Stories from the Hidden Cemetery

Stories From the Hidden Cemetery

IN POINT BLUE’S PAUPER’S GRAVEYARD, LITTLE LEGENDS LIVE ON

Story by Jordan LaHaye Fontenot • Photos by Olivia Perillo

When it rains in Point Blue, a single perfect pink lily blooms right behind the graves of four children. The two sets of twins each lived only for a day. They join about sixty others lying in the dark prairie clay beside the Bayou Marron, nestled under a shroud of trees in the corner of a crawfish field.

J.D. Soileau, the graveyard’s gentle overseer, points to the blossom. It’s a Rain Lily, he says, part of the amaryllis family. The significance of nature’s tiny brilliant gifts are not lost on him. In the spring, when the Mexican Petunias grow wild between the graves, he stops mowing the grass for a few weeks. The hulking Gardenia bushes in the corner, he explains, were likely planted two hundred years ago for their perfume, before the folks living in these rural areas bothered to embalm their dead. In the fall of 2020, volunteers with the local Catholic Daughters organization came and placed a single silk flower in a vase on each and every visible grave. On my visit one year later, the flowers had wilted in the way that fake flowers do; accumulating dirt and wear in a way that was a little sad, but also a little beautiful.

A retired schoolteacher and farmer from Point Blue, Soileau has been volunteering his time at the Leon Manuel Cemetery—more commonly known as “The Hidden Cemetery”—for seventeen years now.

J.D. Soileau has served as a volunteer caretaker of the Leon Manual Cementery—more often known as “The Hidden Cemetery” since 2004.

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Today used as one of Evangeline Parish’s three public graveyards, the grove is scattered with graves dated as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, with ornate blacksmithed metal crosses and plaques written over in French script. Soileau, a hobby historian, has discovered through his research that the crosses are identical to grave markers used in France. Very likely, either the crosses themselves or the tradition from which they were made came with the French or Acadian settlers in the eighteenth century. On the most beautiful of these, standing tall at the head of a brick-laid grave totally decimated by weather and time, reads in a handwritten scrawl: “Ici cit D. Dupléchain décédée a l’age de 67 ans et 8 mois le 7 de Octobre 1904. Adieu Per.” On many more, the dates are now illegible, and there are almost certainly dozens that are unmarked entirely. In the far corner, there is one that is marked by only a rusted metal pole, which Soileau explains is the axle from a buggy’s wheel.

Soileau has gotten to know many of the souls whose bodies lie here by way of the people who visit them, and by holding a strong finger to the pulse of the Point Blue community and its families. Telling the story of “Mer- Mer Pitchout”—for whom the graveyard’s neighborhood “L’anse á Pitchout”—was named, he casually mentions that her granddaughter Flo turned ninety-four in June. As he walks through, pointing to one grave or another, he says things like “Maudrey Miller from Reddell? That’s his grandparents. Related to Eula Miller and them.” Or “The ones over there are the Fontenots. The grandson or great grandson worked at the courthouse in Opelousas.” “That one,” he gestures, “lost a duel.”

Soileau was first spurred to start coming here by a rumor that his great grandfather and aunt were buried in the Hidden Cemetery, which at the time sat wild and abandoned—taken over by the invasive chicken trees. He never did find his family there, but he started cleaning the place up. Shortly after, around 2004, the Evangeline Parish Police Jury started using the site as a resting place for unclaimed and indigent bodies. Since then, along with general upkeep like lawn mowing and basic maintenance, Soileau has volunteered his time hand-crafting cement crosses to mark the graves of these forgotten dead.

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Today, whenever Ardoin’s Funeral Home in Ville Platte receives a body without funds to bury it, they’ll call the police jury and Soileau. “Ardoin’s will embalm you for free,” he says. “But they put you in a casket-shaped cardboard box.” After receiving word of a body on its way, Soileau will go out with a probe, searching for a free swath of ground, and he’ll mark the spot with a flag. The police jury will dig the hole, and later Soileau will come to set the cross into the dirt, a simple gesture of witness to a life once lived.

A woman named Elizabeth was Soileau’s first. When the hospital called her family to tell them she had died of an overdose, they didn’t want her. “Y’all can throw her in a ditch,” they said, according to Soileau. He remembers that he came to help dig the grave at the Hidden Cemetery, and that the entire family then showed up to watch. “They brought a big ole ice chest of beer,” he recalls. “Said ‘I hope y’all don’t mind,’ and popped the lid.”

Soileau says there are many reasons why bodies end up in pauper’s graves, most often simple cases of the funeral home being unable to find any family or connections to a person at all. Sometimes people can afford a headstone, but not a plot or a coffin. Often, they can’t afford any of it.

Sometimes it is more complicated, though. Lying just beside Elizabeth is Tiffany, whose grave is one of the few marked by an ornate modern headstone. When Tiffany died in 2008, she was supposed to be buried in Opelousas with her mother, who she cared for in her old age. But because she was transgender, her brothers told the funeral home they didn’t want to pay to bury her. “She was an antique collector,” says Soileau. “And she had a bunch of friends. They got her a nice headstone.” Years later, a couple of men—her brothers— tracked Soileau down to find out where she was buried. “They wanted to come and see her, and to say goodbye.”

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We walk across the grove to the treeline, where an aisle of Soileau’s signature crosses stand. “This one came with Katrina,” he says, pointing towards one grave near the center. He was a nursing home evacuee to Evangeline Parish who no one ever tried to find. “He didn’t have anybody. And when he died, they buried him here.”

