Creole Sketches/Whited Sepulchres
WHITED SEPULCHRES[1]
It is rather ghastly to have death in the midst of life as we have it in New Orleans; but ghastlier when it is presented without even the ordinary masks. The skeleton of our public closet is exposed to broad daylight. Are we becoming like the Orientals who never repair? — do we accept all things with the fatalistic Kismet? Our bat-haunted prisons and our ruined cemeteries seem to answer in the affirmative.
They are hideous Golgothas, these old intramural cemeteries of ours. In other cities the cemeteries are beautiful with all that the art of the gardener and the sculptor can give. They are often beautiful parks, in which shafts of rosy granite or pale marble rise in pleasant relief against a background of ornamental shrubbery; — birds are singing in the trees; — flowers are growing upon the gently swelling eminences which mark the sleep of the dead. There horror is masked and hidden. Here it glares at us with empty sockets.
The tombs are fissured, or have caved in, or have crumbled down into shapeless masses of brick and mortar; — the plaster, falling away, betrays the hollow mockery of the frail monuments; — the vases are full of green water and foulness; — the flowers are dying in their coffins of glass; — the crawfish undermine the walls to fatten upon what is hidden within; — and instead of birds, the tombs are haunted by lizards.
If we must have intramural cemeteries, at least let them be worthy of a civilized people. As they are, they are nightmares.
- ↑ Item, September 9, 1880.