The reaper and a spandexed vigilante pose for their mother behind a weathered headstone. Both peculiar subjects are barely a foot higher than the faded monument—by looks, no older than 12. The vibes are dour: Nobody smiles except the adult on the other side of the camera, wearing a witch hat. The only ordinary things in Howard Street Cemetery around this time of year are the dead.
This plot of land was once an open field where a man was executed for witchcraft by pressing (boulders and the like) and afterward became a depository of unwanted New England corpses—the poor and colored. Now it sits prim before soft-green and blue three-story homes with hybrids parked in freshly paved asphalt driveways. Below the soil are centuries of human remains. The thin shadows of the graves cloak the ground like doors to an ancient subterranean darkness.
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