On Oakland Cemetery

An immersive meditation on death and the discomfiting ambience of one of my favorite places to spend time wandering in Atlanta

For the first 46 years of its existence, Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery had no walls. Nothing divided the city’s dead from its living. It wasn’t until 1896, more than a decade after all of the plots inside the property had been sold, that the area was enclosed, demarcating the location as a space you might be either inside or outside of. The walls it has now are made of brick; at night, they chain the fences, locking the landmark in silence to itself near the center of the city, while just outside the walls the world goes on, surrounded on all sides by traffic, nightlife, thousands of renovated loft apartment homes.

The cemetery, as a landscape, is alive. In comparison to other major cities, Atlanta is green almost throughout; in fact, with more than 36% of its area covered in trees, it is the most densely forested urban location of its size, to the extent it’s often referred to as “a city in a forest.” And yet, to enter the grounds of Oakland — so named for its abundance of oaks and magnolias — feels like entering another world, or at least a world within a world, a limning space wherein time rolls back, revives a prior era, a feeling at once sublime and, just underneath that, horribly scarred.

In some ways, this transportative feeling must be derived from the age of the area compared to everything around it. The Union’s historic march under Sherman in the November of 1864 left most of the downtown area in rubble or flames; the cemetery and its neighborhood is one of the oldest remaining locations inside city lines, a rare physical relic among so much else reduced to ash. As a result, the cemetery acts as a kind of historical index to its surroundings; countless names of parks, schools, streets, and other landmarks find their name chiseled into family headstones and mausoleums. Nowhere could it be more clear that the ground we walk on is crowded with the legacy of those who came before us, for better and for worse.

A significant number of the headstones, particularly those on the original six acres of Oakland, are all but illegible, their namesakes and dedications worn to blur. Faint traces of engravings float over the flat of the stone like they might disappear altogether some day soon. Some of the inscriptions seem to weep, the water running for decades between the nubs of relieved language. Others, set face up in the ground, have turned a darker color, or stand speckled, whorled, pockmarked in wholly arbitrary patterns dictated by the weather, the light.

Other inscriptions, perhaps often by those who could afford more hardy arrangements, remain bold despite the visible wear of their cut stone, enduring their erosion, at least for now. “HOME AT LAST,” one headstone reads, solidifying the interred’s place below as if he was always meant to be there. Most tributary fragments speak grandly and say absolutely nothing at all, a pastiche of hyperbole and prayer. “Asleep in Jesus” is at least as popular around here as “Rest in Peace.” Others extend their metaphors still further, as if trying to command their direction in death by will alone: “Made perfect through suffering.” “Peace to his ashes.” “Passed through death into life.” “I died the death of the righteous.” “One more in heaven.” Then there are the more plainspoken, open inscriptions: one says, just, “Passed.” Another plot lies marked only with the title “Mrs. Duffy,” all other details buried like her body beneath a plot itself completely overrun with wilding ferns and rising weeds.