In Memory of Mrs. Saunders
Louisiana has the best graveyards. Everybody thinks about New Orleans and its famous cemetery tours, but my favorite funerary monument is in Monroe, up in the Arklamiss, the Northeast corner of the state. The Saunders Tomb was visible from one of the old main streets and I typically saw it framed in a backseat car window as my mother drove us through Monroe’s decaying downtown, which by the 1970s was all red brick and dusty windows and dirty concrete. I remember there being a wall around the old city cemetery, or at any rate some barrier that made it possible to see only the tops of a lot of tombs, but this statue had been deliberately set high up enough so that it was visible from the main street. It’s the life-sized figure of a man with a droopy moustache, facing the city and holding a document.

The story I was told about it went like this: The man’s name was Mr. Saunders, and he had married a northern woman. This sounds like no big deal, but Monroe had and still has the reputation of being one of the most insulated, snobbish cities in Northern Louisiana. As a Yankee, poor Mrs. Saunders was just not popular, and all kinds of nasty things were said about her. One rumor that proved especially durable was that she and Sidney Saunders hadn’t really been married and that their son was illegitimate.

So, when her husband died his wife commissioned the statue. The document he is showing to the city is their marriage certificate.

There were other stories about her. I was told that she managed some of her husband’s properties and conducted transactions from inside his tomb, setting up a desk and an oil lamp and receiving visitors, her husband’s coffin quite visible behind her. Whether this was a morbid refusal to accept his death (In Gumbo Ya-Ya, Lyle Saxon describes her as spending her days in the tomb sobbing at his desk) or a pointed reminder to local business associates that it was her husband who had entrusted her with the properties, I don’t know. I’ve always preferred the second theory. Monroe folklore of course, had it that she was crazy.

It was even rumored that she’d started the fire that, in the late 19th century, burnt down City Hall and much of the rest of the city, destroying countless records and making a lot of Monroe’s history largely a matter of guesswork for 20th century historians. I’m sure her accusers had a more sophisticated idea of exactly how she did this, but I wasn’t shrewd enough to ask about it when I was a kid, so I was left with the image of a woman in a bustle and swept-up hair running up and down Grand Street with a lit torch, laughing wildly and setting fire to buildings. Why nobody stopped her I couldn’t imagine, unless they were still freaked out from their last visit to her office.

Mrs. Saunders, the torch-wielding firebug who spent her workdays in her husband’s tomb, is now incorporated into my memories of Monroe along with riding my bike to the 7/11 on Forsythe, swimming in Bayou Desierd and watching Christmas Eve Fireworks on the levee. The information provided at findagrave.com, that it was her husband who was suspected of arson and that he was a saloon-keeper rather than a real estate baron, hasn’t done much to shake it. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Peter Pan I’m willing to give up, but not Mrs. Saunders. Not at this stage of my life.