Just a few slots beside him lies a Navy veteran, whose plaque was stolen from Soileau’s cross in 2016. Soileau noticed its absence right away and reported the theft to the Evangeline Parish Sheriff’s Office. The crime was covered in the Ville Platte Gazette, with an optimistic request for information. One can’t help but wonder about the person who wandered into a cemetery in the truest bluest middle of nowhere to steal a single twenty-four by twelve inch plaque, of all things. “They never found it,” says Soileau, “but I had another one made for him.”

The only other notable mention of the cemetery that I can find in The Gazette’s archives is the case of another crime, this one in 1984. The headline reads: “Deputies probing grave desecration”. On a Thursday evening following several weeks of rain, the great-great granddaughter of Mr. and Mrs. Soulee Lafleur had come to lay flowers upon their double grave, only to find it in absolute ruin. As written by then-Editor Ben Reed of The Gazette:

“The vandal or vandals, apparently wielding some sort of large sledge hammer, slammed their way through the brick and nine-inch thick concrete slab to get to the victims. The identifying cross was stolen from the scene, and the debris from the grave, said to be at least one hundred years old but maybe even more, dumped back into the brick vault, covering up whatever further damage they might have done to the coffin and deceased within.”

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Though the Sheriff’s department promised a thorough investigation, which would include exhuming the bodies beneath the rubble, a follow up article a few months later admitted that no progress had been made. As far as anyone knows, the vandals were never discovered. And the grave, still today an arresting pile of rubble at the cemetery’s center, was never repaired.

Other graves across the cemetery sit in various stages of their own kind of decay: cracks stretching cobwebby over their slabs, bricks missing like baby teeth. One of the old iron crosses has been totally encompassed by the century-thickened roots of a catalpa tree in the corner. Even Soileau’s crosses—marking the youngest of the grove’s residents—sink into the oft-waterlogged soil of the Chatagnier prairie, sometimes all the way down to their armpits, tilted just so.

Soileau will occasionally take time to spruce up some of the older graves, though he prefers to first get permission from the families when possible. He wanted to fix Mrs. Pitchout’s grave, which also holds her husband Paruse. Paruse died at the foot of a startled horse, after tapping it on the hip from behind. And as for poor Mrs. Pitchout, her nightgown caught on fire some years later. Soileau asked Mrs. Flo (who turned ninety-four in June) if he could break up the crumbling slab further, then return it to the hole as gravel. She gave her permission, and even had an updated plaque made for her grandparents using a chunk of the original slab— making their resting place one of the nicest in the Hidden Cemetery.

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One of the most noticeable graves on the property is the Millers’. An entire family settled beneath a California king-sized block of cement. Before that was put in, all of the family’s individual grave markers were broken, and one of the descendants had reached out to Soileau about getting them redone. “It ended up being cheaper to do one big block instead of four individual ones,” said Soileau. They preserved the iron crosses, though, poking out of that concrete bed like fossils in a sidewalk.

It’s around this unwieldy family tomb that one will see the largest concentration of children’s graves. “You see there were a lot of babies,” says Soileau. “In those days, children died so much more often.” He says that many of them had likely died of le grand fevier, the Yellow Fever epidemic that plagued Louisiana throughout the nineteenth century. Watching me look closely at one set of old graves—arranged side by side—Soileau names one, “Ophelia”. “She and her baby right here died almost on the same day,” he says. “He was four.”

Walking towards the back corner of the graveyard, Soileau tells me that one of the most fascinating things he’s witnessed since he’s started coming here is a tradition practiced by a Black family who used to visit often. “The last time they came, the old lady—she was from Eunice—was in her nineties,” he says, noting that it had been at least two years since they visited. Led by this matriarch, the family would come to the cemetery each year before All Souls Day—visiting ancestors who had died long before most of them had been born. Pointing at little piles of broken glass and a cracked red plastic cup, Soileau shares that one of the little girls had once explained the ritual to him. “On All Souls Day, the souls come back and are thirsty.” So, family members set out jars of water for their dead. The broken glass was the doing of last winter’s freeze, he explains.

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1984 Gazette article, the Hidden Cemetery was once a shrewd hiding place for people who escaped slavery. Though difficult to definitively verify, this accounted history is supported by the graveyard’s proximity of the Bayou Marron—the word “Marron” perhaps being derived from the word “marronage,” which historically refers to groups of enslaved people who escaped plantations. “Marroons,” as these groups were called, often went on to form independent communities of their own in the swamps and backwoods of rural Louisiana.

Though this wooded corner of the vast Acadian prairie looks undoubtedly different than it did two hundred years ago, it isn’t difficult now to see its appeal as a refuge, as a place away from the confines of society and its cruelty. There’s something, in this quiet strangeness, that feels enduringly safe. A place for the forgotten, the unwanted, and the formerly enslaved to rest unbothered.

“There are so many stories about this old cemetery,” says Soileau, then adding that this is probably true of most cemeteries. Death draws out lore, certainly. Existing just beyond our understanding, it pricks the imagination. But perhaps it’s just the nature of the things—lives and all they once held, crowded together like old books.

“Some people even believe there is buried gold here,” laughs Soileau. He leads me down a hundred-or-so-yard path through the woods, passing a lone headstone here and there. I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but it wasn’t a massive, perfectly round hole, deep enough for a grown man to stand in and wide enough for six or so others to join him. “When I first started coming out here,” says Soileau, “I thought that maybe it had been dug as a means to hold water for when people came to whitewash the graves.”

One day though, he learned the real story from an old man from the neighborhood. “He said they had heard all kinda stories about money over here left from the Civil War. Gold. So they came out here, about four of them. They came in the middle of the night for some reason, with lanterns and a jug of wine. And they dug and they dug and they dug. They ran out of wine. And they didn’t find anything.”

Soileau says that the gold digging storyteller’s daughter was a classmate of his, who later told him: “On that old man’s deathbed, he was still talking about the gold in the Hidden Cemetery.”

Olivia Perillo