This, Our Passing: White Rock and Old City Cemetery

Day 7: A poem in honor of Councilman Thomas Jefferson Anderson (1853-1921)

Listen to the poem here, and read along below:

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This, Our Passing: White Rock and Old City Cemetery (T.J. Anderson III)
Lynchburg, Virginia

The morning sun washes cold slabs
of the dead who proudly guard
this gray road that marks my entrance.

Nestled in tangles of periwinkle
this White Rock Cemetery with its relics and tomb stones
like chipped and broken teeth clotting the earth.
I see a strong, loose-limbed
black man trimming the grass.

Could this have been you great grandfather
standing at the lawn’s edge of Old City Cemetery
between pebble and path?
What it must have been like
to walk those rows, pick those weeds
from some of the very people who may not
have seen you as a man,

those wouldn’t invite you sit down
with them at the dinner table
for a well-appointed meal.
Perhaps the very same who caused
you to tip your hat, cross the street
when one of their belles came striding through.

But they are under the dirt now, no longer stepping
out of wagons and Model-T Fords,
wearing bonnets or wide brimmed hats
to block out the sun. The heat is on them,
on this land where you pushed your clippers
under the compost of leaves,
and city council papers
where you pushed your pen
and signed your name.

At this age you notice things;
the way this late moon morning
slowly vanishes behind the willows,
the way the sun comes rising
up to give light on the opening
of what you hope
will be a new day for all of us.

Locomotive engines on tracks, lonely whistles that called your children
to pack their bags and move North, a place you’ve never been.
I know why you let them go,
you staying here
to work the wrought gates.
You staying here
to assist a customer with brilliantly red apples,
brown grains of wheat, stew
meat and rhubarb from your market stall.

Oh Great Grandfather, it is always here that I see you
standing between long limbed trees and bright celestial sun,
between the clouds of freedom that telegraph your dreams.

Beloved father, husband, churchgoer and councilman.
Image of you rising to appear in a poem,
census records, clotted ink script on a death certificate.
Were your children there to send you off?
Who took up their places
behind the coffin-carrying carriage
to hold up flowers, to survey Lynchburg’s seven hills
rising and falling off the backs
of the enslaved as well as the free.

The James River courses its way, snakes through your life,
which is now mine. like the horses that pull the coffin,
the truck that brings the extra dirt to fill in the whole six feet.
What was it like to stand at the borders of stone pathways
and manicured lawns to witness the lines where we salute the dead,
to hear the shutter of falling leaves
to see the same ancient oak that witnesses our passing.

Jefferson Anderson. Photo Credit: Lynchburg Museum, Courtesy of Old City Cemetery.

Poet and musician T. J. Anderson III is the Great Grandson of (Thomas) Jefferson Anderson, Superintendent at Old City Cemetery and one of five African Americans to serve on the Lynchburg City Council from 1885-1889 (2 terms). T. J. Anderson’s most recent publication is t/here it is (Omnidawn Press 2022).  He currently teaches at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.

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