Bureau file in my hands right now. This is one of the ones we protect.
I told him about the developer in his sunglasses, the fourteenth hole, the eleven graves he wanted to move to Valdosta.
In 1880, he said, your wifes great-great-grandparents, freed people, were deeded this land through the Freedmens Bureau, and the family burial ground on it is recorded in the federal file. A documented historic cemetery like this one has protections a county rezoning cannot simply wave away. Those graves are not going anywhere.
The paper folded smaller than a stamp inside Hatties daddys pocket watch was the 1880 land record, and the Library held the federal file that matched it.
He walked across my wifes family graves like a parking lot, and the United States government had been guarding them since 1880.
The federal records went to the county and to the developers lawyers, and the rezoning that put the fourteenth hole over those graves was withdrawn. The golf course bent its fairway around the pecan trees, because the law gave it no other choice.
Eleven graves still rest under the pecan trees behind the house, and Hattie rests there too, next to her mama. I keep the little cemetery swept and the azaleas planted every spring, the way she did for fifty years. Her family has been in that ground since 1880, and there they will stay.