A grave situation

In the sweltering humidity of a Monday afternoon in Evangeline Parish, Joseph Alfred waded slowly through the still standing water, and now sinking mud, that had engulfed the old cemetery down on Shuff Road.
Alfred had left work to come and check on the condition of the tomb where his uncle Elijah had been laid to rest, and to put his family member’s minds at ease that their loved one had not been washed away.
“I was looking on Facebook on Sunday night and people were taking pictures of the high waters that was over here,” Alfred said. “So I knew I had to come out here and check on my family.”
After a few minutes, Alfred found the cement-incased tomb but the lid had been jarred open by the powerful flooding that occurred over the weekend, a massive amount of destruction that forced Governor John Bel Edwards to declare a state of emergency.
The only thing Alfred could see as he stared down inside of the tomb were gallons upon gallons of dirty water. There was no way for Alfred to tell if the coffin that his uncle had been buried in a little more than two years ago was still inside the tomb, or if it had been carried away by the powerful current that swept through St. Matthew Baptist Church Cemetery, one of the oldest African-American cemeteries in the parish.
The moment left Alfred struggling to find the words.
“This is.... I am speechless right now,” Alfred said. “God is telling us something right now.”
Families of those buried at the cemetery and members of the St. Matthew Missionary Baptist Church, located directly across the road, were in disbelief on Monday by the damage done at the cemetery and church.
Flowers and mementos left by loved ones had been washed away to the weeds in the ditch across the road. The cement crosses and grave markers that once stood on top of tombs had fallen off and now laid in the mud.
More than a dozen tombs had begun to tilt over in the ground, as the saturated soil which absorbed anywhere between eight to twenty inches of rain over the weekend, began to push the cement structures out of the ground.
The flooding at the cemetery and church, which sits roughly 30 yards away from a large gully, was so powerful that a handful of tombs were jarred loose and floated across the road to the back part of the church, where a collection of tombs and even a silver-colored coffin finally came to rest at the wire fence that separated the church from the field.
Rev. Freddie Holmes Jr., who serves as associate pastor at St. Matthew, had never seen anything like it.
“I came the other day and I saw some of the tombs and coffins floating around,” Holmes said. “This is just unbelievable.
“We are going to need someone to come out here and do some DNA testing to figure out who these folks are. Those tombs don’t have any markings left so we don’t know who is who.”
Later that afternoon, the Evangeline Parish Police Jury came and lent a hand to the church and cemetery. Jurors Daniel Arvie and Ryan Williams, who represent the districts that include the church and cemetery, were on hand to talk to residents, while Public Works Director Chester Granger and his crew arrived to pull one tomb out of the water.
A tomb had floated across the road and was lying upside down in a ditch. With a high-powered crane, Granger and his team managed to flip the tomb over and kept the watering remains of someone’s loved one inside, despite the breaking of the tomb’s lid. The tomb was then moved back to the cemetery on flat ground.
More time will be needed though to be able to fully put all tombs, and coffins, back into place.
“We contacted the District Attorney’s Office and he told us to come out here and put this tomb here on dry land,” Granger said. “We can’t put the caskets back into the tombs until they dry out or they will pop right back up.”
Even though the jury no longer is in charge of maintenance at the cemetery, like it did from the early 1990’s to early 2000’s, that didn’t stop Arvie, who has family members buried in the cemetery, from pledging change.
“We just have to find a way to help prevent this from happening anymore,” Arvie said.
The cemetery though wasn’t alone in being damaged.
The church found itself succumbed by the flooding as water rose as high as two or three feet inside of the old wooden structure with its tin roof, a building which already sits more than a half foot off the ground.
With the temperature rising outside Monday, the black waterlines could be seen in every room as the stench of mildew began to fill the air. The floors had begun to sag with soft spots every five feet or so, walls along the floor had begun to buckle, and the carpet and vinyl flooring that covered the majority of the worship area had been ripped away by the water or began to bubble.
This long-standing house of worship, which was founded sometime in the 1800’s, would be filled every Sunday with the buzz of window units and the joyful sounds of hallelujah and amen had now become eerily silent. A refuge for prayer and forgiveness had been made unusable.
“We can’t have no service in the church,” St. Matthew’s pastor of the past 43 years Freddie Durgin said. “It is a disaster in there. It is all messed up. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
For Durgin, whose car and house were flooded in Ville Platte, said that they are in the process of finding some sort of temporary home to hold services for his parishioners.
Durgin said, “We need some help. It is a mess.”