Unvisited Tombs

Reckoning with the incalculable value of hidden lives

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to visit George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate with my family and two friends. It was a beautiful sunny day, the views and the company equally wonderful. We saw the kitchen and ornamental gardens, marveled at the mansion’s neoclassical design, and examined the greenhouse technology that allowed Washington to keep palm and citrus trees alive during the cool winters. Our son Thomas particularly liked the sheep.

We also visited the Washington family graves. Here signs are posted demanding silence and respect, and tourists file past one by one to stand before the brick mausoleum housing the tombs of America’s first president and his wife, Martha. Nearby stand multiple obelisks marking the graves of other family members. Even a completely ignorant observer would have concluded that this was a place where important persons were buried.

Then we turned to walk into the nearby wood, following a dirt path approximately one hundred feet to another monument, its design modern and rather less august. This is the Slave Memorial erected in the 1990s, at a time when Americans were beginning to show greater interest in this aspect of our collective history. Here is the other half of the Mount Vernon story, for the aristocratic life of the Washingtons was made possible not simply by their fortunate births and George’s successes on the battlefield, but by the continual toil of darker hands.

The greenhouse that allowed tropic plants to be grown was made possible by hot air from the stove room, which I was able to view. The signage explained that the enslaved persons at Mount Vernon would split the logs manually, hacking at the wood again and again until large piles were produced. The fuel was then fed into the stove around the clock to provide the constant heat the plants needed. A slave would bend over the blazing fire day and night, no doubt sweating profusely and likely suffering burns. All this for some pretty trees.

The crops that were harvested at Mount Vernon, the cloth that was stitched, the silver that was cleaned, the lawns that were mowed: nearly everything was done manually by persons working in the South’s notorious summer heat. When the sun finally dropped below the horizon and the day’s work was done, they would retire to bunk rooms where they slept one on top of the other, with hardly anything in the world to call their own. They could not leave. They had only what their master and mistress deigned to give them. They were not treated as persons, but property. Even their family members could be taken from them at any time.

The story of America is not only that of plucky entrepreneurs who set out from the old European kingdoms to seek a better future in the New World, nor those who sought religious freedom and the creation of a kingdom of God on earth. It is also about millions of people who were brought here against their will, many dying on the way, divided from those they loved, forced to work in conditions we would deem inhuman. These hands too built America.

As I stood there by the Slave Memorial, I saw something strange among the trees: rows of rectangles marked out with string, with small memorial stones set on those closest to the path. This was where the slaves were buried, their resting places unmarked, their memory covered up by the falling leaves of the trees. Here, a stone’s throw from the grave of America’s greatest Founding Father, they lay in silence for two centuries, their very existence forgotten: swallowed by the earth without ever having tasted freedom.

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As I took in that scene, I was struck with a profound sense of grief, and I remembered a quotation from the end of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch. Having related the story of her heroine, Dorothea, who ends up being a person of little social consequence, Eliot makes the following observation.

“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”[1]

For many years, the tombs of Mount Vernon’s slaves were unvisited. Their hidden lives were not seen to be of much value. The passing of time has now produced a moment of reckoning: specifically, a reckoning of how much we owe to people like them and how much worth they truly possessed.

But America’s slaves are hardly the only persons to lead hidden lives or rest in unvisited tombs. Most of us do not even visit the tombs of our own forbears with any regularity. The majority of Americans with whom I speak are as unaware of their own ancestors’ history as they are of history in general.

This is not because Americans are uniquely ignorant or uncaring. In fact, it is not possible for human beings to take full notice of every person on planet earth, nor of all those who have gone before us. The human brain cannot hold so many memories. We are forced to pick and choose: to elevate some people and abandon others. So, we remember George and Martha Washington’s names, but not those of the hundreds of persons in their employ.

Most human burials have historically been unmarked. The vast majority of human names are forgotten, the details of their lives lost in the sands of time. Does this mean that their existence did not matter? Hardly! We would not be who we are without them. Our lives are entirely dependent on the countless sacrifices of those who came before us, most of which we will never learn about and thus will be unable to honor individually. The only honor we can show them is a general gratitude for the fact that we live and breathe.

Terence Malick’s film A Hidden Life was inspired by that quote from Middlemarch. It shined a light on another life mostly forgotten: that of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian who refused to swear allegiance to Hitler when he was drafted into military service and was subsequently executed. The film depicts him being asked on multiple occasions what value his single act of defiance will have at a time when such things are kept secret and millions of people are dying in the Second World War. Is it worth abandoning his family to a life of poverty when only God will see what he does?

Jägerstätter did eventually come to the public’s attention. The Roman Catholic Church, to which he belonged, declared him a martyr and beatified him. Now, a feature film has been made about his life, bringing his story to a new generation. One might say that history has vindicated Jägerstätter’s choice, but as he sat in a prison cell contemplating his fate, the threat of anonymity—that his sacrifice would be forever hidden—surely weighed on him.

I too feel the threat of anonymity. Human beings want to be remembered. We want something of ourselves survive after we die. We fantasize that sometime after we pass from this life, our true significance will be discovered, and people will file past our tomb in reverence, silently honoring the suffering we endured and the things we achieved. But in all likelihood, my life will be forgotten a few generations after I expire, and no one will know about the things I endured. They may enjoy things I added to the human story without ever realizing it was I who added them.

This does not mean that my life has no meaning. In fact, I increasingly see the value of a hidden life. Even if my tomb is unvisited, the meaning of my life will endure. Even if my words are lost forever, I will have contributed to the great human epic. And if this entire world should perish in flame, and there is no one left to remember anything, still these precious lines will be true.

“As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives,

And at the last He will take His stand on the earth.

Even after my skin is destroyed,

Yet from my flesh I shall see God;

Whom I myself shall behold,

And whom my eyes will see and not another.

My heart faints within me!”[2]

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[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/145/145-h/145-h.htm

[2] Job 19:25-27. The 1995 New American Standard Bible, copyright The Lockman Foundation.