On weekends and Memorial Days a few generations ago, if you wanted to find black St. Louis you would have done well to visit Fr. Dickson or Greenwood cemeteries. "My grandmother, daddy and them would go out and take care of our plot," Karen Mozee recalls. "I remember going out as a kid; it was very pretty." The family would picnic, and sometimes they would look for Karen's great-great-grandmother, housekeeper to Ulysses S. Grant, who is buried at Fr. Dickson though no one is quite sure where, "all daddy knows is, somewhere along the fence."

Greenwood actually had a formal picnic ground. Etta Daniels' family used to take her there on Memorial Days in the early 1960s to see her great-grandfather's grave, but visiting the dead was only part of it. As an adult Etta noticed that her white friends often reminisced about the things they did as kids in the Forest Park highlands; she has no such memories - couldn't have them. "So much of St. Louis was segregated that you used whatever facilities were available." The burial grounds, built at a time "when there was nowhere else for African-Americans to be buried except in potters' field," were solidly "in the community." So black families turned necessity into invention and fashioned the weekend picnic at the cemetery.

Now that tradition and the last generation that upheld it are gone, or almost so. In the 1960s, as segregation ebbed, black St. Louisans started having themselves buried in the big, formerly whites-only cemeteries and taking advantage of the glitzier Sunday amusements that had always been closed to them. The old black cemeteries went to seed. Weeds grew to six feet and more; vandals dumped garbage in the night: old refrigerators, unwanted building materials. Nineteen sixty-three, the year Etta's grandfather was buried at Greenwood, was "the last I can remember it being really decent." Burials stopped taking place at Fr. Dickson altogether in 1983; at Greenwood, in 1993. Strictly speaking, Etta doesn't think Greenwood cemetery ever legally closed. "My understanding was just that the conditions got so bad out there, funeral directors refused to do burials." What were once focal points of African-American social life became sore thumbs of history, waiting for something to sweep them away.

But memory is a persistent thing, and the memories of a handful of middle-aged African-Americans have led them to devote much of their free time and energy to preserving these two pieces of ground - although each in a very different way.

On a recent Thursday morning, Ernest Jordan, president of the Friends of Fr. Dickson Cemetery, is walking around the grounds in an old sweatshirt with holes in the elbows, picking up trash, doing whatever other errands come to hand. He's here almost every day, but often - like this morning - alone. In the years since its heyday, the cemetery has been surrounded by big new homes. Meacham Park, the most important of the African-American neighborhoods it was built to serve, was declared a blighted area and paved over with megastores. The Friends came together in 1988 to keep the cemetery itself from being chipped away. "As working people, black or white," Ernest comments, "when you don't have money, things are taken away from you."

In those early years perhaps 50 or 60 members came to meetings, mostly the older black women who had always played a central role in community life. Her mother pushed the young Karen Mozee into joining; "we did what our mama told us," she says. Volunteers had a lot of heavy work to do. The weeds, vines and brambles came practically to the front gate; they hacked it back to the little white house a dozen yards in. "I guess we were young enough and adventurous enough to do it," she says. But as the founders grew elderly, attendance at monthly meetings fell, and sometimes there wasn't a quorum for a meeting at all. "When you get to my generation or younger," Ernest says, "you just can't get anyone to show any interest. They tell me, 'Ernest, the only time I visit a cemetery is when I have to, when there's a death.' This organization is no different from any other: Getting people to stay involved is hard."

You can see the turning point with your own eyes: The first third of the cemetery is now open and grassy, a few dozen headstones popping up into view, the rest overgrown. Ernest has been able to keep those front acres in shape by himself ("When I used to work in corporate America," he says, he would come here after work, "get on a lawnmower in the evenings and just use it as my therapy") but back in Baby Heaven and down the hill, well: Community groups, school classes and would-be Eagle scouts have come out to help on rare occasions and beaten back the brush, but the brush has returned. Christmas in April worked two years to restore the little white office, but now "the gentleman that found our organization of interest isn't with the group anymore." The Friends don't seek partners, although they welcome them when they come. They would love to see Fr. Dickson listed on the National Register of Historic Places, become a park or a St. Louis attraction, but first and foremost they want it to remain a decent resting place for black St. Louisans - the famous, the personal relatives and the rest - and they're wary of too much involvement by people who might "take it out of the community."

