2022, during the completion of this trail, a readily identifiable core function of TPL, an organization that claims as its mission every American should live within a 10-minute walk of a park, Peterson got a phone call. “Like, this is a bad joke,” Peterson recalls. “This is a very bad joke.”The caller had news. A retired police officer from Georgia, sleuthing a story about his own hometown’s origins, had discovered a secret Chattanooga had been keeping for more than a century.
“And in my heart I was like, ‘Please don’t tell me that we built a trail over a cemetery.’” But they had. And not just any cemetery — a scandal-laced potter’s field where, from 1882 to 1912, the community had dumped the bodies of its poor Black citizens, including hundreds of children, out of sight and, for more than a century, largely out of mind. I too had heard rumors of this godforsaken place and TPL’s wish to redeem it, which is what brought me to Chattanooga. I had spent months immersed in 19th century news archives and public records, trying to figure out who lay here and what message they might have for their abusers, for their descendants, for the community.
Peterson, who immigrated to the United States 10 years ago with little English and fewer prospects, is the one who finally asks the right question. A close friend recently had visited from Chile and died suddenly in Chattanooga. It had fallen to Peterson to ship his body home.
“That was like a very privileged deal — all the details and all the cultural differences we needed to consider,” she says. “But he was a citizen of the country, you know. I have a lot of friends that, they are not. And I actually haven’t answered that question, what happens with people here that are undocumented, noncitizens, and don’t have the money to be sent back?”
And that’s when it hits me. I am no longer walking through history. In December 2024, I am in the damn moment, a month before the world changes, before a long-forgotten burial ground begins to speak to those in Chattanooga today who are not refugees from slavery in Georgia, but from autocracy in Venezuela, gang violence in Guatemala, drug cartels in Mexico. What would this place mean for them, their families, their loved ones, if they were to die on an unsafe construction site, if their children were stillborn, if their elders simply expired for lack of health insurance?
Where would their bodies go? Would anyone tell the authorities? Would it be any different?
What Peterson, the Trust for Public Land, and the people of Chattanooga would do next, might just tell us.