ABANDONED

Zion opened in Tampa in 1901. The state’s own report calls it “believed to be Tampa’s first African-Americans burial ground,” with room for some eight hundred graves.

Eight hundred. Somebody sat down and counted the people they expected to have to bury, and bought the ground before those people had died, in a state that was not going to bury them anywhere else.

They dug it because it was theirs.

The easy story, which is wrong

There is a version of this essay that writes itself, and I had it written.

It goes like this. Florida has a law about neglected cemeteries, and before its provisions the law sets out its findings, which is where a statute tells you what problem it thinks it is solving. And the findings say this:

“a large number of cemeteries in Florida have no entity responsible for their care and maintenance and have become abandoned, overgrown, dilapidated, and otherwise neglected, creating eyesores and decreasing neighboring property values, and WHEREAS, neglected cemeteries become breeding grounds for mosquitoes, rats, and other vermin, raising serious public health concerns”

Eyesores. Property values. Vermin.

There it is. The state of Florida, asked what is wrong with a forgotten grave, answers that it lowers the price of the house next door. The dead are not the victim in that sentence. The dead are the nuisance.

It is a devastating paragraph and every word of it is verbatim.

And it is two clauses out of twenty-seven.

What the legislature actually said

Keep reading the preamble. It is right there, on the same page, above and below the sentences everyone quotes.

That the “families and loved ones of the deceased who are interred in Florida deserve well-maintained cemetery facilities which provide the highest dignity and respect accorded to the deceased’s final resting place that is compatible with reasonable and practical economic constraints.”

Read that clause twice, because Florida does something extraordinary in it. It promises dignity and it prices dignity, in one breath, in the same sentence. The qualifier is not a betrayal of the promise. It is the promise, as an appropriations problem.

That inadequate care “causes added stress and emotional trauma to the deceased’s family and friends.”

That it is “an affront to the dignity of our departed and a source of pain to their families when grave spaces are overgrown with weeds and tombstones are broken and scattered due to neglect.”

That abandoned cemeteries can become “obliterated, leading to a loss of important historical, genealogical, and archaeological information.”

And then this, which is the legislature making my own accusation, against itself, in 1998, and then acting on it: that the existing statutes “relate to economic problems but not to care and maintenance.”

Florida saw the objection coming and wrote the answer into the law.

Twenty-three years later it did it again. The act that created this very task force, with Zion named in its text, declares the state’s obligation to “identify and properly record abandoned African-American cemeteries and burial grounds in order to preserve history, better inform development decisions, and ensure dignity and respect for the deceased.”

So the words were never the problem

This is the harder essay, and I would rather have written the other one.

The other one lets you believe that the machinery of erasure runs on cold language, and that the remedy is warmer language. Get the statute to say dignity instead of property values and something will change.

Florida said dignity. It said it in 1998 and it said it again in 2021 with Zion written into the text of the bill.

There are still five apartment buildings standing over what archaeologists believe to be a hundred and twenty-six caskets.

You cannot fix this by demanding better words. The better words already passed, and nobody voted against them.

House Bill 3763, in 1998: one hundred and ten to nothing in the House, thirty-eight to nothing in the Senate. CS/CS/HB 37, in 2021: one hundred and seventeen to nothing, forty to nothing.

Four floor votes, twenty-three years apart, and not one recorded nay in either chamber. Florida agreed. Florida has never stopped agreeing. And the buildings are still there.

What actually failed

The state built the map, and then made looking at it optional.

Florida keeps a Master Site File. It is the official register of the state’s known archaeological and historic sites, and it exists precisely so that the location of a thing like Zion cannot simply evaporate.

