In the middle of the Blue Zone parking lot, far away from the civilization of the Main Quad, amid hundreds of neatly ordered cars, are the-not-so-neatly ordered headstones of one of the most overlooked and unknown places at Duke: the Rigsbee family graveyard.
Despite having walked to and from the Blue Zone countless times, I had not been aware of the cemetery's existence until halfway through the second semester of my sophomore year. This realization came only after a friend asked me, "You ever noticed what's behind that wall over there?"
Behind the short stone wall are the remains of Jesse Rigsbee, his wife Mary, their sons Henry and Thomas, Thomas' wife Nancy and their son Thomas Jr., along with a few others.
The Rigsbee family once owned the land that is now the Blue Zone, but they sold it to Duke in 1925 during the University's expansion project. The family graveyard, however, is still owned by the family.
As I took down the names and dates on the headstones for this column, two girls approached the wall of the cemetery. They asked me with a look of curiosity mixed with mistrust what I was doing. I muttered something about The Chronicle-my inflection perhaps increasing the potential that the girls thought I was an axe murderer, especially considering I was a guy alone in a graveyard taking notes.
"Weird, I never noticed it. Sort of creepy," one of the girls said, hopefully in reference to the graveyard and not me.
"Sort of creepy": a very American response to a cemetery, like holding your breath as you drive past one. Normally, cemeteries are far enough removed from where we live so that we don't have to think about the people we know buried there until we make the trip for special occasions. We hide our dead.
I became aware of my own American squeamishness during my stay in Buenos Aires this past summer for DukeEngage. In the most exclusive barrio in the city is the most famous cemetery in the country-La Recoleta Cemetery. There, death is up close and personal.
Directly surrounding the high walls of the cemetery are a Hard Rock Café, some nightclubs, a multiplex and restaurants with outdoor seating offering views of the cemetery. Buenos Aires' dead are far from hidden.
Quite different from the golf course aesthetic of the cemeteries I am familiar with in the U.S., La Recoleta Cemetery is the literal embodiment of the Greek meaning of the word "necropolis."
Within the walled city that is the cemetery, there is a sprawl of "homes" in the form of mausoleums. Walkways reminiscent of grand boulevards, streets and alleys weave through the city.
Like any city, the cemetery contains the obligatory central park and church. A high-rent area with sparkling monuments and mansions for the dead, along with other zones on the outskirts with homes that have fallen into decay, add to the metropolitan feel of the cemetery. The city of La Recoleta Cemetery also has its fair share of stray animals, street cleaners and pedestrian traffic during the daytime. Essentially, the cemetery functions not so differently from the city of Buenos Aires itself.
Crowds of visitors wander around with maps, like the ones tourists in Beverly Hills carry around in order to catch a glimpse of the homes of their favorite movie stars. It is as if the cemetery is a gated community for Argentina's most famous figures.
In Buenos Aires, the living mingle with the dead. In the United States, we keep them in the proverbial Blue Zone-as far removed from us as possible, both physically and mentally. Encountering Duke's relic of the past-the Rigsbee family graveyard-with its irregular layout and surprising location, makes me question why we tend to avoid our dead.
Why hide a city's dead in what looks like a golf course? Why end up neatly packed away far from the civilization in which you once lived? Why do we put our dead as far away as possible, like a car in the Blue Zone?
Jordan Rice is a Trinity junior. His column runs every other Monday.
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