Cemetery keeps history alive

Column

Blanche Benford wants to make it abundantly clear: "I am not much of a cemetery person."

She says this smack in the middle of what she has now firmly identified as an unlikely location: a little memorial park named for the Mount Carmel Baptist Church that a long time ago marked its northeastern boundary.

The place also goes by another name, the Ehren African American Cemetery, which establishes its bona fides as a historic site. It also establishes the origination of the relationship, now bordering on a romance, between Benford and this modest patch of central Pasco County ground.

For those just tuning in, a bit of an introduction is in order.

Benford, 66, a Dallas-area baby with a degree from the University of Minnesota, spent her professional life bouncing among American metropolises — Minneapolis, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans — that shared two noteworthy, if unrelated, characteristics: airports with significant Northwest Airlines footprints and lively racial interactivity.

The former provided employment, in sales and reservations, for 30 years; the latter brought an important sense of belonging, wherever she lit. All of which makes her decision to complete her career in Tampa then retire to Wesley Chapel — where in the area of race relations we still have ground to make up — an endless source of fascination.

Despite her recent arrival, Benford has not been idle on that front. A founding member and occasional president of the Black Caucus of Pasco County, she emerged in 2004 first as a transformative figure in the tumultuous renaming of Zephyrhills' Sixth Avenue for martyred civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., then as a reasonable negotiator in the subsequent compromise in which (like Lock Street/Callé de Milagros in Dade City) the city settled on a dual designation, half official, half ceremonial.

Benford's demonstrated blend of tempered feistiness, professional skills and reliability was in large measure why county Commissioner Pat Mulieri turned to her in 2007. At the time, Connerton was sufficiently hot to make an issue of delegating oversight for the rundown black cemetery on the development's eastern frontier.

This was not an idle concern. Occasional Pasco Tribune contributor and local black historian Imani Asukile says the county once had at least four African-American cemeteries. Now there are two. What happened? "They were paved over," Asukile says. "Developers come in; they need the property. It's a common problem."

This particular property — a 1-acre rectangle framed in barbed wire — would remain, as it had been since 1985, ultimately the county's responsibility. What Mulieri sought was a combination advocate/godmother.

At the time, "I didn't even know it existed," Benford concedes. Still, she leapt with both feet into her limited-liability authority, bringing the county's Black Caucus with her.

How could she decline? "God just dropped this in our laps," she says.

No, Benford is not a fan of cemeteries. But for this place, she is willing — she is compelled — to make an exception.

At least three dozen black Americans are buried here, their deaths unrecorded in any handy government reference. Except for a few names carved into crude wooden markers (removed and preserved by the local historical society) or rudimentary concrete headstones, they are anonymous.

Historians know only the broadest outlines. Ehren was a lumber town for about 30 years until the sawmill burned in 1920. As the community collapsed, descendants scattered, taking memories with them.

All that said, Benford knows their stories. Surely they were not much different than those recalled by her grandfather, who grew up in a laboring-class family in West Texas.

So she stands in this historic place, unremarkable except for a haphazard array of unmarked depressions carpeted in toasted oak leaves, and the vision in her head takes her breath away.

A pavilion will mark the ruins of the old church. There will be proper grass and tasteful arrangements of perennials, flowering in every season. A walkway paved in memorial stones will wander through it, and every now and then, benches for pausing, resting and reflecting.

At the moment, the cemetery's restoration is, to say the least, a work in progress. Saturday, marking weeklong Juneteenth celebrations — a portmanteau of June and 19th, the date in 1865 that slaves in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free — the cemetery is in for its annual cleanup. Festivities begin at 8 a.m.

Bring work gloves, rakes, insect repellant and maybe a lawn chair, Benford says. She would welcome volunteers with gas-powered leaf blowers, too. Most of all, pack your sense of reverence and awe.

"It's restful out here, you know?" Benford says. "It's just peaceful. I could bring a chair and my

e-reader and spend the day." She knows this: She would be among friends.