The sign: "Mother and Baby." On a gravestone, it's a story even shorter than the famous six-word work often attributed to Ernest Hemingway: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." In this briefest of novels though, there are three characters instead of two – the mother, baby and the person left to remember them.

"I wonder what went through his mind," said Margott Williams standing before the thick stone that marks the grave site of Mayme Beauchamp and her one-day-old baby, Elise, in Olivewood Cemetery. "What are the feelings?"

As one of the volunteers behind the nonprofit Descendants of Olivewood, Williams spends a lot of time on the lumpy plot of property tucked between a Grocers Supply warehouse and Interstate 10 just northwest of downtown. Olivewood, one of Houston's first African-American cemeteries, predates the end of slavery. Williams has read each headstone several times – or at least, the ones that can be read. But this one has always stood out to her. The mother, 28 years old when she died in 1921, was an educator. Records give her cause of death as eclampsia – a type of hypertension linked to pregnancy. Mayme lived just nine days longer than her stillborn baby, Elise, before joining her on February 18, 1921.

The two share a tombstone, a squat, simple thing, roughly twice the size of a typical headstone – perhaps to mark the double grave. On the stone's slightly slopped top, the engraver wrote the simple phrase, "Mother and Baby," echoing another mother and child often remembered in painting and sculpture, Mary and Jesus. In pietàs across Europe, where the form flourished, Mary is shown cradling her full-grown son after he's been killed: a private moment of mourning in a very public story. The form appears in churches as well as graveyards.

Here in Olivewood Cemetery, there are angels and lions but no pietàs. Just Mayme and Elise.



The place: Rain clouds darkened the sky beneath which Charles Cook worked alone in the cemetery. As he does regularly, Cook pushed a lawn mower around the roughly seven acres of fenced land that is Olivewood. The earth is uneven and ever changing. Water and time have eroded the back edge of the property so badly that headstones and gravemarkers slide from their original positions like props in a Dalí landscape.

"Olivewood is living history," Cook explained after cutting the engine and wiping his brow with a worn, red baseball cap. "Mother Nature will run its course and suddenly things appear." Cook is co-president of the Descendants of Olivewood, along with Williams. Gravestones re-emerge from the earth. New plots are discovered. Sometimes skulls and femurs even work their way to the surface.

"You live as long as you're remembered," said Cook, "so we're trying to remember Olivewood."

More Information On April 24, Olivewood Cemetery will celebrate its 140th anniversary at Trinity United Methodist. Events include a party, speakers and a workshop at the cemetery the following Saturday.

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The cemetery officially began in 1875, when the city's first black alderman, Richard Brock bought the property, but volunteers believe slave burials had already been taking place there. The site was platted for 444 graves. Doctors were buried there, their graves marked with the rod of Asclepius. Politicians and soldiers chose Olivewood as final resting spots. Even two African-American brides of Confederate soldiers, who could not join their husbands at the Glenwood or Washington cemeteries, are buried here.

But from the beginning, Olivewood was also home to the community's more humble members, their graves marked by basic headstones. "Some of these even came from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue," said Cook. Though it began as a Methodist cemetery, Olivewood hosts a range of beliefs, including many traditions that survived from West Africa, such as marking graves with seashells, broken dishes and pipes. Archaeologists estimate there are more than 4,000 graves here, the vast majority of them unmarked because their headstones have been lost or stolen, or because they never had headstones to begin with.

Most of the burials ended in the 1960s, though the most recent was sometime in the '80s. By the time Williams came to the cemetery to find a plot for her grandmother in the late '90s, the land was overgrown.

"You couldn't tell it was a cemetery," said Williams. Though her mother had been visiting and tending the plots that held their family members, much of the cemetery lay neglected. "It was just grass and vines and weeds crawling up the trees."

So she set out to clean it up – clearing the land, cutting back the weeds and documenting the graves that could be documented. She founded the Descendants of Olivewood, which became the cemetery's official custodians in 2008.

Many groups have helped out along the way with cleanups and blessings. But there's more to do.

Just this week, a geophysicist visited the cemetery with his family. "It's a shame it looks like this," he told Cook, who happily stops and talks with any visitors. "He gave me his card," said Cook, "so I'm going to put him to the test."

"Sign Language" appears Tuesdays in Gray Matters.

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