Sunbury Grave Markers

Sunbury, Georgia was a Colonial seaport that once rivaled Savannah, which is about 40 miles north. Sunbury is now a tiny town, but in early 19th century America it was important center for cotton and rice, and later timber and turpentine. It remains important for the grave markers to be found there, especially those adjacent to the Sunbury Missionary Baptist Church, an African American congregation. The markers there may be unique in the United States, incorporating handprints, mirrors, shards, seashells and unique inscriptions. At one time there were wooden markers as well, but they are long gone. The WPA-era Georgia Writers' Project documented the greatest of those, a sculptural installation by local man named Siras Bowens. The last scan above is from a photograph of that monument taken in the late 1930s. There's a book titled The American Resting Place by Marilyn Yalom, and you can see some relevant parts of it on Google here.

I was lucky to have a chance to go there some years ago and take some pictures of my own.

Last summer I was in Paris' Pere Lachaise cemetery, and the memorials there may be more grand, but not any more impressive than these.

Charm Coins

Where there's fear and uncertainty, folks sometimes look for something that gives them an advantage, or protection. Sometimes that's an object, like a buckeye, or rabbit's foot or coin. Sometimes they're called an amulet, or a talisman. Or juju, gri-gri, or lucky charm. The word talisman evolved from the Greek word telos, which means result or purpose. Amulet comes from a Latin word meaning method of defense.

Anyway, over the years I've managed to find a number of coins with holes punched into them so that they can be hung on a string or chain. I've found them with histories of being from Memphis, Macon, Atlanta and St. Simons Island, GA. Typically they have been bought from black vendors at a flea market, and have always been matter-of-factly described by the seller as charms.

There's a wonderful book titled Drums and Shadows, which documents remnants of African culture among blacks living on the coast of Georgia in the 1930s. There's a part that reads "a silver coin is frequently worn on the ankle to insure good luck and to give warning..." But ultimately their power seems to yield to pragmatic concerns, as one woman acknowledged, "The folks around here used to wear five dollar gold pieces on their ankle, but hard times just naturally makes them gold pieces jump off."