Cover Story
It’s a truism that the human lifespan expanded, incrementally but markedly, during the 20th century. This is a matter of dry statistics printed in black and white. The fading inscriptions on the gray-green tombstones of the 19th century, however, suggest the personal impact of an earlier mortality.
Young children were especially at risk. During the cholera epidemics of 1849 and 1850, the “number of children [buried in City Cemetery] was often equal to all other burials,” write Carole Bucy and Carol Kaplan in The Nashville City Cemetery. Burials of children outnumbered adults three to one in Temple Cemetery in the 1860s. In 1887, infant deaths comprised almost 50 percent of the total deaths among African Americans. Children of privilege were not immune. In the McGavock family graveyard near their Carnton plantation house stands the tomb of John Randal (June 5-Sept. 11, 1851), carved with the symbol of innocence, a recumbent lamb.
Marker after marker in City Cemetery testify to the fatalities of women, frequently due to the hazards of childbirth. Ann Rawlins died at 21, Mary Macon Cannon Bryan and Lydia Jewett at 24, Sarah Ann Gray Walker at 28, to name just a few.
Louisa Gordon Zollicoffer lasted longer, to age 38, but the price she paid was bitter. When she died in 1857, her death was recorded as “sudden,” according to Bucy and Kaplan. But what seemed sudden then takes on an air of inevitability today. Louisa died after the birth of her sixth living daughter, having already buried five sons and two other daughters as infants.
Nashville’s Bordeaux Cemetery reminds us, however, that infant mortality is not merely a thing of the past. Relentless rows of flat granite rectangles—“Infant Butler 1987,” “Baby Girl Harper 2001,” “Baby Girl Beasley 2001”—record the loss of children who didn’t live long enough even to receive a name.
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|