Ruth Cofer Cemetery is much more than a “potter's field”
Ruth Cofer Cemetery is on the side of a hill near Silverdale. It’s behind a roadside stretch of woods close to the mall. The land surrounding the cemetery is overgrown in kudzu vines and a tall black iron gate blocks the road to the place.
A sign outside the gate demands that no living flowers be planted there. No tombstones are allowed. No monuments of any sort.
Plastic flowers or momentos left on the graves will be gathered and discarded at the caretaker’s discretion. After sundown no one is allowed, but that doesn’t matter because no one ever goes there anyway.
This cemetery is better known as Chattanooga’s potter’s field. It’s the final resting place of the city’s panhandlers and roadside preachers, old children dead of small pox, unclaimed prostitutes and faceless murder victims. Nursing home refuse and old convicts—any dead person without family or friends or (most importantly) money on their name is laid to rest in the potter’s field.
Prisoners from the county jail down the road dig the graves. A local minister is found to donate his time and say a few words, the dirt is thrown back in the hole and that’s the end of lives such as those.
The term “potter’s field” is the old common name for such places in America. The term is of Biblical origin and in the New Testament refers to a place called Akeldama. Akeldama was a field near Jerusalem from which clay for the local potters was dug from the ground.
After the field’s use for a source of this clay had come to an end such a place, already full of trenches and holes, would become a graveyard for strangers, the poor, and anyone else who could not be buried in the orthodox cemeteries.
The Biblical scripture that gave rise to the name is Matthew 27:3-8 and refers to the thirty pieces of silver Judas Iscariot had been paid to betray Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane:
Then Judas, who had betrayed him, when he saw that Jesus was condemned to death, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders,
Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that.
And Judas cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.
And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not lawful for us to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood.
And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.
Wherefore that field was called, The field of blood, even unto this day.
“Field of blood” may have been a little too graphic to fall into colloquial usage so these burial places of the poor and unclean became the potter’s field. In Ruth Cofer Cemetery there are no concrete benches or statues of mournful angels looking down. No cherubic stone children playing lyres. Marble arms of Jesus are not outstretched to welcome anyone. There are no tree-lined paths or any of the normal peaceful cemetery consolations. There’s nothing there but dry grass and bugs in the air.
The emptiness of the place is disturbing. It lacks the sense of being hallowed ground. Forest Hills Cemetery at the foot of Lookout Mountain is a resting place for royalty by comparison. All those dead Luptons and Davenports have monuments that will last for centuries.
But at the top of the hill there where the dry grass meets the woods, you can turn and look back towards Chattanooga. That old familiar slow rise and steep fall of Lookout Mountain is on the far horizon. In the foreground, at the bottom of the hill, are three white crosses that stand impossibly tall along the highway down below.
A nearby church called The Crossing spent $700,000 to erect the massive icons. The Crossing Church erected the crosses to represent the itinerant preacher called Jesus who was betrayed by Judas Iscariot two thousand years ago.
This itinerant man, who members of The Crossing now worship as God, stood atop another grassy hill not long before his death and said to a crowd of people gathered before him:
Blessed are you poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you that hunger now: for you shall be filled.
Blessed are you that weep now: for you shall laugh.
Blessed are you, when men shall hate you and when they shall separate you from their company.
But woe unto you that are rich! for you have received your reward.
Woe unto you that are full! for you shall hunger.
Woe unto you that laugh now! for you shall mourn and weep.
It is unknown whether The Crossing is aware that the city’s potter’s field is so near their venue. It is very strange that there is no monument to the Man who spoke those words in that poor place. There is nothing there that echoes those blessings. There is only a silence over the graves.
It’s not the peaceful quiet of a quaint country graveyard or the majestic tranquility of the historically preserved Forest Hills Cemetery at the foot of Lookout Mountain. In the potter’s field it’s the silence of scared animals. Many animals become completely silent and motionless when a predator is near. While foraging across plains or in woods, for example, animals who move in herds make little sounds towards one another as they graze.
