The disposal of the dead presented authorities with a practical problem that could not wait for the count to close.
The south shore of Lake Okeechobee in the last week of September 1928 was subtropical in temperature and still largely inundated. The bodies that had not been carried into the Everglades were in the water, in the mud, in the wreckage of the structures that had failed, in the fields. The conditions required rapid action. The sanitation logic of the situation was the organizing principle of the burial, not the identification logic.
Authorities answered the disposal problem with mass burial.
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The bodies recovered in the first days were interred in mass graves in locations selected by the county and state officials managing the disaster response. The graves were dug by work crews — in some cases the National Guard, in some cases labor organized through the relief apparatus.
The white dead of the south shore were, where identification was possible, buried in the cemeteries of the south shore communities in individual graves with markers. Where identification was not possible, they were included in the mass burials.
The Black dead of the south shore were buried in mass graves in designated locations. The largest received the dead from the muck plain in a trench dug in a low-lying area of West Palm Beach. The individual interment and the mass interment existed simultaneously, and the distribution of the dead between them was not random.
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The foremen who had kept their gangs on the south shore were, in these same days, conducting their own accounting of a different kind.
Where a man from a foreman’s gang had died and his body had been recovered and identified, the foreman knew. Where a man had been recovered and not identified — interred in the mass grave without a name attached — the foreman’s ledger and the burial record did not speak to each other. There was no mechanism by which an entry in the county’s burial record and an open line in a foreman’s ledger would find each other and close.
The foreman returning to Georgia with the men he could account for carried his ledger with lines still open. The families waiting for those men had no name of a cemetery, no row number, no marker to visit. In some cases they had no confirmation of death. Only the absence of the person who had gone south in August and not come back in October.
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The mass grave in West Palm Beach became, in the years after the flood, a site that the official record of the disaster did not feature.
It was not marked in any manner that would allow someone visiting West Palm Beach in 1940 or 1950 or 1960 to locate the site of the interment. The land above it was used, in subsequent years, for other purposes. The location was known to people who had been there in 1928, and it passed from them to others through memory rather than through any official designation.
For the Archivist, the absence of marking became an entry of its own.
A grave that is marked creates a site to which the bereaved can return, at which memory can be located, around which grief can organize itself. A grave that is not marked creates none of these things. The dead are in the ground, but the ground does not acknowledge them.
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The families of the Black laborers who had died on the south shore did not, in most cases, have the means to come to West Palm Beach to bury their dead according to the customs of their communities.
They learned of the deaths through whatever channels reached them — through the foreman who returned without their kin, through letters from survivors, through newspaper accounts that named the white dead and estimated the Black dead.
They were not brought to a gravesite. They were not given a gravesite to be brought to.
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What was buried in the mass graves of the south shore was not only the dead. It was the specificity of who the dead were. The mass burial converted individuals — with names, with families, with the communities they had come from and the communities they had arrived in — into an aggregate count that subsequent decades would dispute and revise without ever fully closing.
The foreman’s open ledger and the unmarked grave were two versions of the same problem: the systems that had organized these men’s presence on the south shore had no corresponding system for acknowledging their absence from it.
The ground received them.
The ground did not say their names.