REFUSE

In 1856 the school wrote down a rule.

It was a housekeeping rule, the kind an institution passes when a problem has become routine enough to need a procedure. It concerned the demonstrator of anatomy, and it told him what to do with what was left when a class was finished.

He “shall see that the offal is not allowed to collect in the dissecting or dead room and shall deposit it in the sink provided for that purpose.”

Read the verbs. Shall see. Shall deposit. That is not how a man writes about something he is ashamed of. That is how a man writes a standing order.

And read the noun, because the noun is a person.

The sink provided for that purpose

The sink was a well, under the street, outside the building.

The university’s own archivist will not say that flatly, and it is worth understanding why she will not. The faculty minutes, she writes, “do not reveal when such a place may have been selected or where it was located.” The well found in 1994 “may have been” the one. That is as far as the paper goes.

The bones go further. The forensic analysis of the crania recovered from that well found saw cuts, and it names them: marks that “reflect an autopsy or dissection procedure of sawing to remove the vault cap.” Five autopsied crania. One aborted dissection.

The paperwork will not confirm which hole they used. The skulls will.

The rule did not invent it. The faculty had been working the problem for years. The minutes show them worrying, first, about the smell reaching the neighbours: the rooms were to be kept “as neat and as free from offensive matters as possible,” and in “the removal of the refuse matter” it was to be done “as never to give offense to the citizens.” One of them recommended the faculty find an “appropriate place to deposit the refuse matter from the dissecting rooms.”

They found one. Then they wrote it into the regulations, so that nobody would have to decide again.

That is what a rule is for. A rule takes a thing that required a decision and makes it a step. After 1856 no one at that school had to look at a dead woman and choose what she was. The paperwork had already chosen.

The word

Refuse is not our word for what they did. It is their word for what we were.

That is the thing this file exists to establish, and it changes what kind of document this is.

Virginia Commonwealth University tells the story about its predecessor now, on its own website, and it uses the word: when the cadavers and specimens “were no longer useful for educational purposes, they were callously and disrespectfully discarded as refuse in nearby wells.” Read cold, that sentence looks like a modern institution reaching for the harshest available term to describe its own past. An act of conscience.

It is not reaching. It is quoting.

The word was already in the minutes. The word was already in the regulations. History did not call us refuse. The institution called us refuse, in its own procedure manual, in the ordinary course of business, while working out where the buckets should go.

And when the same faculty advertised itself to prospective students, it had another word. It promised that “materials for dissection can be obtained in abundance,” and its 1844 catalogue told a young man that “from the cheapness of material” he could practise his operations on the dead.

Abundance. Cheapness. Material. That is a market being described, and the commodity is us.

What was in the well

In April 1994, construction workers preparing the ground for a new medical sciences building found human remains twenty-five feet below East Marshall Street.

Here is where the record demands care, because the number everyone repeats is not a number. The forensic analysis found “a minimum of 44 adults” and “9 children (ages 14 years and younger).”

A minimum. Fifty-three is the sum of two floors, and it has been circulating for years with the word minimum quietly filed off it. The Family Representative Council is plainer still: it is “quite likely that additional human remains and artifacts are still located beneath the Kontos Building.”

There are more of them under there. We do not know how many. That is not a gap in this file. Keep reading, because that is the file.

What cannot be known, and why

The easy version of this story is that they were buried, and then they were stolen. A grave, opened. A theft with a shovel.

The descendants will not let us say that, and they are right not to.

The Family Representative Council, in its own final report, in its own words:

“we did not know which of the EMSW Ancestors had been buried prior to entering the ‘cadaver trade.’ African American oral history suggests that living individuals also could be abducted for the purpose of supplying cadavers for medical training. If true, at least some of the EMSW Ancestors may never have been deliberately buried.”

And:

“We may never know with certainty whether the bodies of specific EMSW Ancestors were obtained through illegal grave robbing or as a result of ‘dying while black’ in a medical school infirmary.”

The school had more than one supply line. It robbed graves, yes. It also placed two medical students at the almshouse for the express purpose of collecting anatomical material. It looked at the penitentiary’s convict cemetery. It had an infirmary of its own, where Black patients came in sick and did not always come out.

So the question how did they get there has no answer, and it will never have one.

Do not read that as a limit on this essay. Read it as the achievement of the institution.

And here is the thing about that. The school kept books.

There is an entry in the Dean’s Account Book covering a debt the school owed “to the students at the Almshouse for anatomical materials.” Somebody sat down and reconciled what was owed for bodies.

So it is not that the institution could not write things down. It wrote down the price. It did not write down the person.

The not-knowing is not a gap in the record. It is the record. It is the finished product, and it worked, and it was still working in 2018, when the descendants of these people sat down to write their own report and found they had no choice but to put the words we may never know into it.

The law, which was awake the whole time

There is a version of this where the state simply did not know.

It knew. Virginia’s criminal code, strengthened in the session of 1847 to 1848, is short enough to print entire:

“If a free person, unlawfully, disinter or displace a dead human body, or any part of a dead human body, which shall have been deposited in any vault or other burial place, he shall be confined in jail not more than one year, and fined not exceeding five hundred dollars.”

A year, and five hundred dollars. The legislature looked directly at grave robbing and raised the price of it.

And then it did not collect. The university’s archivist, in the same paragraph in which she cites that statute: public officials “generally ignored those engaged in grave robbing activities particularly when slaves or free blacks were the target.”

That is the oldest instrument in this archive and it is still the most reliable. You do not have to legalise a thing if you can arrange never to prosecute it.

But go back and read the statute one more time, because it does something worse than fail to be enforced.

“which shall have been deposited in any vault or other burial place.”

The law protects the buried. That is its plain condition. Disinter a body that was deposited somewhere, and you have committed a crime.

Now set that beside what the descendants had to write: “at least some of the EMSW Ancestors may never have been deliberately buried.”

Take a person from an almshouse. Take a person who died in your own infirmary. Take a person who was never put anywhere, by anyone, at all. You have not disinterred a body deposited in a vault or other burial place, and by the plain words of the statute you have not broken it.

The protection was never unenforced. For an unknown number of the people in that well, it was never available. Virginia wrote a law against opening graves, and the surest way to stay inside it was to make certain your dead had never been given one.

The unnamed

The theft did not only take the bodies.

Virginia Commonwealth University, describing the body that now speaks for the dead, calls it a council existing “to symbolically personify the descendants of the unnamed individuals from the East Marshall Street Well.”

The unnamed individuals.

Every one of them had a name. Somebody knew it. It is gone now, and it is gone for a specific and traceable reason, which is that the institution which took them had a policy of not writing anything down.

So a city built the thing that was destroyed. The Council’s members were nominated at public engagement forums and selected by a planning committee. They did not inherit this. They were asked, and they said yes, and they agreed to stand as family to a number of strangers that nobody can state exactly, whose names nobody will ever recover.

They made kin by decision, because the paperwork of kinship had been thrown down a well.

The remains were welcomed back to Richmond on 25 November 2019.