Next to the Flushing Ambulance depot, across from the Flushing Cemetery, is 3..5 acres of fenced woods interspersed with grassy patches and light brush enclosures.

There are six inscriptions for negro servants of the wealthy elite who were buried in the monumental precinct across the street, on the manicured hill surrounded by more substantial barriers.

The ground is touted as an African American heritage site, where colored folks were buried from the 1860s to 1880s, after which it was used as a pauper’s cemetery again.

On the central inscription it is also noted that American Indians were also buried here and also some “others,” unspecified poor, who, unlike the Negro servants were ot given burial inscriptions—none of them, all anonymous.

The lie is exposed when the historical society let slips the term “slaves [modern for negro servants] and servants [modern for white servants]. There is also the mention of “a potter’s field” a place where poor whites were traditionally buried, and of five dated Cholera epidemics which carried away droves of Irish. The real give away that this melancholy ground, with its shaded weed-grown patches of layered gloom, is the term “paupers” which was never used to designate any English-speaking person other than the criminally poor, who, in a world where poverty was a capital offense, were denied their humanity to the last; shoveled into the ground like a dead rat, their bones eventually to be covered by human creatures worthy of pity, honor and remembrance, the household servants of color, now honored for having been buried here as martyrs against racist oppression, their hundreds of corpses negating the thousands of unmentionable whites who committed the ultimate sin of English-speaking America—being poor.

For this, the punishment is nameless oblivion.

Thanks to Mescaline Franklin for guiding me down this melancholy lane, shaded from both the sun and posterity.