“3 years, 10 months, and 19 days...” That's what a woman buried on Mount Moor had lovingly carved into the tombstone for her child. "That's a mama who loved her baby", I said to my brother in passing. We read off their names, dates, and military service as we walked around the small grounds, hemmed in on every side by a new mall and its parking lots, in an area of Rockland County that was swampland when we were growing up here. There was actually nothing to see on the road from Nanuet to Nyack, but for this hidden little gem of a cemetery tucked into boggy marshland nobody else wanted, as fitting a historical tribute to segregation for ethnic minorities as ever.
Acadians, Cajuns, and Creoles shared the same fate, too. Bayou water is considered "bad" water, because mosquitoes give sickness to the people forced to live there. What the new laws couldn't wipe off the face of the earth, nature certainly could. It was an economical way to get rid of a despised people (often better than the European colonists around them who couldn't acclimate to this new place, similar as it is in climate to Europe, but that wasn't the real problem) through deliberate marginalization and severe economic poverty, except for one powerfully overlooked fact, and that was this: already-oppressed minorities often bond with similarly afflicted tribes, and so we did.
What was once a power play among the socio-economic elite, based on their weirdly outdated prejudices against "interbreeding", allowed our ancestors the relative freedom of marrying whoever they choose, which often meant mating with the much greater genetic stability present in the indigenous people who walked their way here, carrying their culture and robust good health with them. And so, it backfired against the minority elite horribly, which only angered the white man even more. We saw name after name of a people who lived over 80 years and more, way before modern medicine was available to them.
Unfortunately, their children didn't fare better. We saw a lot of markers and smaller headstones with one date etched simply into the stone, as places to memorialize their still-born babies before a naming ceremony could take place. I'd passed by the small cemetery many times, always rushing to make an errand on someone else's time, but this time, my brother went along with whatever I wanted. I priced out a few items in the bloated mall that are completely overpriced for this land and its economy, and we both left empty-handed, to visit my grandparents at their resting place. It only seemed fitting.
We were baffled by the overly ornate constructions of chain restaurants that we know are no good, wondering aloud how any amount of business could sustain such an obvious waste of space. Most of the square footage was blown on bad plastic decorations serving one purpose: to attract the eye of someone who'd obviously never been to a mall before, which is totally out-of-date for the area. I can't imagine that this "new" mall will up stay for very long, and that's a comfort to me, too. Long after these stores (with their cheap shoddy merchandise) will be plowed underground, our ancestors will still reside in relative peace, nestled in a little hillside that overlooks the real Palisades of Rockland, with their beautifully rocky facades. Happy Earth Day, 2016.
