c. 2007 Religion News Service

CHARLESTON, S.C. _ From early adulthood, a yearning for soul connections pushed China Galland beyond her parochial school education in Dallas and her ancestry in East Texas.

Eventually her searching took a circular path, bringing her back to where she began. She recounts that odyssey in her newest book, “Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves.”

Galland’s book is a first-person account of how she happens upon a neglected slave cemetery near where she was raised in East Texas and finds an interacial group of locals _ from Boy Scouts to ministers _ who pledge to restore the sacred ground.

“This is a riveting story of a remarkable effort to resurrect the dead, to uncover a long-neglected burial ground and give the anonymous folk interred there the voice denied them as slaves,” journalist Bill Moyers said of the book.

Whether telling the story in her book or at a lecture, Galland begins where she started _ in the tree-shaded confines of East Texas. “I’d been going back to Texas all my life,” she said last month, speaking to 30 people at the Sophia Institute, a nonprofit in Charleston, S.C., dedicated to feminine wisdom, creativity and the sacred arts.

“I kept going back to Texas and I began to take my children back in the 1980s,” said the author and activist from Mill Valley, Calif., who teaches at the Graduate Theological Union’s Center for the Arts, Religion and Education in Berkeley.

Galland, who is white, got reacquainted with a network of cousins on her visits home and began to build a circle of African-American friends. She discovered that her family had moved to East Texas in the early 1800s to raise peaches.

Returning to mine her own history, Galland unearthed a deeper, wider vein _ the South’s scarred racial history.

She began her research in Harrison County, Texas, near her hometown of Marshall.

“Because I’ve spent 20 years studying Buddhism and studying Asia and India, I could go back to East Texas and see it as a foreign country,” she said in Charleston. “I didn’t go looking for this story. It came looking for me.”

Soon she learned that Harrison County was the largest slave-owning county in the Lone Star State when the Civil War broke out. The county’s enslaved shared their lot with the estimated 4 million other slaves in North America.

On subsequent visits she learned how many slaves’ graves remained unmarked,then about the plight one group of descendants faced in gaining access to Love Cemetery. An overgrown plot almost buried beneath weeds and wisteria, Love Cemetery had been cared for by people who called themselves “The Keepers of Love.” Research showed that the original deed came from Della Love Walker, the niece of the African-American cowboy Deadwood Dick.

Galland ended up gathering an interracial group of local leaders, both ordained and laypeople, who worked to clear the debris from the cemetery and restore community access.

“It’s been a communal effort, like I was a pencil and hundreds of people behind me supporting me,” Galland said, noting that a local Boy Scout troop, a white Roman Catholic priest and a cross section of African-American Christians became involved.

Love Cemetery is surrounded by land owned by larger corporations. Repeatedly the “Keepers of Love” have run into legal and corporate roadblocks in their work. Recently another corporation bought the surrounding property and “changed the locks without telling the community,” Galland said. Then the “Keepers of Love” were told they needed a $1 million liability insurance policy to guarantee their access, she said. “That still has not been resolved.”

Galland, the author of several previous books including “Longing for Darkness” and “The Bond Between Women,” uses her new book to explore how the ghosts of slavery still shape the lives of blacks and whites more than 140 years after the Civil War ended.

The ongoing need for interracial reconciliation resonated with her Charleston audience. Several people said they had heard Galland speak when she lectured at the Sophia Institute two years ago.

“I was drawn to be here for anything that will raise the consciousness of people in this area,” said one listener.

“I’m here because I was compelled,” said Cookie Washington, another local resident, who attended Galland’s lecture two years ago. “That journey started an amazing transformation for me.”

Galland’s Charleston lecture helped kick off a nationwide book tour.

(Longtime religion writer Cecile S. Holmes is an associate professor of journalism at the University of South Carolina.)

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