Love Cemetery - by China Galland (Paperback)

About the Book

Galland learned of an unmarked cemetery for slaves--Love Cemetery--in her Texas hometown. This is her struggle to help restore the cemetery that, in the process, uncovers racial wounds that have never completely healed.

Book Synopsis

One woman's struggle to restore an old slave cemetery uncovers centuries-old racism

When China Galland visited her childhood hometown in east Texas, she learned of an unmarked cemetery for slaves-Love Cemetery. Her ensuing quest to restore and reclaim the cemetary unearths racial wounds that have never completely healed. Research becomes activism as she organizes a grassroots, interracial committee, made up of local religious leaders and lay people, to work on restoring community access to the cemetery. The author also presents material from the time of slavery and the Reconstruction Era, including stories of “landtakings” (the theft of land from African Americans), and forms of slavery that continued well into the twentieth century. Ultimately Keepers of Love delivers a message of tremendous hope as members of both black and white communities come together to right an historical wrong, and in so doing, discover each other's common dignity.

“Galland captures the struggle to reclaim one small cemetery in Texas with such engrossing drama and personal detail that the story becomes something larger still-a universal struggle to reclaim the ground of Deep Compassion that lies untended in the human heart.”-Sue Monk Kidd

Review Quotes

Love Cemtery is a moving work of immense social consciousness and spiritual power written by a very gifted writer. While China Galland's book is part pilgrimage, part liberation theology, and part expose', ultimately it is a moving story of community and redemption. Racial injustice continues to be a wound in American life that calls out for particular and concrete narratives of healing. this book is just such a narrative, but an especially evocative one. Galland captures the struggle to reclaim one small cemetery in Texas with such engrossing drama and personal detail that the story becomes something larger still--a universal struggle to reclaim the ground of Deep Compassion that lies untended in the human heart. - Sue Monk Kidd
"There are sacred grounds all over the South where the departed spirits cry out for discovery and respect. Love Cemetery uncovers a sacred resting place near Highland Park, Texas. The living are not always with us . . . and the dead are not always gone. The tone is one of discovery, the touch is that of an historian, the feeling is relief that at least this one mystery has been solved." - Nikki Giovanni, author of Acolytes.
"A moving and inspiring account of race and history in a small town." - Booklist
"This is the riveting story of a remarkable effort to resurrect the dead. And it couldn't have come at a more crucial time. What Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz called our "refusal to remember" threatens, in the midst of a fantastic proliferation of mass media, to sever our links to the past and leave us a nation of amnesiacs sliding into the memory hole. Here is an antidote: The search by a handful of dedicated people, inspired by one woman's persistence, to uncover a long-neglected burial ground and give the anonymous folk interred there the voice denied them as slaves. Read on; I guarantee that once you start, you will not stop, and when you are done, you will have discovered the healing power of Love Cemetery." - Bill Moyers
The riveting story of a remarkable effort . . . when done, you will have discovered the healing power of Love Cemetery. - Bill Moyers
"The common thread woven through this year's Free Press list of top 10 Books For Spiritual Summer Reading is diversity... Galland's story about the discovery and restoration of an east Texas cemetery where slaves once were laid to rest winds up unearthing deeper attitudes about race and faith. " - Detroit Free Press