Buried Alive or something so…

My diploma level 1 students are studying Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid at the moment. It’s one of my favorite novels to teach, and I’ve been looking forward to teaching it at this level for a long time. I’ve only ever taught it to second formers, and the intensified analysis of an advanced class will be a welcome change. As a sort of starter, I chose to read the first chapter to the class. Usually, if I read to the class, it’d be a poem or maybe a piece of drama. Prose is never something I’d read aloud at this level. However, I was in a whimsical mood last Friday, and I felt like being a drama queen, so I read chapter one as campily as possible. Here’s the deal though. This post isn’t about Annie John, it’s about a memory of something I heard as a child, and how this has affected my life. Chapter one is primarily about death, and Annie John’s morbid interest in it.

When I was a child I went to the St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Primary School in Kingstown, St. Vincent & the Grenadines. The school is part of an imposing complex of buildings constructed hundreds of years ago, when SVG was a happy British colony. There are spires, battlements (I always thought of them as such) and a bell tower. Over the years, the concrete (or whatever) has blackened and become pockmarked. I think it may be baroque. I may be wrong. Let’s work with that as a description for now, though. When I was little I was an altar boy; this complex (which, in addition to the school, houses a cathedral, pastoral centre and presbytery) has an actual crypt, with actual tombs. I’m just setting the mood here. 

Across the street from Kingstown’s bastion of Catholicism is its protestant stronghold, the Anglican cathedral. Where the Catholic place is dark and extravagant, the Anglican is grandiose yet elegant. It’s a cream and white building with no lack of surrounding grounds. Another major difference between the two sites is that the Anglican grounds are comprised mainly of a massive, archaic graveyard. The RC complex isn’t surrounded by anything except itself. 

At one end of the Anglican “yard” (directly opposite the St. Joseph’s Convent) is a stretch of empty land that has recently been developed into a Protestant parking lot. When I was a little boy my mother taught at the Convent. I would walk up the road from school, along the wall separating the street from the Anglican graveyard, turn the corner and enter the Convent. That empty plot of land was always a bit odd to me, being the only piece of undeveloped land in the area. There weren’t even any graves there. Or so I thought.

At some point in my boyhood, I discovered (and I can’t remember how - but I suspect a teacher told me) that there was a cholera epidemic some time in SVG’s past and all the dead were buried in a mass grave on this plot of land. I was also informed (again I can’t remember how or by whom) that sometimes people who were buried there weren’t actually dead, that cholera can sometimes make a person appear dead while actually being happily alive, but monumentally incapacitated. 

For years I could not look at that piece of land without imagining scores of people waking up underground, their eyes, noses and mouths filled with dirt. I would imagine these people slowly coming to the awareness that they’d been buried alive, and trying to claw their way out of the earth only to be thwarted by the decomposing flesh of their children, parents, or some stranger. I would imagine screams that couldn’t be uttered because mud caked people’s throats, eventually suffocating. I would imagine fear, pain, confusion, despair and extreme loneliness. I would imagine a child, like me, waking to the knowledge that he was buried alive and could do nothing about it. 

I have feared being buried alive since then. Apart from actually dying, being buried while accidentally alive is my greatest fear. I don’t want to be interred. I don’t want to be put in a metal casket and sunk in the ocean. I don’t want to be put underground. I want to be cremated. I want to be burned so that if I DO happen to wake up, it won’t be long enough for me to be aware that I’m supposed to be dead. 

That’s all.