This is just one of many personal stories. Unimaginable! I hope they get every asshole that is responsible for this! Personally, it's more than the four in custody and I think he owner knows more than he's letting on!
My mother used to tell my sister and me that one of the hardest trips she ever made to Burr Oak Cemetery near suburban Alsip was to bury her grandmother. At family gatherings, my mother often has talked about Lessie Saville Jennings as a larger-than-life figure.
My great-grandmother was born in Mississippi in 1898 and moved to Chicago in 1916. She had a dark brown complexion and stood 5 feet 8, which was quite statuesque for a woman of her era.
My mother told us that our great-grandmother had two major passions beyond her family: God and policy, the precursor to lottery, which she played with near-religious fervor. On the nightstand by her bed, she kept her Bible and a variety of dream books. Dream books, which were sold at five-and-dimes, assigned three- or four-digit numbers to dreams. For example, if one dreamed about fish, the corresponding number was, say, 757, according to one book. Grandma Lessie referenced the books daily for playing policy.
When my mother was younger, she had reddish brown hair that got her into quite a few fights. She would stop over at her grandmother's South Side home, which was a few doors down from her own, to clean up before her parents saw her. My mother and great-grandmother were girlfriends. They gossiped as they made Sunday dinner, window-shopped downtown together and listened to old blues songs on an even older Victrola that hissed and whined.
Whenever my mother talked about her grandmother, my sister and I would sit at rapt attention. My mother would be transported back to the little red-haired girl who seemed less like a parent and more like a peer. She told us that as her grandmother got older, she would say she wanted to live long enough only to see my mother have her first child.
"It always made me sick to my stomach when she said it," my mother said. "I would tell her, 'Granny, I don't want to hear that.' "
Eight months after I was born in 1965, her Grandma Lessie died. And my mother's drive out to Burr Oak Cemetery to bury her grandmother next to Anderson Jennings, her grandfather, was one of the toughest drives my mother ever made.
However hard that trip was back then, my mother could never have imagined how hard it would be to make it to Burr Oak in 1993 to bury her daughter, my sister, who at 23 died suddenly of a heart attack.
Since then, my mother, other family members and I have gone to that cemetery to bury an uncle who served in the Korean War, an aunt who was like a mother to me and so many others.
The truth is, if you're an African-American with roots in this city, you almost certainly know somebody who's buried in Burr Oak. For the longest, it and Lincoln Cemetery at 12300 S. Kedzie Ave. were the only two places where the area's blacks could be buried.
When I learned that four of Burr Oak's employees allegedly had been digging up bodies and reselling graves, the news made me angry. I called my mother to see if she knew. She said she was in shock by it all.
My mother hasn't decided what course of action she intends to take. She has been calling the numbers (800-942-1950 and 708-865-6070) set up for people with loved ones at the cemetery. Right now, she and countless others want to know whether the graves of her loved ones are intact. So far, she hasn't been able to reach any of the officials.
My parents aren't the type who visit grave sites much after a burial, and neither am I. They've always believed that it's enough that a loved one lives on in our memories and stories.
Still, the assumption is that once you leave your relative's grave site, it is indeed a final resting place. It is supposed to be hallowed ground. That is what makes what has happened at Burr Oak even more disgusting and shameful.
