For the first 80 or so years of its existence, Holt was mostly used by the city coroner to bury unidentified or indigent people. Some were patients at local psychiatric hospitals whose bodies were unclaimed after their deaths. Buddy Bolden, the legendary jazz cornetist who spent the last decades of his life in treatment for schizophrenia at the Louisiana State Insane Asylum, was buried at the cemetery in an unmarked grave. Holt became an almost exclusively Black space in the 1960s, when the city moved the coroner’s burials elsewhere, leaving it to be used primarily by low-income Black families in the surrounding area. This shift marked the beginning of the period of municipal neglect that continues today.
“When the cemetery became a de facto segregated space, city services completely abandoned it,” explains Emily Ford, the city’s superintendent of cemeteries since late last year. “The disastrous conditions at Holt starting in that period were absolutely a product of racism,” she says. By the 1980s, conditions there had deteriorated so much that city officials decided it needed to be closed. But nothing ever happened.
Today, the city continues to provide almost no maintenance or oversight in Holt. City management keeps no formal records of the burials—despite being legally required to do so—and leaves it up to Warren Ernest to decide when a grave should be reused, based on his memory of how recently it was visited and how well tended it appears.
“I’m like their little spy,” Ernest says with a grim laugh. When he digs up an old grave, he seals any human remains he finds in garbage bags, then puts the bags back in the hole before making a new interment, to keep the bones separate. (Under state law, human remains cannot be moved from their original burial location without consent from next of kin. The law says nothing, however, about exhuming remains and putting them into garbage bags, as long as they stay put.)
Though Ernest has been working as a gravedigger at Holt since 1980, when he was in high school, he is no longer employed in any formal capacity, and receives no benefits or compensation from the city. He digs the graves with a shovel, sometimes in hundred-degree heat. Families pay him in cash. Ford views these informal employment practices as further evidence of the city’s longstanding neglect of the cemetery. “The story of Holt is in many ways a story of mistreatment of Black bodies,” she says, “from the people buried there to the men that do the digging.”