Nash Molpus, a second-year graduate student in Southern Studies, reports on the research project with local teacher and historian Susie Marshall.

Mrs. Susie Marshall is a 90-year-old, African American woman who has lived in Oxford, Mississippi, since 1923. She was a teacher for 41 years and a Jeans supervisor for 10 years. As a Jeans supervisor, Mrs. Marshall oversaw 36 one-room schools in Lafayette County. She is known around town as the local historian. In 2002 the Skipworth Genealogy group of Oxford asked Mrs. Marshall, as part their mission to record the local cemeteries, to identify all of the African American cemeteries in Lafayette County. There are 34.

I began helping Mrs. Marshall as a field work and photography project last spring and continued it into the fall as an independent study. Mrs. Marshall and I visited cemeteries from March of 2003 until December of 2003. Once a week we went out into rural Lafayette County to photograph and record the markers of each African American cemetery. The first visits were about accuracy and taking the perfect photographs. As time went on they became little adventures out in the county. This is an excerpt from my journal on April 16, 2003:

It is a hot, sunny day and Mrs. Marshall sports a straw hat to keep the sun off her face. The first cemetery we visit is Springdale. It is 14 miles south of Oxford on an old gravel road. The only markers we see are a trailer decorated with fake deer and Christmas lights, and a mailbox. Mrs. Marshall has a hunch that this is the right road. We travel down this dusty, one lane road for a while and see nothing. She tells me to keep going. I think it is looking very doubtful, and begin to worry that we might get shot. After about 10 minutes we come across a tiny cemetery on the right side of the road. There is no church or even a sign; it is just a cemetery. Mrs. Marshall says they still bury people here. We get out of the car, and as usual I begin recording names on the stones as Mrs. Marshall walks around calling out the names of people she knows. She has a stick to scrape away the dirt and a can of shaving cream to clean off the markers so I am able to read them.

Each trip I would want to understand and learn more about why we were going to these cemeteries. I was also curious about the people Mrs. Marshall knew out in the county. The obvious answer is that she is involved in different history projects and as a Jeans supervisor she traveled these roads many times throughout the years to visit teachers and families. This answer came to me after a couple of trips out in the cemeteries, but the real answer did not come until some of our final adventures. It hit me as I walked away from Mrs. Marshall’s home: Mrs. Marshall is doing this because she cares. She cares about these communities outside of Oxford; she cares about the people she knows who live near the cemeteries; she cares about the people in the cemeteries; and she cares enough to make sure their names are a part of history. Mrs. Marshall’s love for people is the reason she still makes it a priority to write down 100 names in a cemetery on a hot day, to spend four hours on back country roads each week, and to teach me through her words and actions the ways to remember and keep history alive.

The final product of our trips together is a booklet that consists of: two photographs, directions, and names of all 34 cemeteries. Copies will be given to Mrs. Marshall, Reverend Wadlington, and the University of Mississippi library. This project has been the most rewarding one I have ever completed. I will greatly miss my cemetery adventures with Mrs. Marshall. This is my final journal entry on December 19, 2003:

I walked around to the front of the church to take one last photograph, and when I returned, Mrs. Marshall’s back was to me and she was hobbling over to the left side of the cemetery. Everything was still, and the sun was brightly shining. It was the third cemetery we had been to that day. Mrs. Marshall slowly reached down to pick up a rose that had blown off one of the gravestones. She walked back over to a handcrafted white stone and placed it in the vase. Mrs. Marshall stood and looked at it, and then delicately brushed some of the dirt off of the gravestone. It seemed like time was standing still and finally she turned and walked back towards me. We silently climbed back in the truck and drove away. I realized I had just witnessed the reason we were here.