We pull up in front of a small
Baptist church off the main road, just outside of Athens, Georgia. My brother
leads us through some thick brush into the woods behind the parking lot. At the
edge of the woods, there are a couple of modern gravestones.
We walk further into the woods.
The last light of twilight is on the horizon.
Standing amidst the dark trees, we
notice nothing out of the ordinary…at first. If you take a closer look at the
ground, however, you will see them.
The graves. Where the slaves were
buried.
They are barely
recognizable—shallow depressions in the earth, just the size of a human body.
All these years later, the earth still sinks down over the final resting places
of these people. An unmarked flat stone has been placed at the head of each
grave, the only manmade marker the tombs have received.
As we stand amidst the ancient
stones and cold pine trees, my brother explains how he found out about the
slave graveyard.