They make their little familiar-voiced sounds to let the others know that all is well and they are not alone. A sudden silence amongst them impels fear. Silence means something has come that is threatening. Their terror does not arise out of a sudden animal shriek but because a still silence has fallen.
Humans are no different. People who study us have found that when left in solitude and deprived of all sound we hum or sing or talk to ourselves. We do anything to hide from silence. Going through everyday life we are completely unaware of most of the sounds that constantly assail us. But when a complete silence falls we become immediately uneasy.
The turn-key guards in the jail at Silverdale down the road know this very well. Cacophony in those cages is normal. A sudden silence amongst all the inmates means something is about to happen. This is the silence in the evening at the back of the potter’s field.
In a house on top of the far-off mountain there once lived a girl named Marie. She went to the same fancy school as her friends up there. At home, her father was a drunk. Her mother didn’t know what to do about it so her mother did nothing. Marie enjoyed the things that come from up there but she got nothing from her family. She suffered accordingly but was always somehow the most beautiful girl on the mountain.
One winter night, it snowed in Chattanooga. The mountain as always had more snow than the valley. Snow up there makes cozy warm coffee holidays and fairy tales of the morning. Marie woke and pulled back the curtains in her room as all children do on snowy mornings. Downstairs her father was drinking whiskey and her mother was somewhere.
I was drinking with Marie one night and she told me a story of taking her bicycle out in the snow that morning. Bundled in her coat and scarf and half-tied boots she rode in circles around the usual mountain paths. After a while, because no one was looking, Marie took a different path.
She went pedaling down the old tree-lined sidewalks. No cars were out so she took her bicycle out onto the snowy mountain road. Marie laughed and said she was laughing the whole way down that road.
She surely knew the trouble that was coming but down the mountain she went anyway, all the way down to the city where everything was different.
What happened after that only Marie knows. Because when Marie told me this story she shook her head laughing and looked away. She didn’t tell anything else. With a faraway smile she said, “It was a dumb thing to do,” and filled her glass up with wine again.
Marie’s dead now. How or why doesn’t matter much. It was a quiet death. The house she lived in when she was a girl on the mountain is home to another family now. The new family seems to live a quiet life. They rake leaves in the fall and smoke comes out of the chimney in winter, the same as all their neighbors.
Marie is at rest beneath a great maple or oak tree full of leafy life and singing birds somewhere, I’m sure. There’s surely a marble stone that says her name and memorializes the years she lived, and flowers. Marie is not buried in the potter’s field. But it’s a good place to remember her.
There’s a spot in Ruth Cofer Cemetery marked by very small stone bricks arranged in the shape of a cross on the ground. Years ago some person arranged the bricks this way to remember a bunch of children who died and were buried there.
Nobody knows the names of the children. There are only numbers engraved on the small stones.
No one can say what their laughter sounded like or what were their favorite games to play. Nobody remembers these children chasing leaves when they fell or their faces when they saw their first snowfall.
There are no monuments or flowers allowed in the potter’s field. But they couldn’t have been much different than Marie. Surrounded by nothing up there it’s good to remember her. Otherwise those children may have never existed at all.
I sat on the hill at Ruth Cofer Cemetery and wrote this story. I sat there as darkness fell. Lookout Mountain disappeared in the dark and I saw the three white crosses down below become lit up in beams of artificial light. Car lights went up and down the highway.
My fingers got cold after a while. I ran out of cigarettes, and cheap whiskey only makes you want more. There’s nothing there but the story is done. The story is that there’s nothing there.
The itinerant preacher that Judas betrayed said: “You will have the poor with you always, but you will not always have me.”
Sitting on the ground in the potter’s field, I knew that prophecy had come true.
It started getting dark and I had to go before that tall black iron gate closed and locked me in the place.
Chattanooga resident Cody Maxwell is a longtime contributing writer for The Pulse and is the author of “Chattanooga Chronicles” and “16 Cantos”. Reach him at codymaxwell@live.com