Here is Adrienne Burke, a planner with thirteen years in Florida planning and zoning, writing to the task force from Miami-Dade County, in an email the state printed in its own report. She is not a task force member. She is a member of the public, telling them how it actually works:

“there is nothing that requires them to look at the Florida Master Site File during the site plan and permitting process (unless there was a local ordinance requiring it)”

Read the parenthesis, because the parenthesis is the whole thing. The check is not forbidden. It is discretionary, and the discretion was handed down. On Burke’s account, the state built the register, did not require local governments to consult it, and left the decision to the counties, where it becomes nobody’s job in particular.

She wrote that to the state. The state printed it in its own final report. Nobody contradicted her.

That is not a conspiracy and it is not a cover-up. It is a permit process that does not ask a question, in a state whose statute book is full of the answer.

Nineteen fifty-one

The state’s report contains this sentence.

“In 1951, while building the Robles Park Apartments, construction crews found three caskets on the land that includes part of the Zion cemetery site.”

They found the caskets.

They were digging, and they brought up three caskets, and there was no longer any question about what was under there, and they built anyway.

Everything after that moment is a choice made with the answer in hand.

Then families moved into Robles Park Village. They raised children there, over ground that three caskets had already come out of. Nobody told them. The crews knew in 1951, and the knowledge did not travel, and a fact with no keeper is a fact a city gets to stop having.

What the radar found

In August 2019, archaeologists ran ground-penetrating radar over the land.

They found what they believe to be one hundred and twenty-six caskets beneath Tampa Housing Authority property.

The Authority has since spent between seventy and eighty thousand dollars relocating about thirty families out of Robles Park Village. Its stated goal, in the report, is to “demolish the five buildings that sit on top of the cemetery and create a memorial park that honors those resting underground.”

Three caskets in 1951. One hundred and twenty-six in 2019.

Thirty families moved out of homes that a housing authority built on a graveyard, at public expense, because in 1951 nobody was required to look at a map that already existed.

They were the second people moved off that ground.

The right you cannot reach

There is one more thing in Florida law, and it is the only place in this file where a Black family is handed something.

Section 704.08, passed in 1980, eighteen years before the dignity clauses. Read it whole, because the whole of it is the point.

“The relatives and descendants of any person buried in a cemetery shall have an easement for ingress and egress for the purpose of visiting the cemetery at reasonable times and in a reasonable manner. The owner of the land may designate the easement. If the cemetery is abandoned or otherwise not being maintained, such relatives and descendants may request the owner to provide for reasonable maintenance of the cemetery, and, if the owner refuses or fails to maintain the cemetery, the relatives and descendants shall have the right to maintain the cemetery.”

Shall have. Twice. The law does not make you argue for this. It hands it over.

And then look at what it routes through.

The owner of the land may designate the easement. You have a right to walk in, and the man who owns the ground decides where you walk.

Such relatives and descendants may request the owner. Before you may lift a fallen headstone, you must go and ask. And only when he “refuses or fails” does the right to maintain your own dead spring into being.

Every single thing this statute gives you, it gives you through the person standing on top of your ancestors. That is not a flaw in the drafting. In 1980 it would have read as ordinary and reasonable, because it assumes a cemetery with an owner, and a family who knows which cemetery.

And it has one more requirement, which the statute never says out loud because in 1980 nobody imagined it needed saying.

You have to know where your dead are.

“The cemetery disappeared from public view in the late 1920s,” the report says, and a storefront went up, and warehouses, and then a housing project. The families of Zion were not stripped of the right to tend those graves. They were stripped of the graves’ address.

A right that activates only when you can point at the ground is not a right once the ground has been paved and the map has been redrawn and no one is required to check the map.

The word

So what does abandoned mean here.

Nobody walked away from Zion. The word puts the leaving on the leaver and then names no leaver, which is the trick of it: things become abandoned the way weather happens. No hand, no date, no decision.

But the cemetery was not abandoned by its families.

It was abandoned by the record. It fell out of the register, out of the permit process, out of the map, out of the paperwork that a right depends on. And the record was the only thing that could have saved it.

The state of Florida convened a task force about this, and put the word in the task force’s own title, and the word is still doing exactly what it always did.