Researcher calls Pittsylvania County slave cemetery ‘hidden history’

The slave cemetery at Berry Hill is a piece of “hidden history” because people either wanted to forget a shameful part of the past or they just didn’t know about it, said a Sweet Briar College researcher.

“This has more to do with the continuing inequalities with black and white history,” said Lynn Rainville, a research professor in humanities at the college.

In addition, blacks in the postbellum South migrated north and to cities, making it difficult to keep their slave history and knowledge of their ancestors alive, Rainville said during a telephone interview Friday. That could have contributed to the lack of a wide awareness of the cemetery at the proposed Berry Hill industrial mega park site.

Rainville says she has no doubt that the graves there date back much further than the earliest-marked gravestone that’s visible. The oldest easily spotted gravestone gives an 1898 death date, more than 30 years after slavery ended.

Rainville said different burial traditions are probably represented at the cemetery, illustrating heavily African-themed burial rituals in the older, 18th-century plots for slaves with more recent lineage from Africa. As more slaves were converted to Christianity, burial traditions from that religion began filtering into those rituals, Rainville said.

Some of the graves at Berry Hill have mere indentations and little to no stones. That probably indicates they were never marked, the original markers didn’t survive, or flowers or other plants were planted at the head of the grave — the last a common African-American ritual, Rainville said.

Rainville, who has a doctorate in anthropology and archaeology and has studied slave cemeteries and African-American mortuary practices, said only about 3 percent of slaves’ graves are inscribed. It was illegal for slaves to read and write in Virginia, so an inscription would be an advertisement they could do so, Rainville said. Also, African-American cemeteries emphasized the group or family, so individual graves were not quite as important, she said.

Eighteenth century African-American burial rituals included breaking up the deceased one’s belongings and burying with them to ensure their spirit leaves with them, Rainville said. Iron and cowrie shells from the African coast were also buried with loved ones because they carried significance. As more slaves became Christianized, more crosses were carved into headstones and integrated into African burial traditions, Rainville said.

“People didn’t just lose their indigenous beliefs overnight,” she said.

Members of the community can learn about the site by talking to those who tend the cemetery and under-standing the significance of the site. Rainville said to look at the cemeteries as “open-air museums.”

“It’s a way to address the wrongs of slavery,” Rainville said. “To disturb these graves or forget them would add to the wrongs of slavery.”

The deceased individuals may not be in the history books, but they contributed to the society in which they lived, she said.

According to Virginia law, it is illegal to disturb a monument or grave in a cemetery, and doing so can result in a year in jail. Trespassing results in a $250 fine.