On a hilltop a few miles east of Leesville in Vernon Parish stands a church. It’s a small red-brick building, with an adjoining Sunday school wing and an asphalt parking lot.
It’s called Castor Baptist Church, which locals pronounce “cast-AW.” From the parking lot, you can see the nearby intersection of La. 184 and La. 468. Beyond that, pine trees. Less than a mile away, cars whizz by on La. 28, the main road between Leesville and Alexandria.
Next to the church is a cemetery, a several-acre plot with more than 1,000 burials, some stretching back more than 100 years.
One day last fall, I met with Amos Ezell at the church. Ezell is 87, and has many of the records related to the cemetery.
From the church’s door we walked past the small playground and entered the chain link gates of the cemetery before climbing the slight incline to its center. Hundreds of headstones ranging from elaborate marble monuments to simple concrete rectangles set flush in the ground spread in every direction.
As we walked, Ezell pointed out notable graves and features of the sprawling graveyard, which includes military veterans of every American conflict from the Civil War through at least Vietnam. Several generations of my mother-in-law’s family are buried in the Castor Cemetery.
But on this afternoon, it wasn’t those graves I was interested in. Near the center of the cemetery, close to the top of the hill, is a simple grave marker maybe a foot by six inches, set in the ground. The inscription on it is simple, descriptive and maddeningly cryptic.
"UNKNOWN NEGRO."
That's all it says. No name, no date of death, nothing.
The marker is clear and easy to read. It certainly looks better than many of the older gravestones, some of which have worn away too much to be legible.
Another, several feet away, is older and appears to be concrete. It’s too weathered to read, But it’s the same size and shape as the "unknown Negro" stone. Ezell says he thinks it used to say the same thing.
Ezell pointed his finger at the legible stone before sweeping it toward the other.
“I think there are maybe several people buried under there,” he said.
The cemetery’s existing records don’t shed light on who might be buried there, when they died or who buried them.
Given Louisiana’s history, it’s not hard to imagine that the person met a troubling end. That’s certainly common enough in Louisiana. Enslaved people were often buried in unmarked graves and in small cemeteries, some of which have been lost forever.
Even after the Civil War, Black burials were often not treated with proper respect. Just an hour to the north and east of Castor is Colfax, the site of one of the worst post-Civil War massacres of Black Americans. There, dozens of victims were dumped in mass graves near the courthouse while their murderers were celebrated as heroes.
Castor Baptist Church Cemetery.
Many academics and individuals have done important and heartbreaking work on these sites and others like them.
At Castor, the situation appears different.
The "unknown Negro" grave is not the only anonymous burial marker there. There are approximately 15 others with “unknown” on them, all much more weathered. None of them mention the race of the grave's occupant.
Ezell has tried in the past to learn more about the grave. In 2013, he snapped a photo of it and put it on the website Findagrave.com in the hopes that it would generate a lead or two. In the 11 years since, his post has drawn three comments from visitors, none of whom gave any clue as to who it might be.
What is for certain is that at some point, somebody decided to mark the grave with the resident's race.
Ryan Seidemann, an attorney and cemetery researcher based in Louisiana who has examined thousands of graves across the southeastern United States, was stumped by it.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said after I sent him photos of the headstone.
His best guess, he said, was that it was some person who was perhaps passing through town and died without identification. It was not unusual, he noted, for coroners or the state to pay cemeteries to bury such people and pay for a simple marker.
Without exhuming the body, Seidemann said, it’s unlikely that we will ever know more about the person buried there, whether it was a man or a woman, old or young. Unless someone with information steps forward, we'll likely never know whether the person's family ever learned how their loved one's life came to an end.
All we have to go on is the gravestone, silent, tucked into an out-of-the-way church’s cemetery. A reminder that Louisiana’s past, even when it’s unknown, can still haunt.