Karen (now the vice president of the Friends) says she wouldn't mind if a responsible someone with deep pockets came along to buy the grounds, but "projects can become exploitation." Ernest, in his gentle voice, puts it all more bluntly. "I don't want this to be a front organization - I want it to be Friends of Father Dickson, black-owned, black-operated. If we lose, I want us to lose on our own account."

Up in Hillsdale, the decay within Greenwood Cemetery is only an extension of the decay that surrounds it. Along St. Louis Avenue you'll find burned-out houses and a billboard warning of the penalties for illegal firearms. No one is threatening to buy and develop this property. As Etta Daniels walks through the grounds, though, for an impromptu tour on a rainy lunch hour, she makes the place sound and look like a busy construction site. The front quarter of the cemetery is trim and attractive; the next, covered with stumps and neat piles of logs or woodchips, ready to be hauled away. Further back the headstones peak out from tangles of growth, but there are tiny American flags alongside those of the buffalo soldiers, flowers beside some others, willpower overcoming the brambles even where chainsaws haven't yet.

"We need expert advice on what to spray here," she notes to herself as she walks, before explaining how Greenwood was "part of the Victorian cemetery movement." Although Etta has relatives here, her motivation for founding the Friends of Greenwood in 1999 is more indirect. First, some run-ins with the eccentric former owner, Solomon Rooks, fed a general interest in cemeteries and genealogy; then she attended a conference on cemeteries in Jefferson City, through which she met a historian, Ann Morris, an UMSL archaeologist, Tim Baumann, and a grabbag of other St. Louisans who were also interested in Greenwood.

They didn't have personal memories or racial solidarity to bond them, only a common interest in St. Louis's African-American history, and once they formed the friends they set out to squeeze any aid they could find from anyone else who might feel the same way. They created a networking committee (to draw in outside partners), a program committee (to set up Memorial Day events), a grant committee (to apply for cash aid), a facilities engineering committee (to rent port-a-potties for public events) - all combinations and recombinations of the same 10 people. They met every Saturday to clean. "In the past two years, I've missed two Saturdays," Etta says, "and one, I was in Japan, and one, my sister had just died." Often they would bring along a crew of volunteers that one of their committees had managed to round up, like the 60-odd Missouri National Guardsmen who have worked there on five weekends this year. "We rented a chipper. They had a chipper and a lot of chainsaws. When you've got that many people you make progress very fast."

Alberici Construction donated a toolshed. J.S. Logistics (where Etta works) gave a chainsaw. Monsanto has supplied the Friends with weedkiller. Schools and churches from across St. Louis have come to clean up. The State of Missouri gave them money to help with the historical research they need in order to apply for the National Register of Historic Places. Perhaps most important, Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon sued Solomon Rooks for neglecting the cemetery, leading to a court order last year that took the property away from him. As Ernest Jordan admits, the black community doesn't have the clout by itself to get these kind of results, but the Greenwood group has broader ambitions to begin with.

"I would not like to see ownership of the cemetery go to a big conglomerate," Etta says, "but I don't think it's necessary that it stay in the black community." The cemetery might become a state park, an educational center, a nature reserve, one of the rare places you can actually touch St. Louis' African-American history. And, she emphasizes, "We talk about African-American history, but really all of this is American history." To that end, the hundred-odd people who visited Greenwood's annual ceremonies last Memorial Day included not just descendants of the honored dead, but stray St. Louisans who had heard about the event through the media. What's more, Etta Daniels says, they came in the right spirit: with lawn chairs in their cars. "They came," she said, "intending to stay."

Friends of Father Dickson Cemetery
A group that works to preserve the historic African-American cemetery (1903-83) at 999 S. Sappington Rd. in Crestwood. The Friends hold planning meetings once a month at the cemetery gatehouse; visitors are welcome.
Address: c/o Ernest Jordan, P.O. Box 220612, Kirkwood, Mo. 63122
Email: ejmadison@worldnet.att.net

Friends of Greenwood Cemetery Association
The association works to develop the Greenwood Cemetery (1874-1993), at 6571 St. Louis Ave. in Hillsdale, into a park and historic site. The Friends meet at the cemetery every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. for cleanup work.
Address: P.O. Box 741, Florissant, Mo. 63033
Email: legacy@sprintmail.com